Continuing the work of the award-winning Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta casts an Indigenous lens on contemporary society, challenging us to face conflict and embrace conversation to find our way onto the right track.
With Right Story, Wrong Story, Apalech Clan member Tyson Yunkaporta, from far north Queensland, tackles the divisions that prevent us from talking to one another. Yunkaporta invites us to confront life's biggest questions and arms us with the tools we need to really listen, and to open our minds to change based upon our connections with others. He makes this point through discussions with a diverse range of people across social and political divides including:
Building upon the Indigenous tradition of yarning to weave our individual narratives into the great narrative that includes us all across any and all differences, Yunkaporta argues that story is at the heart of everything. But what is right or wrong story?
One Book South Dakota Common Read, South Dakota Humanities Council, 2022
PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, PEN America, 2020
One Book One Tribe Book Award, First Nations Development Institute, 2020
Finalist, Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, 2019
Shortlist, Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, 2019
Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a personal story, and a manifesto.
Now available in paperback on the fifth anniversary of its original publication, Our History Is the Future features a new afterword by Nick Estes about the rising indigenous campaigns to protect our environment from extractive industries and to shape new ways of relating to one another and the world.
In this award-winning book, Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance leading to the present campaigns against fossil fuel pipelines, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, from the days of the Missouri River trading forts through the Indian Wars, the Pick-Sloan dams, the American Indian Movement, and the campaign for Indigenous rights at the United Nations.
In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century, attracting tens of thousands of Indigenous and non-Native allies from around the world. Its slogan Mni Wiconi-Water Is Life-was about more than just a pipeline. Water Protectors knew this battle for Native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even with the encampment gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue.
While a historian by trade, Estes draws on observations from the encampments and from growing up as a citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires) and his own family's rich history of struggle.
To the colonized, the term 'research' is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which academic research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory.
This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research - specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth.' Concepts such as 'discovery' and 'claiming' are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being. Now in its eagerly awaited third edition, this bestselling book includes a co-written introduction features contributions from indigenous scholars on the book's continued relevance to current research. It also features a chapter with twenty-five indigenous projects and a collection of poetry.Forcibly removed from her Indigenous family as a child, Andrea Currie journeys back to her Nation and the truth of who she is
Otipemisiwak is a Plains Cree word describing the Métis, meaning the people who own themselves.
Andrea Currie was born into a Métis family with a strong lineage of warriors, land protectors, writers, artists, and musicians--all of which was lost to her when she was adopted as an infant into a white family with no connection to her people. It was 1960, and the policy of removing children from their Indigenous families was firmly in place. Together with her younger adopted brother, also Métis, she struggled through her childhood, never feeling like she belonged in that world. When their adoptions fell apart during their teen years, the two siblings found themselves on different paths, yet they stayed connected. Currie takes us through her journey, from the harrowing time of bone-deep disconnection, to the years of searching and self-discovery, into the joys and sorrows of reuniting with her birth family.
Finding Otipemisiwak weaves lyrical prose, poetry, and essays into an incisive commentary on the vulnerability of Indigenous children in a white supremacist child welfare system, the devastation of cultural loss, and the rocky road some people must walk to get to the truth of who they are. Her triumph over the state's attempts to erase her as an Indigenous person is tempered by the often painful complexities of re-entering her cultural community while bearing the mark of the white world in which she was raised. Finding Otipemisiwak is the story of one woman's fight--first to survive, then to thrive as a fully present member of her Nation and of the human family.
An exploration of the Zapatista project, from its conception to the present.
On the thirtieth anniversary of the Mayan Indigenous uprising in Chiapas, The Zapatista Experience reconstructs the trajectory of the Zapatista struggle over the last three decades, both in its concrete achievements and in its contributions to the renewal of critical and antisystemic thinking. The Zapatista rebellion has become a reference and source of inspiration for many struggles around the world due to its major contribution in reformulating a credible and desirable path to emancipation, a path that broke with previously dominant conceptions: state-centric, productivist, Eurocentric, modernist, and patriarchal. Baschet demonstrates how the Zapatistas have succeeded in materializing, on a massive scale, the concrete experience of another way of living, a forerunner of possible emerging worlds.
The autonomous rebel territories of Chiapas are among the most developed and radical of the real utopias that exist in the world today, exceptional in their experiments in self-governance and anti-State political form, argues Jérôme Baschet. The Zapatista Experience orients readers in the profusion of Zapatista writings concerning, for example, the elaboration of a different understanding of politics, the Zapatistas' planetary conjunctural analysis of capitalism as a total war against humanity, their conception of Indigeneity that breaks with both modernist individualism and identity politics, and their notion of time and history. All this in clear opposition to neoliberal capitalism.
The 10th anniversary edition
A Guardian Best Book about DeforestationCited in the Chicago Manual of Style
The groundbreaking Indigenous style guide every writer needs
A new editorial team continues the paradigm-shifting conversation started by the late Gregory Younging in his foundational Elements of Indigenous Style. Trusted by writers, editors, publishers, researchers, scholars, journalists, and communications professionals around the world, the second edition of Elements continues to offer crucial guidance to everyone who works with words on how to accurately, collaboratively, and ethically participate in projects involving Indigenous Peoples.
This second conversation updates and annotates Younging's twenty-two succinct style principles and recommendations to reflect up-to-date, Indigenous-led best practices. The new edition also includes:
The book's large format and beautiful color images make this title a worthy addition to any collection in need of information about Native American art and customs, or clothing tradition and design.
--Library Journal
More than five centuries of native peoples' artistry.
Native Americans crafted beautiful clothing out of skins, pigment, quills and sinew. The collection of photographs in this outstanding reference celebrates this decorative genius. Many of the 300 photographs from more than 60 leading museums and private collections have never been published previously.
The book describes the clothing in fascinating detail, from moccasins and tunics to sashes, bags and ceremonial and burial costumes. Theodore Brasser explains who made what and how, as well as the meanings of the different kinds of decoration, such as beadwork, embroidery, appliqué, patchwork, weaving and dyeing. There are also many examples of native pottery and other historic artifacts that depict themes used in the clothes.
Native American Clothing provides a thorough historical background of the many influences on this clothing, including:
The book covers the entire North American continent and is organized by tribal groups and regions:
Numerous maps show the ranges of the tribes and convey how trade and travel spread cultural themes.
With authoritative text and art-quality color reproductions, Native American Clothing will be important to collectors and historians and will also appeal to general readers.
With more than fifty contributors, Indigenous Critical Reflections on Traditional Ecological Knowledge offers important perspectives by Indigenous Peoples on Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous value systems. The book aims to educate and inspire readers about the importance of decolonizing how Indigenous Knowledges are considered and used outside of Native communities.
By including the work of Indigenous storytellers, poets, and scholars from around the globe, editor Lara Jacobs and chapter authors effectively explore the Indigenous value systems--relationships, reciprocity, and responsibility--that are fundamental to Indigenous Knowledge systems and cultures. Indigenous languages and positionality statements are featured for each of the contributors to frame their cultural and geographical background and to allow each Indigenous voice to lead discussions and contribute critical discourse to the literature on Indigenous Knowledges and value systems. By creating space for each of these individual voices, this volume challenges colonial extraction norms and highlights the importance of decolonial methods in understanding and protecting Indigenous Knowledges.
Indigenous Critical Reflections on Traditional Ecological Knowledge is an essential resource for students, academics, members of Tribal, state, and federal governments, Indigenous communities, and non-Indigenous allies as well as a valuable addition to environmental and Indigenous studies collections.
Contributors include: Melinda M. Adams, Joe Anderson, Coral Avery, Andrew Kalani Carlson, Kathryn Champagne, Brandie Makeba Cross, Joanna M. DeMeyer, Jonathan James Fisk, Pat Gonzales-Rogers, Celina Gray, Rhode Grayson, Zena Greenawald, Jennifer Grenz, Joy Harjo, Mandi Harris, Jessica Hernandez, Victor Hernandez, David Iniguez, Michelle M. Jacob, Lara A. Jacobs, Lydia L. Jennings, Eileen Jimenez, Stephanie Kelley, David G. Lewis, Tomás A. Madrigal, Tara McAllister, Lauren Wendelle Yowelunh McLester-Davis, Angeles Mendoza, Kat Milligan-McClellan, Todd A. Mitchell swəlítub, Don Motanic, 'Alohi Nakachi, Kaikea Nakachi, Kobe, Natachu, Ululani Kekahiliokalani Brigitte Russo Oana, Jennifer R. O'Neal, Lily Painter, Britt Postoak, Leasi Vanessa Lee Raymond, Anamaq Margaret H. C. Rudolf, Oral Saulters, Sam Schimmel, Paulette Steeves, Joni Tobacco, Angelo Villagomez, Vivi Vold, Margaret Palaghicon Von Rotz, Luhui Whitebear, Joseph Gazing Wolf, Monique Wynecoop, and Cherry YEW Yamane.Red Nation Rising is the first book ever to investigate and explain the violent dynamics of bordertowns. Bordertowns are white-dominated towns and cities that operate according to the same political and spatial logics as all other American towns and cities. The difference is that these settlements get their name from their location at the borders of current-day reservation boundaries, which separates the territory of sovereign Native nations from lands claimed by the United States.
Bordertowns came into existence when the first US military forts and trading posts were strategically placed along expanding imperial frontiers to extinguish indigenous resistance and incorporate captured indigenous territories into the burgeoning nation-state. To this day, the US settler state continues to wage violence on Native life and land in these spaces out of desperation to eliminate the threat of Native presence and complete its vision of national consolidation from sea to shining sea. This explains why some of the most important Native-led rebellions in US history originated in bordertowns and why they are zones of ongoing confrontation between Native nations and their colonial occupier, the United States.
Despite this rich and important history of political and material struggle, little has been written about bordertowns. Red Nation Rising marks the first effort to tell these entangled histories and inspire a new generation of Native freedom fighters to return to bordertowns as key front lines in the long struggle for Native liberation from US colonial control. This book is a manual for navigating the extreme violence that Native people experience in reservation bordertowns and a manifesto for indigenous liberation that builds on long traditions of Native resistance to bordertown violence.
On February 27, 1973, a group of roughly 300 armed Indigenous men, women, and children seized the tiny hamlet of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, at gunpoint, took hostages, barricaded themselves in the hilltop church, and raised an upside-down American flag. Taking place at the site of the infamous massacre in 1890, the highly symbolic confrontation spearheaded by the American Indian Movement (AIM) ultimately evolved into a prolonged, seventy-one-day armed standoff between law enforcement officers and modern-day Indigenous warriors. Among these warriors were Vietnam War veterans armed with Vietnam-era equipment and weaponry. By organizing in defense of the newly proclaimed Independent Oglala Nation, the AIM activists at Wounded Knee linked their nationalist quest for sovereignty and self-determination with a warrior masculinity they constructed from a mix of Indigenous cultures and contemporary cultural elements, including the Black civil rights movement, the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the antiwar movement.
As Matthias André Voigt shows, the takeover of Wounded Knee was only one moment among many in the complex interplay between protest activism, gender, race, and identity within AIM. While AIM is widely recognized for its militancy and nationalism, Reinventing the Warrior is the first major study to examine the gendered transformation of Indigenous men within the Red Power movement and the United States more generally. AIM activists came to regard themselves, like their ancestors before them, as warriors fighting for their people, their lands, and their rights. They sought to remasculinize their Indigenous identity in order to confront hegemonic masculinities--and, by implication, colonialism itself. By becoming more manly, Indigenous men challenged the disempowering nature of white supremacy.
Voigt traces the story of the reinvention of Indigenous warriorhood from 1968 to the takeover of Wounded Knee in 1973 and beyond. His trailblazing work explores why and how Indigenous men refashioned themselves as modern-day warriors in their anticolonial nation-building endeavor, thereby remaking both self and society.
Deyohahá ge:, two roads or paths in Cayuga language, evokes the Covenant Chain-Two Row Wampum, known as the grandfather of the treaties. Famously, this Haudenosaunee wampum agreement showed how Indigenous people and newcomers could build peace and friendship by respecting each other's cultures, beliefs, and laws as they shared the river of life.
Written by members of Six Nations and their neighbours, this book introduces readers not only to the 17th-century history of how the Dutch and British joined the wampum agreement, but also to how it might restore good relations today. Many Canadians and Americans have never heard of the Covenant Chain or Two Row Wampum, but 200 years of disregard have not obliterated the covenant. We all need to learn about this foundational wampum, because it is resurging in our communities, institutions, and courthouses-charting a way to a future. The writers of Deyohahá ge delve into the eco-philosophy, legal evolution, and ethical protocols of two-path peace-making. They tend the sacred, ethical space that many of us navigate between these paths. They show how people today create peace, friendship, and respect-literally-on the river of everyday life.Readers are provided with a fascinating overview of the history of indigenous footwear in North America and an in-depth Introduction to rawhide, leather, and buckskin by G. D. Wood. Patterns for 28 moccasin types covering over 30 tribes throughout North America are featured along with new instructions for making Plains hard-sole, Northern Plains soft-sole, and Cherokee/Southeastern-style moccasins.
Also included is a brief history of the tribes, additional resources, and website references. Forty-one full-color photographs accompany the patterns, along with 22 historic period photos of camps, hides being tanned, individual chiefs, and more.
Considers the character of the Stage Indian in American theater and its racial and political impact
Redface unearths the history of the theatrical phenomenon of redface in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Like blackface, redface was used to racialize Indigenous peoples and nations, and even more crucially, exclude them from full citizenship in the United States. Arguing that redface is more than just the costumes or makeup an actor wears, Bethany Hughes contends that it is a collaborative, curatorial process through which artists and audiences make certain bodies legible as Indian. By chronicling how performances and definitions of redface rely upon legibility and delineations of race that are culturally constructed and routinely shifting, this book offers an understanding of how redface works to naturalize a very particular version of history and, in doing so, mask its own performativity. Tracing the Stage Indian from its early nineteenth-century roots to its proliferation across theatrical entertainment forms and turn of the twenty-first century attempts to address its racist legacy, Redface uses case studies in law and civic life to understand its offstage impact. Hughes connects extensive scholarship on the Indian in American culture to the theatrical history of racial impersonation and critiques of settler colonialism, demonstrating redface's high stakes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. Revealing the persistence of redface and the challenges of fixing it, Redface closes by offering readers an embodied rehearsal of what it would mean to read not for the Indian but for Indigenous theater and performance as it has always existed in the US.