Emerson College Library: National Native American Heritage Month: History and Nonfiction

Histories by Indigenous Authors

The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book by Gord Hill
The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book is a powerful and historically accurate graphic portrayal of Indigenous resistance to the European colonization of the Americas, beginning with the Spanish invasion under Christopher Columbus and ending with the Six Nations land reclamation in Ontario in 2006.
Custer Died for Your Sins by Vine Deloria
In his new preface to this paperback edition, the author observes, "The Indian world has changed so substantially since the first publication of this book that some things contained in it seem new again." Indeed, it seems that each generation of whites and Indians will have to read and reread Vine Deloria’s Manifesto for some time to come, before we absorb his special, ironic Indian point of view and what he tells us, with a great deal of humor, about U.S. race relations, federal bureaucracies, Christian churches, and social scientists.
Eating Fire, Tasting Blood by MariJo Moore (Editor)
For five centuries -- from Columbus's arrival in 1492 to the U.S. Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s, to the renewed assault in the 1970s -- our continent's indigenous people endured the most massive and systematic act of genocide in the history of the world. In Eating Fire, Tasting Blood, twenty established and up-and-coming American Indian writers from disparate nations and tribes offer stirring reflections on the history of their people. This is not a collection of essays about Native Americans but rather a collection BY Native Americans -- the story of native holocaust on a tribe-by-tribe level as told by those few who have been fortunate enough to survive.
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer
Beginning with the tribes' devastating loss of land and the forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools, David Treuer shows how the period of greatest adversity also helped to incubate a unifying Native identity. He traces how conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of their self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is an essential, intimate history - and counter-narrative - of a resilient people in a transformative era.
Invisible Reality by Rosalyn R. LaPier
Rosalyn R. LaPier demonstrates that Blackfeet history is incomplete without an understanding of the Blackfeet people’s relationship and mode of interaction with the “invisible reality” of the supernatural world. Religious beliefs provided the Blackfeet with continuity through privations and changing times. The stories they passed to new generations and outsiders reveal the fundamental philosophy of Blackfeet existence, namely, the belief that they could alter, change, or control nature to suit their needs and that they were able to do so with the assistance of supernatural allies.
Our Beloved Kin by Lisa Brooks
With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the "First Indian War" (later named King Philip's War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. In reading seventeenth-century sources alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history, Brooks's pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England.
Reclaiming Diné History by Jennifer Nez Denetdale
In this groundbreaking book, the first Navajo to earn a doctorate in history seeks to rewrite Navajo history. Here she presents a thought-provoking examination of the construction of the history of the Navajo people (Diné, in the Navajo language) that underlines the dichotomy between Navajo and non-Navajo perspectives on the Diné past. She reveals how Navajo narratives, including oral histories and stories kept by matrilineal clans, serve as vehicles to convey Navajo beliefs and values. She argues that these same stories, read with an awareness of Navajo creation narratives, reveal previously unrecognized Navajo perspectives on the past. She contends that a similarly culture-sensitive re-viewing of the Diné can lead to the production of a Navajo-centered history.
Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S.History
Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non-Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this transformative synthesis he shows that: European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success; Native nations helped shape England's crisis of empire; the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior; California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War; the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West; twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy.

Streaming Media Histories

After the Mayflower: We Shall Remain (Streaming Media)
Directed by Native American Filmmaker Chris Eyre, this episode of the PBS series "We Shall Remain" begins in March of 1621, in what is now southeastern Massachusetts, when Massasoit, the leading sachem of the Wampanoag, negotiated with a ragged group of English colonists. A half-century later, as war flared between the English colonists and a confederation of New England Indians, the wisdom of Massasoit's diplomatic gamble seemed less clear. English immigration, mistreatment, lethal epidemics, and environmental degradation had brought the Indians' way of life to the brink of disaster.
Without a whisper = Konnon:kwe
Explore the untold story of how Indigenous women influenced the early suffragists in their fight for freedom and equality. Mohawk Clan Mother Louise Herne and Professor Sally Roesch Wagner shake the foundation of the established history of the women's rights movement in the United States. They join forces on a journey to shed light on the hidden history of the influence of Haudenosaunee Women on the women's rights movement, possibly changing this historical narrative forever.

Challenging Stereotypes

All the Real Indians Died Off by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz; Dina Gilio-Whitaker
In this enlightening book, scholars and activists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture and history that have misinformed generations. "All the Real Indians Died Off" challenges readers to rethink what they have been taught about Native Americans and history.
American Indians by Devon A. Mihesuah
Devon Mihesuah goes beyond simply providing responses to common stereotypes. She provides the reader with assistance in efforts to improve understanding of her peoples, a valuable contribution in bringing greater clarity to important issues. She created a good sourcebook for dispelling misconceptions and negative stereotypes about American Indians. These beliefs and attitudes exist and these statements are made in academic settings.
Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians but Were Afraid to Ask by Anton Treuer
Treuer, an Ojibwe scholar and cultural preservationist, answers the most commonly asked questions about American Indians, both historical and modern. He gives a frank, funny, and personal tour of what's up with Indians, anyway.
Exiled in the Land of the Free by Oren Lyons
These impressive essays by eight Native American leaders and scholars present persuasive evidence that the American colonists and U.S. founding fathers borrowed from the Iroquois Confederacy and other Indian political institutions in drafting the U.S. Constitution and in creating democratic traditions. This groundbreaking work, which was written into the Congressional Record, has major implications for future relations between Indian tribes and the governments of the United States and other nations. It presents the strongest case ever made for Native American sovereignty.
Killing the White Man's Indian by Fergus M. Bordewich
In the face of a new lightly romanticized view of Native Americans, Killing the White Man's Indian bravely confronts the current myths and often contradictory realities of tribal life today. Based on three years of research on the Native American reservations, and written without a hidden conservative bias or politically correct agenda, Killing the White Man's Indian takes on Native American politics and policies today in all their contradictory--and controversial-guises.

Decolonizing Academia

The American Indian Mind in a Linear World by Donald Fixico
Currently, there are three approaches to studying American Indians: from how white Americans approach Indian studies, from the dynamics or exchange of Indian-white relations and from the Indian point of view. Written primarily from inside the Native world, but fully cognizant of the American cultures outside of that world, his unique voice speaks to a need for understanding the interior Native world: a world in which linear thinking is atypical and circularity is preferable.
Decolonizing Journalism by Duncan McCue
Written by a leading Indigenous journalist, Duncan McCue, specifically for journalism students in Canada, Decolonizing Journalism delivers practical, up-to-date advice in a guidebook-like text that students will use throughout their studies and careers. Readers will learn how to develop a critical consciousness when engaging with and reporting on Indigenous communities, and will draw insights into the histories, processes, and obstacles central to decolonizing journalism from exclusive interviews with 9 leading Indigenous journalists.
Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
Here, an indigenous researcher issues a clarion call for the decolonization of research methods. In setting an agenda for planning and implementing indigenous research, the author shows how such programmes are part of the wider project of reclaiming control over indigenous ways of knowing and being.
Native Historians Write Back by Susan A. Miller (Editor); James Riding In (Editor)
A first-of-its-kind anthology of historical articles by Indigenous scholars, framed in assumptions and concepts derived from the authors' respective Indigenous worldviews. Writings stand in sharp contrast to works by historians who may belong to tribes but work within the Euroamerican worldview
Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
This provocative collection of essays reveals the passionate voice of a Native American feminist intellectual. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a poet and literary scholar, grapples with issues she encountered as a Native American in academia. Cook-Lynn emphasizes that her essays move beyond the narrowly autobiographical, not just about gender and power, not just focused on multiculturalism and diversity, but are about intellectual and political issues that engage readers and writers in Native American studies. Studying the "Indian," Cook-Lynn reminds us, is not just an academic exercise but a matter of survival for the lifeways of tribal peoples. Her goal in these essays is to open conversations that can make tribal life and academic life more responsive to one another.

Documentaries

Âs Nutayuneân: We still live here (DVD)
The Wampanoag are celebrated at Thanksgiving as the Indians who saved the Pilgrims from starvation, but their linguistic heritage remained largely forgotten until Jessie Little Doe Baird discovered hundreds of documents written in their ancient language. Her efforts, which led to the reclamation of the Wampanoag language and culture, are explored in this documentary film.
First Language (Streaming Media)
The Cherokee language was spoken in North America thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, and is still used today by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in the mountains of North Carolina. However, this fascinating language is now in endangered, with the number of native speakers dwindling. This Emmy award-winning program depicts the efforts of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to preserve and revitalize the Cherokee Language.
Navajo Warriors: The Great Secret (Streaming Media)
The famous Navajo Code Talkers, memorialized by Hollywood in the feature film "Windtalkers," were an integral part of the armed forces during World War II. Navajo veterans who fought in the Pacific in World War II used their unwritten Native American tongue as an unbreakable code language, essential in the American military intelligence machine. Richard West, President, Museum of the American Indian, says, "Ironically, the U.S. military used the Native American language as a potent instrument of war although the government had prohibited [native] people from speaking their own language for almost a century."
What Was Ours (Streaming Media)
An Eastern Shoshone elder and two Northern Arapaho youth living on the Wind River Indian Reservation attempt to learn why thousands of ancestral artifacts are in the darkness of underground archives of museums and churches, boxed away and forgotten. Like millions of indigenous people in many parts of the world, they do not control their own material culture. It is being preserved, locked away, by "outsiders" who themselves do not know what they have. These beautiful ancestral objects -- drums, pipes, eagle wing fans, medicine bags, weapons, and ceremonial attire -- are far from home, their meaning slowly being lost to time.
Thirst for Justice
Armed only with facts and their illnesses, extraordinary citizens take on industry and government, risking arrest to protect clean water. From Flint, Michigan to the Navajo Nation, via Standing Rock, this is their story. Thirst For Justice follows Janene Yazzie as she searches for the source of contamination in her son's water in Sanders, Arizona. She suspects drinking uranium-contaminated water from the Church Rock dam spill caused her ovarian cancer. Armed with a Geiger counter, she begins investigating radioactive waste on the Navajo Nation and finds areas hotter than evacuation zones in Chernobyl. When the epic movement for water justice ignites in Standing Rock, Janene is compelled to join. There she meets Flint water activist Nayyirah Shariff, and their struggles converge. Janene travels to Flint, where she sees firsthand the similarities between what's happening in this inner-city and the Navajo experience. The sacredness of water flows through the film, with water ceremonies and teachings from water carriers including Mary Lyons and other water protectors.
Home From School: The Children of Carlisle (Streaming Media)
Follows the difficult journey of Soldierwolf and tribal elders as they delve into the controversial history of Indian boarding schools, patch together the historic record and personal stories of the relatives who were shipped away, and, finally, travel to Carlisle Indian Industrial School to reunite with, and ultimately retrieve, the lost children of their tribe.

National Native American Heritage Month

Journals and Databases for Further Research

Reservation Narratives

Environmentalism

Histories by Indigenous Authors

Streaming Media Histories

Challenging Stereotypes

Decolonizing Academia

Documentaries