Rabbit Plants the Forest is an adventure story based on characters from Cherokee tradition, including Ji-Stu (Rabbit) and his friends Otter, Sa-lo-li (Squirrel), and the mysterious Wampus Cat.
Ji-Stu, the Messenger for all the animals, is asked by Otter to tell Sa-lo-li it is a good day to plant. Much to his delight, Ji-Stu is invited to help Sa-lo-li plant the hickory nuts, walnuts, pecans, and acorns that will become new trees, keeping the forest thick and beautiful. Ji-Stu and Sa-lo-li only laugh when the elderly squirrel White Oak warns them to watch out for Wampus Cat. Before the planting is done, their laughter turns to fright as they narrowly escape with their lives!
Based on the ancient Cherokee teaching that squirrels keep the woods alive and should not be hunted, Rabbit Plants the Forest combines Jacob's color paintings and a blending of Cherokee mythology with scientific facts about animals and their places in our world.
Winner of the 2023 Prose Award in Cultural Anthropology and SociologyFinalist for the 2023 Publishing Triangle Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction A sweeping history of Indigenous traditions of gender, sexuality, and resistance that reveals how, despite centuries of colonialism, Two-Spirit people are reclaiming their place in Native nations. Reclaiming Two-Spirits decolonizes the history of gender and sexuality in Native North America. It honors the generations of Indigenous people who had the foresight to take essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground in order to save them. Before 1492, hundreds of Indigenous communities across North America included people who identified as neither male nor female, but both. They went by aakíí'skassi, miati, okitcitakwe or one of hundreds of other tribally specific identities. After European colonizers invaded Indian Country, centuries of violence and systematic persecution followed, imperiling the existence of people who today call themselves Two-Spirits, an umbrella term denoting feminine and masculine qualities in one person. Drawing on written sources, archaeological evidence, art, and oral storytelling, Reclaiming Two-Spirits spans the centuries from Spanish invasion to the present, tracing massacres and inquisitions and revealing how the authors of colonialism's written archives used language to both denigrate and erase Two-Spirit people from history. But as Gregory Smithers shows, the colonizers failed--and Indigenous resistance is core to this story. Reclaiming Two-Spirits amplifies their voices, reconnecting their history to Native nations in the 21st century.
What the world needs today is a good dose of indigenous realism, says Native American scholar Daniel Wildcat in this thoughtful, forward-looking treatise. Red Alert! seeks to debunk the modern myths that humankind is the center of creation.
Red Bird, Red Power tells the story of one of the most influential--and controversial--American Indian activists of the twentieth century. Zitkala-Sa (1876-1938), also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was a highly gifted writer, editor, and musician who dedicated her life to achieving justice for Native peoples. Here, Tadeusz Lewandowski offers the first full-scale biography of the woman whose passionate commitment to improving the lives of her people propelled her to the forefront of Progressive-era reform movements. Lewandowski draws on a vast array of sources, including previously unpublished letters and diaries, to recount Zitkala-Sa's unique life journey. Her story begins on the Dakota plains, where she was born to a Yankton Sioux mother and a white father. Zitkala-Sa, whose name translates as "Red Bird" in English, left home at age eight to attend a Quaker boarding school, eventually working as a teacher at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. By her early twenties, she was the toast of East Coast literary society. Her short stories for the Atlantic Monthly (1900) are, to this day, the focus of scholarly analysis and debate. In collaboration with William F. Hanson, she wrote the libretto and songs for the innovative Sun Dance Opera (1913). And yet, as Lewandowski demonstrates, Zitkala-Sa's successes could not fill the void of her lost cultural heritage, nor dampen her fury toward the Euro-American establishment that had robbed her people of their land. In 1926, she founded the National Council of American Indians with the aim of redressing American Indian grievances. Zitkala-Sa's complex identity has made her an intriguing--if elusive--subject for scholars. In Lewandowski's sensitive interpretation, she emerges as a multifaceted human being whose work entailed constant negotiation. In the end, Lewandowski argues, Zitkala-Sa's achievements distinguish her as a forerunner of the Red Power movement and an important agent of change.
In 1857, the Meskwaki Nation purchased an eighty-acre parcel of land along the Iowa River. With that modest plot secured as a place to rest and rebuild after centuries of devastation and dispossession, the Meskwaki, or "Red Earth People," began to reclaim their homeland--an effort that Native nations continue to this day in what has recently come to be called the #Landback movement. Red Earth Nation explores the long history of #Landback through the Meskwaki Nation's story, one of the oldest and clearest examples of direct-purchase Indigenous land reclamation in American history. Spanning Indigenous environmental and political history from the Red Earth People's creation to the twenty-first century, Red Earth Nation focuses on the Meskwaki Settlement: now comprising more than 8,000 acres, this is sovereign Meskwaki land, not a treaty-created reservation. Currently the largest employer in Tama County, Iowa, the Meskwaki Nation has long used its land ownership and economic clout to resist the forces of colonization and create opportunities for self-determination. But the Meskwaki story is not one of smooth or straightforward progress. Eric Steven Zimmer describes the assaults on tribal sovereignty visited on the Meskwaki Nation by the local, state, and federal governments that surround it. In these instances, the Meskwaki Settlement provided political leverage and an anchor for community cohesion, as generations of Meskwaki deliberately and strategically--though not always successfully--used their collective land ownership to affirm tribal sovereignty and exercise self-determination. Revealing how the Red Earth People have negotiated shifting environmental, economic, and political circumstances to rebuild in the face of incredible pressures, Red Earth Nation shows that with their first, eighty-acre land purchase in the 1850s, Meskwaki leaders initiated a process that is still under way. Indeed, Native nations across the United States have taken up the #Landback cause, marshaling generations of resistance to reframe the history of Indigenous dispossession to explore stories of reclamation and tribal sovereignty.
How the rhetoric of terrorism has been used against high-profile movements to justify the oppression and suppression of Indigenous activists. New Indigenous movements are gaining traction in North America: the Missing and Murdered Women and Idle No More movements in Canada, and the Native Lives Matter and NoDAPL movements in the United States. These do not represent new demands for social justice and treaty rights, which Indigenous groups have sought for centuries. But owing to the extraordinary visibility of contemporary activism, Indigenous people have been newly cast as terrorists--a designation that justifies severe measures of policing, exploitation, and violence. Red Scare investigates the intersectional scope of these four movements and the broader context of the treatment of Indigenous social justice movements as threats to neoliberal and imperialist social orders. In Red Scare, Joanne Barker shows how US and Canadian leaders leverage the fear-driven discourses of terrorism to allow for extreme responses to Indigenous activists, framing them as threats to social stability and national security. The alignment of Indigenous movements with broader struggles against sexual, police, and environmental violence puts them at the forefront of new intersectional solidarities in prominent ways. The activist-as-terrorist framing is cropping up everywhere, but the historical and political complexities of Indigenous movements and state responses are unique. Indigenous criticisms of state policy, resource extraction and contamination, intense surveillance, and neoliberal values are met with outsized and shocking measures of militarized policing, environmental harm, and sexual violence. Red Scare provides students and readers with a concise and thorough survey of these movements and their links to broader organizing; the common threads of historical violence against Indigenous people; and the relevant alternatives we can find in Indigenous forms of governance and relationality.
National Bestseller Winner of the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction - Finalist for the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Award in History - Winner of 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction - Winner of the 2024 Mark Lynton History Prize Named a best book of 2023 by New Yorker, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, Barnes & Noble A New York Times Notable Book of 2023 - A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction of 2023 - An NPR "Book We Love" for 2023 "Eloquent and comprehensive. . . . In the book's sweeping synthesis, standard flashpoints of U.S. history take on new meaning."--Kathleen DuVal, Wall Street Journal "In accounts of American history, Indigenous peoples are often treated as largely incidental--either obstacles to be overcome or part of a narrative separate from the arc of nation-building. Blackhawk . . . [shows] that Native communities have, instead, been inseparable from the American story all along."--Washington Post Book World, "Books to Read in 2023" A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, as a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. 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. Blackhawk's retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.
- 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. Blackhawk's retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.
Winner of the 2022 Electa Quinney Award for Published Stories
Chicago: home to urban Indians and immigrants and working folks and the whole gamut of people getting by in a world that doesn't care whether they do so or not. Sacred City is an incomparable follow-up to Van Alst's award-winning debut collection, Sacred Smokes. Our young narrator now heads deeper into the heart of the city and himself, accompanied by ancestors and spirits who help him and the reader see that Chicago was, is, and always will be Indian Country. Part love song and part lament, Sacred City explores what options are available to an intelligent, smart-assed young man who was born poor and grew up in a gang. Van Alst's skillful storytelling takes us on a journey where Chicago will never seem the same.
Sacred Folks brings it all home in the final book of Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.'s urban Native Chicago story cycle. Disciples, demons, gods, gangbangers, and the city itself all meet up to tell unforgettable tales across time and neighborhoods. Our guide through the trilogy, Teddy, is right in the thick of things, and he recounts for us parts of the path to the end and explains how and maybe why we got here and where we might go after all.
Winner of the 2018 Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing from the Working-Class Studies Association
Selected for the Recommended Fiction Book List of the 2019 In the Margins Book Award
Growing up in a gang in the city can be dark. Growing up Native American in a gang in Chicago is a whole different story. This book takes a trip through that unexplored part of Indian Country, an intense journey that is full of surprises, shining a light on the interior lives of people whose intellectual and emotional concerns are often overlooked. This dark, compelling, occasionally inappropriate, and often hilarious linked story collection introduces a character who defies all stereotypes about urban life and Indians. He will be in readers' heads for a long time to come.