Native American Indian History

Capture the beauty, power, and wisdom of the Native American oral tradition with this superlative collection of readings taken from the writings and speeches of people from many different tribes. The collection offers insights into Native American ways of living, learning, and dying, and helps us to feel a reconnection with the land and ourselves. The words of Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Ohiyesa, Black Elk, and others create a powerful listening experience.

Crazy Horse was as much feared by tribal foes as he was honored by allies. His war record was unmatched by any of his peers, and his rout of Custer at the Little Bighorn reverberates through history. Yet so much about him is unknown or steeped in legend. Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life corrects older, idealized accounts - and draws on a greater variety of sources than other recent biographies - to expose the real Crazy Horse: not the brash Sioux warrior we have come to expect but a modest, reflective man whose courage was anchored in Lakota piety.

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. Tracing how these ideas evolved, and drawing from history, the authors disrupt long-held and enduring myths.

The bloody Battle of Tippecanoe was only the beginning. It’s 1811, and President James Madison has ordered the destruction of Shawnee warrior Chief Tecumseh’s alliance of tribes in the Great Lakes region. But while General William Henry Harrison would win this fight, the armed conflict between Native Americans and the newly formed United States would rage on for decades.

In a real-life version of Little Big Man comes Indian captive narrative of Herman Lehmann. He was captured as a boy in 1870 and lived for nine years among the Apaches and Comanches. Long considered one of the best captivity stories from the period, Lehmann came to love the people and the life. Only through the gentle persuasion of famed Comanche chief, Quanah Parker, was Lehmann convinced to remain with his white family once he was returned to them.

Author Kathleen DuVal argues that it was Indians rather than European would-be colonizers who were more often able to determine the form and content of the relations between the two groups. Along the banks of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, far from Paris, Madrid, and London, European colonialism met neither accommodation nor resistance but incorporation. Placing Indians at the center of the story, DuVal shows both their diversity and our contemporary tendency to exaggerate the influence of Europeans in places far from their centers of power.

The American settlers believed the native American Indians were savages. The Indians believed the settlers were invaders trying to take their land. Lewis Wetzel continues his escapades as a one-man army but runs into trouble he can’t get out of. Knotche’s dwindling band continues to fight a just cause. The British cede the Indian land of the Ohio country to the Americans at the end of the Revolutionary War even though the Indians on the American frontier, allies of the British, had been triumphant in their battles with the Americans. When the Indians refused to relinquish their claim to...

Cochise, a Chiricahua, was said to be the most resourceful, most brutal, most feared Apache. He and his warriors raided in both Mexico and the United States, crossing the border both ways to obtain sanctuary after raids for cattle, horses, and other livestock. Once, only he was captured and imprisoned; on the day he was freed he vowed never to be taken again. From that day, he gave no quarter and asked none.

Based on an Athabascan Indian legend passed along for many generations from mothers to daughters of the upper Yukon River Valley in Alaska, this is the suspenseful, shocking, ultimately inspirational tale of two old women abandoned by their tribe during a brutal winter famine.

The narrative of American history is incomplete without the inclusion of the Native Americans that lived on the continent before European settlers arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries. Among these groups, one of the most famous is the Mohawk, who refer to themselves as Kanien'kehá:ka ("People of the Place of Flint"), but pop culture has a very different image in mind when it comes to the Mohawk. Those unfamiliar with the group associate them with the conspicuous Mohawk haircut, and images of a warlike people who scalp their enemies are still evoked.

He’s famous for planting apple trees across the Midwest. But was this mythic nomad a fool, a saint, or something entirely different? Massachusetts, 1797. John Chapman craves love. Treated like an indentured servant by his father, the late-maturing twenty-one-year-old searches for enough money to take his beautiful sweetheart to a dance. But when the introspective young man is caught stealing a few coins, his stern parent condemns him to a long and dangerous journey to claim new land in the recently opened Indian Territory. Discovering unexpected skills as he and his half-brother brave the...

Between 1846 and 1873, California's Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide.

In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness.

The received idea of Native American history - as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did 150 Sioux die at the hands of the US Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native life past and present for his nonfiction and novels, David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative.

What have you always wanted to know about Indians? Do you think you should already know the answers-or suspect that your questions may be offensive? In matter-of-fact responses to over 120 questions, both thoughtful and outrageous, modern and historical, Ojibwe scholar and cultural preservationist Anton Treuer gives a frank, funny, and sometimes personal tour of what's up with Indians, anyway.

Kill the Indian, Save the Man. That is the goal of the Dawes Commission, a federal agency. The Commission is charged with destroying the Muscogee-Creek Nation by allotting communally owned tribal lands to individual members. Forced assimilation is the zeitgeist of 1920s Oklahoma. SAM DAVIS is a handsome, roguish, half-breed. He brokers real estate between illiterate Creeks and land-hungry palefaces. Assimilation makes for good business. Oil strikes bring thousands of fortune-seeking whites to Tulsa. Sam's commissions soar against cascading reports of missing and murdered Creeks. When Sam is...

The Creek War is one of the most tragic episodes in American history, leading to the greatest loss of Native American life on what is now U.S. soil. A conflict involving not only white Americans and Native Americans, but also the British and the Spanish, the Creek War opened the Deep South to the Cotton Kingdom, setting the stage for the American Civil War yet to come. No other single Indian conflict had such significant impact on the fate of America—and A Brutal Reckoning is the definitive book on this forgotten chapter in our history.

In March 1621, when Plymouth’s survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth’s governor, John Carver, declared their people’s friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousamequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the 'First Thanksgiving'. The treaty remained operative until King Philip’s War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end.

Among all the Native American tribes, the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans learned the hard way that the warriors of the Apache were among the fiercest in North America. Based in the Southwest, the Apache fought all three in Mexico and the American Southwest, engaging in seasonal raids for so many centuries that the Apache struck fear into the hearts of all their neighbors. Given the group's reputation, it's fitting that they are inextricably associated with one of their most famous leaders, Geronimo.

From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold, and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after the tribes' removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory. The tribes marginalized free black people in the Indian nations well after the Civil War and slavery had ended. In this groundbreaking study, Barbara Krauthamer rewrites the history of southern slavery, emancipation, race, and citizenship to reveal the centrality of Native American slaveholders and the black people they enslaved.