A groundbreaking and deeply personal exploration of Tribal enrollment, and what it means to be Native American in the United States

Candid, unflinching . . . Her thorough excavation of the painful history that gave rise to rigid enrollment policies is a courageous gift to our understanding of contemporary Native life. --The Whiting Foundation Jury

Who is Indian enough?

To be Native American is to live in a world of contradictions. At the same time that the number of people in the US who claim Native identity has exploded--increasing 85 percent in just ten years--the number of people formally enrolled in Tribes has not. While the federal government recognizes Tribal sovereignty, being a member of a Tribe requires navigating blood quantum laws and rolls that the federal government created with the intention of wiping out Native people altogether. Over two million Native people are tribally enrolled, yet there are Native people who will never be. Native people who, for a variety of reasons ranging from displacement to disconnection, cannot be card-carrying members of their Tribe.

In The Indian Card, Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz grapples with these contradictions. Through in-depth interviews, she shares the stories of people caught in the mire of identity-formation, trying to define themselves outside of bureaucratic processes. With archival research, she pieces together the history of blood quantum and tribal rolls and federal government intrusion on Native identity-making. Reckoning with her own identity--the story of her enrollment and the enrollment of her children--she investigates the cultural, racial, and political dynamics of today's Tribal identity policing. With this intimate perspective of the ongoing fight for Native sovereignty, The Indian Card sheds light on what it looks like to find a deeper sense of belonging.

A revised and updated edition of a modern classic offers answers to nearly 200 essential and thought-provoking questions about the Native people of North America.

What have you always wanted to know about Indians? Do you feel like you should already know the answers--or are concerned that your questions may be offensive? For more than a decade, Anton Treuer's clear, candid, and informative book has answered questions for tens of thousands of readers. This revised edition both revisits old questions from a new perspective and expands on topics that have become increasingly relevant over the past decade, including activism and tribal enrollment; truth and reconciliation efforts; gender roles and identities in Indigenous communities; the status of Alaskan Natives and Canadian First Nations; and much more.

Treuer, an Ojibwe scholar and cultural preservationist, addresses nearly 200 questions on a range of topics--questions that are thoughtful and outrageous, modern and historical, and always interesting.

--What are we supposed to call North America's first people?

--Can white people dance at powwows?

--What's the point of land acknowledgments?

--Does tribal sovereignty mean that tribes can offer abortion services in states where it is now otherwise illegal?

With frank, funny, and sometimes personal prose, this book cuts through myths, guilt, and anger and builds a foundation for true understanding and positive action.

Joseph M. Marshall's thoughtful, illuminating account of how the spiritual beliefs of the Lakota people can help us all lead more meaningful, ethical lives.

Rich with storytelling, history, and folklore, The Lakota Way expresses the heart of Native American philosophy and reveals the path to a fulfilling and meaningful life. Joseph Marshall is a member of the Sicunga Lakota Sioux and has dedicated his entire life to the wisdom he learned from his elders. Here he focuses on the twelve core qualities that are crucial to the Lakota way of life--bravery, fortitude, generosity, wisdom, respect, honor, perseverance, love, humility, sacrifice, truth, and compassion. Whether teaching a lesson on respect imparted by the mythical Deer Woman or the humility embodied by the legendary Lakota leader Crazy Horse, The Lakota Way offers a fresh outlook on spirituality and ethical living.

Mary Siisip Geniusz has spent more than thirty years working with, living with, and using the Anishinaabe teachings, recipes, and botanical information she shares in Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask. Geniusz gained much of the knowledge she writes about from her years as an oshkaabewis, a traditionally trained apprentice, and as friend to the late Keewaydinoquay, an Anishinaabe medicine woman from the Leelanau Peninsula in Michigan and a scholar, teacher, and practitioner in the field of native ethnobotany. Keewaydinoquay published little in her lifetime, yet Geniusz has carried on her legacy by making this body of knowledge accessible to a broader audience.

Geniusz teaches the ways she was taught--through stories. Sharing the traditional stories she learned at Keewaydinoquay's side as well as stories from other American Indian traditions and her own experiences, Geniusz brings the plants to life with narratives that explain their uses, meaning, and history. Stories such as Naanabozho and the Squeaky-Voice Plant place the plants in cultural context and illustrate the belief in plants as cognizant beings. Covering a wide range of plants, from conifers to cattails to medicinal uses of yarrow, mullein, and dandelion, she explains how we can work with those beings to create food, simple medicines, and practical botanical tools.

Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask makes this botanical information useful to native and nonnative healers and educators and places it in the context of the Anishinaabe culture that developed the knowledge and practice.

Winner: Native American and Indigenous Studies Association's Best Subsequent Book 2017
Honorable Mention: Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award 2017

Across North America, Indigenous acts of resistance have in recent years opposed the removal of federal protections for forests and waterways in Indigenous lands, halted the expansion of tar sands extraction and the pipeline construction at Standing Rock, and demanded justice for murdered and missing Indigenous women. In As We Have Always Done, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking.

Indigenous resistance is a radical rejection of contemporary colonialism focused around the refusal of the dispossession of both Indigenous bodies and land. Simpson makes clear that its goal can no longer be cultural resurgence as a mechanism for inclusion in a multicultural mosaic. Instead, she calls for unapologetic, place-based Indigenous alternatives to the destructive logics of the settler colonial state, including heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation.

An exploration of human connection to the aurora, the Milky Way, and the wonder of the universe above us, with gorgeous photographs by a master photographer.

For millennia, humans have marveled at the night sky: the wonder of the aurora, the glory of the Milky Way, and the peace that comes with stargazing. In this remarkable book, Travis Novitsky's photographs portray these marvels, while astrophysicist Annette S. Lee discusses how Western science and Indigenous knowledge can work together to provide a deeper understanding of our place in the universe.

Novitsky has been photographing the night sky for decades, and his vibrant images reflect and transmit the experiences he has had under the night sky. Astrophysicist and artist Annette S. Lee has been teaching about the stars and creating art that shows them for more than 30 years. She provides a brief but thorough overview of how Western science explains the aurora, from the 17th-century astronomers who first studied sunspots to the 21st-century acoustic scientist who recorded their sounds. Lee also presents examples of the ways Indigenous skywatchers have seen the sky and our place in it.

Both authors write of the wonders of starbathing: sitting quietly under the stars, knowing that humans have always done this, knowing that we literally come from the stars. Working together in this remarkable book, they bring the aurora to readers.

Selected by the San Francisco Chronicle's as one of the top 100 western nonfiction books of the twentieth century.

Beautifully imagined and written.--Alice Walker

One of the most ground-breaking and highly-acclaimed titles that Heyday has published, The Ohlone Way describes the culture of the Indian people who inhabited Bay Area prior to the arrival of Europeans. With clear and accessible writing that is spirited and at the same time informed, Malcolm Margolin vividly recreates the Ohlones' lost world. From his unique vantage point as a friend of the family, he updates this classic text with a new preface that tells stories of the Ohlones' continued endurance and resurgence.

An Unforgettable Journey into the Native American Experience

Against an unflinching backdrop of 1990s reservation life and the majestic spaces of the western Dakotas, Neither Wolf nor Dog tells the story of two men, one white and one Indian, locked in their own understandings yet struggling to find a common voice. In this award-winning book, acclaimed author Kent Nerburn draws us deep into the world of a Native American elder named Dan, who leads Kent through Indian towns and down forgotten roads that swirl with the memories of the Ghost Dance and Sitting Bull. Along the way we meet a vivid cast of characters -- ranging from Jumbo, a 400-pound mechanic, to Annie, an eighty-year-old Lakota woman living in a log cabin with no running water. An unlikely cross between On the Road and Black Elk Speaks, Neither Wolf nor Dog takes us past the myths and stereotypes of the Native American experience, revealing an America few ever see.

Black Elk of the Sioux has been recognized as one of the truly remarkable men of his time in the matter of religious belief and practice. Shortly before his death in August, 1950, when he was the keeper of the sacred pipe, he said, It is my prayer that, through our sacred pipe, and through this book in which I shall explain what our pipe really is, peace may come to those peoples who can understand, and understanding which must be of the heart and not of the head alone. Then they will realize that we Indians know the One true God, and that we pray to Him continually.

Black Elk was the only qualified priest of the older Oglala Sioux still living when The Sacred Pipe was written. This is his book: he gave it orally to Joseph Epes Brown during the latter's eight month's residence on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where Black Elk lived. Beginning with the story of White Buffalo Cow Woman's first visit to the Sioux to give them the sacred pip, Black Elk describes and discusses the details and meanings of the seven rites, which were disclosed, one by one, to the Sioux through visions. He takes the reader through the sun dance, the purification rite, the keeping of the soul, and other rites, showing how the Sioux have come to terms with God and nature and their fellow men through a rare spirit of sacrifice and determination.

The wakan Mysteries of the Siouan peoples have been a subject of interest and study by explorers and scholars from the period of earliest contact between whites and Indians in North America, but Black Elk's account is without doubt the most highly developed on this religion and cosmography. The Sacred Pipe, published as volume thirty-six in the Civilization of the American Indian Series, will be greeted enthusiastically by students of comparative religion, ethnologists, historians, philosophers, and everyone interested in American Indian life.

A moving collection of twenty powerful essays, poems, and more that capture and celebrate the modern Native American experience, featuring entries by Angeline Boulley, Madison Hammond, Kara Roselle Smith, and many more.

With heart, pathos, humor, and insight, twenty renowned writers, performers, athletes, and activists explore what it means to be Native American today. Through a series of essays and poems, these luminaries give voice to their individual experiences while shedding light on the depth and complexity of modern Native American identity, resiliency, and joy.

The topics are as fascinating and diverse as the creators. From Mato Wayuhi, award-winning composer of Reservation Dogs, honoring a friend who believed in his talent to New York Times bestselling author Angeline Boulley exploring what it means to feel Native enough, these entries are not only an exploration of community, they are also a call for a more just and equitable world, and a road map toward a brighter future.

Edited by IllumiNative, an organization dedicated to amplifying contemporary Native voices, My Life: Growing Up Native in America features contributions from Angeline Boulley, Philip J. Deloria, Eric Gansworth, Kimberly Guerrero, Somah Haaland, Madison Hammond, Nasugraq Rainey Hopson, Trudie Jackson, Princess Daazhraii Johnson, Lady Shug, Ahsaki Baa LaFrance-Chachere, Tai Leclaire, Cece Meadows, Sherri Mitchell, Charlie Amaya Scott, Kara Roselle Smith, Vera Starbard, Dash Turner, Crystal Wahpepah, and Mato Wayuhi.

With the art of a practiced storyteller, Ignatia Broker recounts the life of her great-great-grandmother, Night Flying Woman, who was born in the mid-19th century and lived during a chaotic time of enormous change, uprootings, and loss for the Minnesota Ojibway. But this story also tells of her people's great strength and continuity. This popular book is also available on audiotape read by Debra Smith. An enrolled member of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa, she has performed her own poetry on a syndicated radio series on Native writers.

Ignatia Broker, who died in 1987, was a story-teller and teacher in the Ojibway tradition. In 1984 she received a Wonder Woman Foundation award honoring her as a woman striving for peace and equality.

A Yaqui way of knowledge.

The teachings of don Juan is the story of a remarkable journey: the first awesome steps on the road to becoming a man of knowledge -- the road that continues with A Separate Reality and Journey to Ixtlan.

For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel, looking, looking, breathlessly. -- Don Juan

Richard Moves Camp's My Grandfather's Altar is an oral-literary narrative account of five generations of Lakota religious tradition. Moves Camp is the great-great-grandson of Wóptuȟ'a (Chips), the holy man remembered for providing Crazy Horse with war medicines of power and protection. The Lakota remember the descendants of Wóptuȟ'a for their roles in preserving Lakota ceremonial traditions during the official prohibition period (1883-1934), when the U.S. Indian Religious Crimes Code outlawed Indian religious ceremonies with the threat of imprisonment.

Wóptuȟ'a, his two sons, James Moves Camp and Charles Horn Chips, his grandson Sam Moves Camp, and his great-great-grandson Richard Moves Camp all became well-respected Lakota spiritual leaders. My Grandfather's Altar offers the rare opportunity to learn firsthand how one family's descendants played a pivotal role in revitalizing Lakota religion in the twentieth century.

Many promote Reconciliation as a new way for Canada to relate to Indigenous Peoples. In Dancing on Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence activist, editor, and educator Leanne Simpson asserts reconciliation must be grounded in political resurgence and must support the regeneration of Indigenous languages, oral cultures, and traditions of governance.

Simpson explores philosophies and pathways of regeneration, resurgence, and a new emergence through the Nishnaabeg language, Creation Stories, walks with Elders and children, celebrations and protests, and meditations on these experiences. She stresses the importance of illuminating Indigenous intellectual traditions to transform their relationship to the Canadian state.

Challenging and original, Dancing on Our Turtle's Back provides a valuable new perspective on the struggles of Indigenous Peoples.

With a new afterword by the authors

A powerful, intimate collection of conversations with Indigenous Americans on the climate crisis and the Earth's future

Although for a great many people, the human impact on the Earth--countless species becoming extinct, pandemics claiming millions of lives, and climate crisis causing worldwide social and environmental upheaval--was not apparent until recently, this is not the case for all people or cultures. For the Indigenous people of the world, radical alteration of the planet, and of life itself, is a story that is many generations long. They have had to adapt, to persevere, and to be courageous and resourceful in the face of genocide and destruction--and their experience has given them a unique understanding of civilizational devastation.

An American Library Association Notable Book, We Are the Middle of Forever places Indigenous voices at the center of conversations about today's environmental crisis. The book draws on interviews with people from different North American Indigenous cultures and communities, generations, and geographic regions, who share their knowledge and experience, their questions, their observations, and their dreams of maintaining the best relationship possible to all of life. A welcome antidote to the despair arising from the climate crisis, We Are the Middle of Forever will be an indispensable aid to those looking for new and different ideas and responses to the challenges we face.

A moving and deeply personal excavation of Indigenous beauty and passion in a suffering world

The novel Jonny Appleseed established Joshua Whitehead as one of the most exciting and important new literary voices on Turtle Island, winning both a Lambda Literary Award and Canada Reads 2021. In Making Love with the Land, his first nonfiction book, Whitehead explores the relationships between body, language, and land through creative essay, memoir, and confession.

In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls biostory--beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. Through this narrative perspective, Making Love with the Land recasts mental health struggles and our complex emotional landscapes from a nefarious parasite on his (and our) well-being to kin, even a relation, no matter what difficulties they present to us. Whitehead ruminates on loss and pain without shame or ridicule but rather highlights waypoints for personal transformation. Written in the aftermath of heartbreak, before and during the pandemic, Making Love with the Land illuminates this present moment in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are rediscovering old ways and creating new ones about connection with and responsibility toward each other and the land.

Intellectually audacious and emotionally compelling, Whitehead shares his devotion to the world in which we live and brilliantly--even joyfully--maps his experience on the land that has shaped stories, histories, and bodies from time immemorial.

Bestselling Native American title exploring Native American spiritual teachings.

These thought-provoking teachings from respected Native American leaders and thinkers provide a connection with the land, the environment, and the simple beauties of life. This collection of writings from revered Native Americans offers timeless, meaningful lessons on living and learning.

Unpacks the twenty-one most common myths and misconceptions about Native Americans

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 such as:

Columbus Discovered America
Thanksgiving Proves the Indians Welcomed Pilgrims
Indians Were Savage and Warlike
Europeans Brought Civilization to Backward Indians
The United States Did Not Have a Policy of Genocide
Sports Mascots Honor Native Americans
Most Indians Are on Government Welfare
Indian Casinos Make Them All Rich
Indians Are Naturally Predisposed to Alcohol

Each chapter deftly shows how these myths are rooted in the fears and prejudice of European settlers and in the larger political agendas of a settler state aimed at acquiring Indigenous land and tied to narratives of erasure and disappearance. Accessibly written and revelatory, All the Real Indians Died Off challenges readers to rethink what they have been taught about Native Americans and history.

Buffalo Bird Woman, a Hidatsa Indian born about 1839, was an expert gardener. Following centuries-old methods, she and the women of her family raised huge crops of corn, squash, beans, and sunflowers on the rich bottomlands of the Missouri River in what is now North Dakota. When she was young, her fields were near Like-a-fishhook, the earth-lodge village that the Hidatsa shared with the Mandan and Arikara. When she grew older, the families of the three tribes moved to individual allotments on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.

In Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden, first published in 1917, anthropologist Gilbert L. Wilson transcribed the words of this remarkable woman, whose advice today's gardeners can still follow. She describes a year of activities, from preparing and planting the fields through cultivating, harvesting, and storing foods. She gives recipes for cooking typical Hidatsa dishes. And she tells of the stories, songs, and ceremonies that were essential to a bountiful harvest.

A new introduction by anthropologist and ethnobotanist Jeffery R. Hanson describes the Hidatsa people's ecologically sound methods of gardening and Wilson's work with this traditional gardener.

Praise for Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden:

A gem of a book useful for today's gardener. --Organic Gardener

One of the best gardening books around. --City Pages

Every gardener and agricultural scientist should find gems of practical wisdom in these pages, borne from an age-old tradition when sustainable agricultural practices . . . made the difference in sustaining life. Fascinating! --Foster's Botanical & Herb Review

Historical photographs and diagrams of farming techniques, along with actual recipes and Hidatsa vegetable varieties, make this gem of a book useful for today'' gardener. --Organic Gardening