Showing titles in Indigenous Studies

For hundreds of years, the history of the conquest of Mexico and the defeat of the Aztecs has been told in the words of the Spanish victors. Miguel León-Portilla has long been at the forefront of expanding that history to include the voices of indigenous peoples. In this new and updated edition...

Pandemics and war, social turmoil and corrupt governments, natural disasters and environmental collapse—it's hard not to watch the signs of the times and feel afraid. But we can journey through that fear to find hope. With the warnings of a prophet and the lively voice of a storyteller, Choctaw elder and author of Ladder to the Light Steven Charleston speaks to all who sense apocalyptic dread rising around and within.

Using a traditional Yakama tale as a motif, "Coyote’s Swing" combines the author’s firsthand experiences as a consulting psychologist with rare history and sociocultural critique, revealing how the U.S. mental health system reframes Native American reactions to oppression and marginalization into "mental disorders" and "mental illness," and how the Indian Health Service’s contemporary practices echo historical injustices.

In 1963 – a year of agitation for civil rights worldwide – the Yolŋu of northeast Arnhem Land created the Yirrkala Bark Petitions: Näku Dhäruk. ‘The land grew a tongue’ and the land-rights movement was born. Näku Dhäruk is the story of a founding document in Australian democracy and the trailblazers who made it. It is also a pulsating picture of the ancient and enduring culture of Australia’s first peoples. And it is a masterful, groundbreaking history.

In Bad Medicine, Sarah A. Whitt exposes how Native American boarding schools and other settler institutions like asylums, factories, and hospitals during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worked together as a part of an interconnected system of settler domination. In so doing, Whitt centers the experiences of Indigenous youth and adults alike at the Carlisle Indian School, Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, Ford Motor Company Factory, House of the Good Shepherd, and other Progressive Era facilities.

Young countercultural back-to-the-land settlers flocked to northwestern California beginning in the 1960s, and by the 1970s, unregulated cannabis production proliferated on Indigenous lands. As of 2021, the California cannabis economy was valued at $3.5 billion. In Settler Cannabis, Kaitlin Reed demonstrates how this "green rush" is only the most recent example of settler colonial resource extraction and wealth accumulation. Reed shares this history to inform the path toward an alternative future.

When she was twenty-five, Ursula Pike boarded a plane to Bolivia and began her term of service in the Peace Corps. A member of the Karuk Tribe, Pike sought to make meaningful connections with Indigenous people halfway around the world. But she arrived in La Paz with trepidation as well as excitement, 'knowing I followed in the footsteps of Western colonizers and missionaries who had also claimed they were there to help.'

From bestselling author of the Misewa Saga series David A. Robertson, this is the essential guide for all Canadians to understand how small and attainable acts towards reconciliation can make an enormous difference in our collective efforts to build a reconciled country. 52 Ways to Reconcile is...

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER WINNER High Plains Book Award FINALIST for the Writers’ Trust Balsillie Prize for Public Policy FINALIST for the Indigenous Voices Award Longlisted for the First Nation Communities READ A bold, provocative collection of essays exploring the historical and contemporary...

THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER Winner – 2023 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize Winner – 2023 John W. Dafoe Book Prize Winner – 2023 High Plains Book Award for Indigenous Writer Winner – 2022 Manitoba Historical Society Margaret McWilliams Book Award for Local History Finalist...

A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year A Quill & Quire Book of the Year A CBC Books Nonfiction Book of the Year A Maclean’s 20 Books You Need to Read this Winter “An instant classic that demands to be read with your heart open and with a perspective widened to allow in a whole new...

Collecting over twenty-five essays written by more than twenty California Indian authors, Know We Are Here surveys many of the ways California's Indigenous communities are resisting the legacies of genocide. Focusing on the particular histories, challenges, and dynamics of life in Native California—which are often very different from elsewhere in the United States—the book collects essays from writers across the state. It encompasses the perspectives of both elders and the rising generation, and the contributors include activists, academics, students, memoirists, and tribal leaders.

In this strange and wonderful book, thirty elders of the ancient Hopi tribe of Northern Arizona—a people who regard themselves as the first inhabitants of America—freely reveal the Hopi worldview for the first time in written form. The Hopi kept this view a secret for countless centuries, and anthropologists have long struggled to understand it. Now they record their myths and legends, and the meaning of their religious rituals and ceremonies as a gift to future generations.

On her first book tour at the age of 26, Lee Maracle was asked a question from the audience, one she couldn't possibly answer at that moment. But she has been thinking about it ever since. As time has passed, she has been asked countless similar questions, all of them too big to answer, but not too large to contemplate. These questions, which touch upon subjects such as citizenship, segregation, labor, law, prejudice and reconciliation, to name a few, are the heart of My Conversations with Canadians.

Drawing on archeological and ethno-historical evidence, Irving Rouse sketches a picture of the Tainos-the first people Columbus encountered when he arrived in the Americas-as they existed during the time of Columbus, contrasting their customs with those of their neighbors. He then moves backward in time to the ancestors of the Tainos-two successive groups who settled the West Indies and who are known to archeologists as the Saladoid peoples and the Ostionoid peoples.

Il piccolo Mikhail Kalashnikov vive nel villaggio contadino di Kurya, territori russi dell’Altaj, con la sua numerosa famiglia. Finiti nella lista dei kulaki, vengono spogliati di tutto e deportati in Siberia. Ma le difficoltà aguzzano l’ingegno, e il giovane Mikhail si scopre inventore già in tenera età. Un giorno, la sua creatura, il fucile Kalashnikov, mieterà più vittime della bomba atomica, ucciderà più del virus dell’HIV e di tutti i terremoti messi uno sull’altro. Fidel Castro ne regala uno a Salvador Allende, che lo userà per togliersi la vita.

You probably know the story of the late Wilma Mankiller, the first woman to serve as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. You might not recognize the name of her husband, Charlie Soap, yet his role as a Native community organizer is no less significant. Last One Walking charts for the first time the life and work of this influential Cherokee.

From Indigenous scholar Yuria Celidwen comes a first-of-its-kind book about our aspiration for sustainable, collective flourishing through Indigenous wisdom, traditions, and practices that bridge Indigenous and Western knowledges and ways. How do we cultivate happiness? When facing the...

From a young age, Victor Steffensen has had a passion for traditional cultural and ecological knowledge. This was further developed after meeting two Elders, who were to become his mentors and teach him the importance of cultural burning. Developed over many generations, this knowledge shows clearly that Australia actually needs fire. Steffensen's story is unassuming and honest, while demonstrating the incredibly sophisticated and complex cultural knowledge that has been passed down to him, which he wants to share with others.

In A Fire at the Center, Karen Van Fossan takes listeners behind the scenes of the Dakota Access Pipeline conflict, to penitentiaries where prisoners of war have carried the movement onward, to the jail cell where she was held for protesting Line 3, to a reimagining of decolonized family constellations, and to moments of collective hope and strength.