Author: Marshall Poe

In this episode of New Books in Archaeology we talk with Douglas B. Bamforth about his new book The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska (University of New Mexico Press, 2015). Bamforth focuses primarily on Paleoindian land use represented by the Allen Site and the adjacent smaller sites...

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When Howard Zinn published A People’s History of the United States in 1980, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was thrilled. “I used it as a text immediately,” she remembers. Comrades in the movement anti-war movement, Zinn and Dunbar-Ortiz shared a belief that a radically different kind of history, freed from patriotic bluster, was desperately needed.

But Dunbar-Ortiz was also concerned by Zinn’s narrative. While the opening chapters on the genocide of Indigenous people were “like no other general U.S. history book,” Native Americans largely fell out of the story until the Red Power movements of the 1960s and 70s. “I kept saying to Howard, ‘What happened to the Indians? Why did they disappear until Alcatraz in 1969?'” Dunbar-Ortiz recounts. “He would say, ‘You have to write that book.'”

And so last year, Dunbar-Ortiz published An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2014). Covering several centuries in a brisk and moving narrative, this is a deeply unsettling tale. Dunbar-Ortiz lays bear a process of genocidal colonization and Indigenous resistance, the genesis of a American way of war born from frontier counterinsurgency and premised on annihilation, and how powerful origin myths continue to obscure the real history of this continent.

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In his new book Native Americans on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths, and the ‘Good Indian’ (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), Michael Ray FitzGerald reviews how television represented Native Americans, including in both positive and negative stereotypes. He talks about these portrayals from early television shows to more recent characterizations.

 

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For as long as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick has been a staple of the American literary canon, one element often goes unnoticed.

The ship commanded by the monomanacial Ahab on his quest to slay the great white whale is named the Pequod, just one letter of difference from Pequot, a Native nation living within what is now southern New England. Perhaps Mellville was just participating in the widespread romantic nostalgia of the age, when many corporate enterprises and vessels took the name of the supposedly disappearing and noble Indians.

Or, maybe he was simply gesturing at the reality of the industry.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when Moby Dick takes place, Native men from New England constituted a huge portion of the whaling workforce, some spending decades at sea, encountering diverse peoples across two oceans, and invigorating their economically marginalized reservations with vital income. These forgotten seamen finally have a chronicler in Nancy Shoemaker, professor of history at the University of Connecticut. Author or editor of seven books, her latest is Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

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Last month, VICE NEWS released a short documentary about the Navajo Nation called “Cursed by Coal.” The images and stories confirm the title. “Seems like everything’s just dying out here,” says Navajo citizen Joe Allen. “It’s because of the mine. Everything is being ruined. They don’t care about people living on that land.”

About four hundred miles southwest of the Four Corners Power Plant, where much of the coal stripped from Navajo land is burned for energy, stands the gleaming Chase Tower in downtown Phoenix, the tallest building in the state of Arizona.

Connecting the two places is a maze of energy infrastructure, hidden and ignored when a Chase executive enters his air-conditioned top-floor office. “Electricity and power lines had become second nature in Phoenix, as assumed and expected aspect of modern life,” writes Andrew Needham. “Appearing in Phoenix’s homes, businesses, and factories at the flick of a switch, electricity seemed to exist in neither time nor space. It simply was.”

But it had to be made somewhere, as Needham vividly illustrates in his new book, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton University Press, 2014). With booming desert cities demanding ever more power throughout the last century and into the present, the Navajo Nation’s massive coal deposits were targeted for extraction, no matter the ecological or economic cost. People are still living with the consequences.

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Studies of Christian missions can easily fall into two different traps: either one-sidedly presenting the missionaries as heroes saving benighted savages or portraying them as villains carrying out cultural imperialism. At the same time, these vastly different perspectives are based on the same error of minimizing native agency. In The...

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In 2012, a young Cherokee girl named Veronica became famous. The widespread and often coercive adoption and fostering of Indigenous children by non-Native families has long been known, discussed, and challenged in Indian Country. Now, because of an interview on Dr. Phil with the white South Carolina couple seeking to adopt Veronica, the issue went national.

Veronica’s mother had agreed to the adoption, but her father, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, wanted to raise her. And according to the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA), Indian children should grow up in Indian families whenever possible.

The Supreme Court disagreed. In a 5-4 decision in June 2013, they remanded the case to the South Carolina Supreme Court, who promptly placed Veronica with the white couple.

This story opens Margaret D. Jacobs’ new book, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). But instead of trading in the shallow myths that characterized mainstream media coverage of the “Baby Veronica” case, Jacobs offers a nuanced and often troubling history that puts such incidents in context, documenting the mid-century explosion of adoption and fostering of Indigenous children by white families, not only in the United States but other settler colonial countries like Australia and Canada.

Jacobs’ book is one of trauma and violence, but also of courage and resistance, as Indigenous families struggled to reclaim the care of their children, leading to the ICWA in the United States and to national investigations, landmark apologies, and redress in Australia and Canada.

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If George Armstrong Custer had kept off of Greasy Grass that June day in 1875, Vine Deloria, Jr.’s manifesto might well have been called “Canby Died For Your Sins.”

The highest ranking U.S. military official to be killed in the so-called “Indian Wars,” General Edward Canby’s death at the hands of Modoc fighters in 1873 unleashed a campaign of ethnic cleansing and guerrilla resistance later colloquialized as the Modoc War. An international sensation at the time and iconic in the decades following, the Klamath Basin struggle has been largely overshadowed in contemporary historical memory.

In his razor-sharp account Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), historian Boyd Cothran not only reconstructs this dramatic story but traces how various actors–pushed and pulled by the demands of an acquisitive capitalist market–transformed the memory of the war into a redemptive tale of American innocence, a recasting of colonial violence that still shapes U.S. self-perceptions today.

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Often when we think of missions to Native Americans or people of African descent, we think of white missionaries. In his book Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2013), Dr. Edward E. Andrews challenges this view. Through his careful research, skilled use of anecdotes, and compelling narrative. Dr. Andrews shows how it was Native Americans and people of African descent themselves who did much of the heavy lifting when it came to mission work. Moreover, Dr. Andrews not only explores the complex relationship between these diverse groups of people within the Protestant churches he studies (primarily Puritan, Anglican, and Moravian), the meeting of Protestant Christianity and indigenous religious beliefs, and the relationship between culture and religion, he also shows how white, black, and Native American missionaries cooperated (and argued with) each other. This book is a fascinating read and is highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of the Atlantic World or missions.

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Few years in U.S. history call to mind such immediate stock images as 1776. Powdered wigs. Founding fathers. Red coats. And if asked to place this assembly of objects and people, a few cities stand out: Boston. Philadelphia. Williamsburg, perhaps.

This is the small world conjured by the Revolutionary era; the remainder of the continent, some 96% percent of the landmass exclusive of the original thirteen colonies that called themselves Continental, conceived of as a blank slate, awaiting inevitable expansion.

Claudio Saunt wants to change this.

Richard B. Russell Professor of American History at the University of Georgia and co-director of the Center for Virtual History, Saunt’s new book, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (W.W. Norton, 2014), explores nine American places and the diverse peoples who populated them in that fateful year, from the Aleutian Islands to San Diego, the Florida Gulf Coast to the Saskatchewan River.

By illustrating complicated webs of trade and exchange, competing empires and diverse Indigenous responses, Saunt makes the case that the stories of people like the Aleuts in the Aleutian archipelago, Miwoks and Costanoans of northern California, Creek Indians of the Deep South and numerous others deserve our historical attention as fully and richly as musket-bearing minutemen.

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