Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

James F. Brooks, UC Santa Barbara Professor of History and Anthropology and the William S. Vaughn Visiting Fellow at Vanderbilt University’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, offers a scrupulously researched investigation of the mysterious massacre of Hopi Indians at Awat’ovi as well as the event’s echo through American history in Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awat’ovi Massacre (W.W. Norton & Company, 2016).

The Hopi community of Awat’ovi existed peacefully on Arizona’s Antelope Mesa for generations until one bleak morning in the fall of 1700—raiders from nearby Hopi villages descended on Awat’ovi, slaughtering their neighboring men, women, and children. While little of the pueblo itself remains, five centuries of history lie beneath the low rises of sandstone masonry, and theories about the events of that night are as persistent as the desert winds. The easternmost town on Antelope Mesa, Awat’ovi was renowned for its martial strength, and had been the gateway to the entire Hopi landscape for centuries. Why did kinsmen target it for destruction?

Drawing on oral traditions, archival accounts, and extensive archaeological research, James Brooks unravels the story and its significance. Mesa of Sorrows follows the pattern of an archaeological expedition, uncovering layer after layer of evidence and theories. Brooks questions their reliability and shows how interpretations were shaped by academic, religious and tribal politics. Piecing together three centuries of investigation, he offers insight into why some were spared—women, mostly, and taken captive—and others sacrificed. He weighs theories that the attack was in retribution for Awat’ovi having welcomed Franciscan missionaries or for the residents’ practice of sorcery, and argues that a perfect storm of internal and external crises revitalized an ancient cycle of ritual bloodshed and purification.

A haunting account of a shocking massacre, Mesa of Sorrows is a probing exploration of how societies confront painful histories, and why communal violence still plagues us today.

A French edition of of the book, Awat’ovi : l’histoire et les fantomes du passe en pays Hopi, is forthcoming.

Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.

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During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Native American students from across the United States attended federally-managed boarding schools where they were taught English, math, and a variety of vocational skills, all for the purpose of forcing their assimilation into white, American society. While enrolled at these schools, students also showcased their writing, editing, and printing skills by publishing school newspapers. In Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Assistant Professor of English Jacqueline Emery provides the first comprehensive collection of Native American writings published in boarding school newspapers, and demonstrates the ways in which students used these periodicals to both challenge and reflect assimilationist practices at the schools. The collection includes student-authored letters, editorials, fiction, and folklore, and examines the writings of Gertrude Bonin, Charles Eastman, and Luther Standing Bear, among additional, lesser-known writers.

Samantha M. Williams is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently writing her dissertation, which examines the history of the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada through the lenses of settler colonialism and public history. She can be reached at swillia7@ucsc.edu.

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Best-selling Australian writer Richard Flanagan talks about his Booker prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

This unforgettable novel about the cruelty of war and the tenuousness of love and life tells the story of captive Australian soldiers forced into hard labour, working on the Burmese railway during and after World War Two. At its heart is one day in a Japanese slave labour camp in August 1943 which builds to a horrific climax as surgeon Dorrigo Evans battles and too often fails in his quest to save the lives of his fellow POWs.

(Photo: Writer Richard Flanagan. Credit: Joel Saget)

In Horace Poolaw, Photographer of American Indian Modernity (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), Laura E. Smith, Assistant Professor of Art History at Michigan State University, unravels the compelling life story of Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw (1906-84), one of the first professional Native American photographers. Born on the Kiowa reservation in Anadarko, Oklahoma, Poolaw bought his first camera at the age of fifteen and began taking photos of family, friends, and noted leaders in the Kiowa community, also capturing successive years of powwows and pageants at various fairs, expositions, and other events. Though Poolaw earned some income as a professional photographer, he farmed, raised livestock, and took other jobs to help fund his passion for documenting his community. Smith examines the cultural and artistic significance of Poolaw’s life in professional photography from 1925 to 1945 in light of European and modernist discourses on photography, portraiture, the function of art, Native American identity, and American Indian religious and political activism. Rather than through the lens of Native people’s inevitable extinction or within a discourse of artistic modernism, Smith evaluates Poolaw’s photography within art history and Native American history, simultaneously questioning the category of fine artist in relation to the creative lives of Native peoples.

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Katy Waldman, Laura Miller, and Meghan O'Rourke discuss the novel Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan. Our selection for next month will be Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey. 

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In Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (Oxford University Press, 2017), Princeton University English Associate Professor Sarah Rivett studies how colonists in North America struggled to understand, translate, and interpret Native American languages, and the significance of these languages for theological and cosmological issues such as the origins of Amerindian populations, their relationship to Eurasian and Biblical peoples, and the origins of language itself. Through a close analysis of previously overlooked texts, Unscripted America places American Indian languages within transatlantic intellectual history, while also demonstrating how American letters emerged in the 1810s through 1830s via a complex and hitherto unexplored engagement with the legacies and aesthetic possibilities of indigenous words.

Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.

 

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In Claiming Turtle Mountain’s Constitution: The History, Legacy, and Future of a Tribal Nation’s Founding Documents (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Turtle Mountain Tribal Court Associate Justice and UNC-Chapel Hill American Studies Assistant ProfessorKeith Richotte, Jr., offers a critical examination of one tribal nation’s decision to adopt a constitution.

In an auditorium in Belcourt, North Dakota, on a chilly October day in 1932, Robert Bruce and his fellow tribal citizens held the political fate of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in their hands. Bruce, and the others, had been asked to adopt a tribal constitution, but he was unhappy with the document, as it limited tribal governmental authority. However, white authorities told the tribal nation that the proposed constitution was a necessary step in bringing a lawsuit against the federal government over a long-standing land dispute. Bruce’s choice, and the choice of his fellow citizens, has shaped tribal governance on the reservation ever since that fateful day. By asking why the citizens of Turtle Mountain voted to adopt the document despite perceived flaws, he confronts assumptions about how tribal constitutions came to be, reexamines the status of tribal governments in the present, and offers a fresh set of questions as we look to the future of governance in Native America and beyond.

Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.

 

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John Ryan Fischer‘s book Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) is a fascinating look at how a common animal—the cow—changed the landscapes, economies and peoples of both California and Hawai’i, and linked them together in unexpected ways, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. After the introduction of cattle into each of these societies by Europeans, not only did the cows bring ecological change, but they fundamentally altered how people lived, worked, earned their living and interacted with the world at large. As California’s and Hawai’i’s economies became increasingly focused on cattle, especially the hide and tallow industries in the 1820s and 30s, the changes both in the land and the people who worked it paved the way for broader colonial projects both by European countries and eventually the United States.

Ryan Fischer is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. He specializes in environmental history, and studied under environmental and Early American history heavyweights Louis Warren and Alan Taylor at University of California Davis, which has one of the best environmental history programs in the nation.

Sean Munger is an author, historian, teacher and podcaster.

 

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Through meticulous archival research, close readings of key works, and informed and imaginative speculation about a largely enigmatic life, Red Ink author Drew Lopenzina provides a vivid portrait of a singular Native American figure in Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017).

This “cultural biography” provides a lens through which to comprehend the complex dynamics of indigenous survival and resistance in the era of America’s early nationhood. William Apess’s life intersects with multiple aspects of indigenous identity and existence in this period, including indentured servitude, slavery, service in the armed forces, syncretic engagements with Methodist spirituality, and Native struggles for political and cultural autonomy. Even more, Apess offers a powerful and provocative voice for the persistence of Native American presence in a time and place that was long supposed to have settled its Indian question in favor of extinction. This new biography will sit alongside Apess’s own writing as vital reading for those interested in early America and indigeneity.

Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.

 

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Between 1902 and 1934, hundreds of Native American men, women, and children were institutionalized at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians; only nine of them, however, were officially committed by court order. In Vanished in Hiawatha: The Story of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), independent scholar Carla Joinson examines the history of the only insane asylum in United States history dedicated solely to the institutionalization of Native Americans. Vanished in Hiawatha further connects the establishment of the Canton Asylum with efforts to assimilate Indigenous populations during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and considers how and why the institution remained open for three decades, given the ongoing mismanagement and mistreatment of Native patients at the facility.

Samantha M. Williams is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently writing her dissertation, which examines the history of the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada through the lenses of settler colonialism and public history. She can be reached at swillia7@ucsc.edu.

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