The act of interpretation has been central to Western American history. At every historical juncture, interpreters were active and present-conveying meaning between people speaking mutually unintelligible languages, bartering for goods and power along borders, and translating intentions from gestures, acts, and words. While research on ......
The act of interpretation has been central to Western American history. At every historical juncture, interpreters were active and present-conveying meaning between people speaking mutually unintelligible languages, bartering for goods and power along borders, and translating intentions from gestures, acts, and words. While research on ......
Diplomacy and the Politics of Sovereignty, from Roanoke to the Republic
Charles W. A. Prior offers a new account of the sovereign claims of Native Americans, the Crown, and colonies in early America, arguing that Native American diplomacy shaped how sovereignty was negotiated and contested among all three, from Virginia's founding to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Previous scholars have focused on the ......
Indian Boarding Schools, Native American Anthropologists, and the Race to Preserve Indigenous Cultures
In Turning the Power Nathan Sowry examines how some Native American students from the boarding school system, with its forced assimilationist education, became key cultural informants for anthropologists conducting fieldwork during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Salvage anthropologists of this era relied on Native informants to ......
The James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel, AWP Award Series Winner Twinless Twin finds a family maimed by a troubled, enigmatic son, whose unspeakable actions leave the family reeling, torn between moving on and searching for answers. A twin who survives their sibling twin may sometimes be plagued with lifelong feelings of loss, guilt, and ......
Born into a storied but impoverished family on the reservation of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Leonard Carson Lambert Jr.'s candid memoir is a remarkable story and an equally remarkable flouting of the stereotypes that so many tales of American Indian life have engendered. Up from These Hills provides a grounded, yet poignant, ......
One Man's Journey Along the Cherokee Trail of Tears
One fall morning Jerry Ellis donned a backpack and began a long, lonely walk: retracing the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the nine hundred miles his ancestors had walked in 1838. The trail was the agonizing path of exile the Cherokees had been forced to take when they were torn from their southeastern homeland and relocated to Indian Territory. ......
"The guerrilla fights the war of the flea, and his military enemy suffers the dog's disadvantages: too much to defend; too small, ubiquitous, and agile an enemy to come to grips with.
When Blue Bird and her grandmother leave their family's camp to gather beans for the long, threatening winter, they inadvertently avoid the horrible fate that befalls the rest of the family. Luckily, the two women are adopted by a nearby Dakota community and are eventually integrated into their kinship circles. Ella Cara Deloria's tale follows ......