Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere (U Nebraska Press, 2021) is a reclaimed history of the deep past of Indigenous people in North and South America during the Paleolithic. Paulette F. C. Steeves mines evidence from archaeology sites and Paleolithic environments, landscapes, and mammalian and human migrations to make the case that people have been in the Western Hemisphere not only just prior to Clovis sites (10,200 years ago) but for more than 60,000 years, and likely more than 100,000 years.

Steeves discusses the political history of American anthropology to focus on why pre-Clovis sites have been dismissed by the field for nearly a century. She explores supporting evidence from genetics and linguistic anthropology regarding First Peoples and time frames of early migrations. Additionally, she highlights the work and struggles faced by a small yet vibrant group of American and European archaeologists who have excavated and reported on numerous pre-Clovis archaeology sites.

In this first book on Paleolithic archaeology of the Americas written from an Indigenous perspective, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere includes Indigenous oral traditions, archaeological evidence, and a critical and decolonizing discussion of the development of archaeology in the Americas.

To learn more about Steeves’ research, please visit The Indigenous Paleolithic Database of the Americas at https://tipdba.com/.

This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here.

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When the Choctaw Nation was forcibly resettled in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, it was joined by enslaved Black people—the tribe had owned enslaved Blacks since the 1720s. By the eve of the Civil War, 14 percent of the Choctaw Nation consisted of enslaved Blacks. Avid supporters of the Confederate States of America, the Nation passed a measure requiring all whites living in its territory to swear allegiance to the Confederacy and deemed any criticism of it or its army treasonous and punishable by death. Choctaws also raised an infantry force and a cavalry to fight alongside Confederate forces.

In Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country (UNC Press, 2021), Fay A. Yarbrough reveals that, while sovereignty and states’ rights mattered to Choctaw leaders, the survival of slavery also determined the Nation’s support of the Confederacy. Mining service records for approximately 3,000 members of the First Choctaw and Chickasaw Mounted Rifles, Yarbrough examines the experiences of Choctaw soldiers and notes that although their enthusiasm waned as the war persisted, military service allowed them to embrace traditional masculine roles that were disappearing in a changing political and economic landscape. By drawing parallels between the Choctaw Nation and the Confederate states, Yarbrough looks beyond the traditional binary of the Union and Confederacy and reconsiders the historical relationship between Native populations and slavery.

Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 202) Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1.

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Mary Sully was many things: a Dakota woman, an artist, and an American living through a heyday of early celebrity culture in the United States. All of these facets of her life and of her context are present in her art. In Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (University of Washington Press, 2019), Harvard University professor and OAH President (and direct Sully relative) Phil Deloria uncovers Sully's artwork, long tucked away in family attics, and explains why it matters. Deloria argues that Sully's abstract "personality prints" representing various American celebrities of the early 20th century placed her outside the mainstream of the often "primitivist" Native art world of the era. Instead, Sully planted one foot firmly in modernism, while keeping the other rooted in Native art traditions, making her impossible to classify as one thing or another. Deloria tells a remarkably personal and beautiful story of an unheralded master of visual arts gazing into a new American and American Indian future and representing what she sees in vibrant color and intricate patterns, defying easy categorization and expectation.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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The first of our season of celebrating The Exuberance of Youth in this the centenary year of the BBC, World Book Club talks to Irish writer Naoise Dolan about her dazzling novel Exciting Times. Psychologically astute and dryly funny, Exciting Times is a modern, intelligent dissection of youth, power and privilege set amongst the international circles of contemporary Hong Kong. Clever, young millennial Ava, an Irish graduate teaching English, is having an affair with rich cynical banker Julian. Then she meets Edith. Earnest, attentive and all the things Julian isn’t. A raw, intimate exploration of love and sexuality amongst millennials, Exciting Times charts the often transactional nature of relationships in our complicated modern world.

(Photo courtesy of Naoise Dolan.)

Samantha Seeley is the author of Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2021. Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain explores the how, at various levels of government and among a variety of people the right to remain and who would be subject to removal was debated. Seeley’s study illustrates how Native Americans and African Americans had to navigate a myriad of challenges to their place both within and outside of the nation. This work reorients the history of U.S. expansion and reconsiders how the early United States was built around the movement and non-movement of people.

Dr. Seeley is an Assistant Professor at the University of Richmond.

Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park. His dissertation, "The Specter of Black Citizens: Race, Slavery, and Citizenship in the Early United States," examines how citizenship was used to both bolster the institution of slavery and exclude Black Americans from the body politic.

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Originally published in 2006, Art of the Northwest Coast offers an expansive history of this great tradition, from the earliest known works to those made at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although non-Natives often claimed that First Nations cultures were disappearing, Northwest Coast Native people continued to make art during the painful era of colonization, often subtly expressing resistance to their oppressors and demonstrating the resilience of their heritage. Integrating the art’s development with historical events following contact with Euro-Americans sheds light on the creativity of artists as they appropriated and transformed foreign elements into uniquely Indigenous statements. A new chapter discusses contemporary artists, including Marianne Nicholson, Nicholas Galanin, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, and Sonny Assu, who address pressing issues ranging from Indigenous sovereignty and destruction of the environment to the power of Native women and efforts to work with non-Natives to heal the wounds of racism and discrimination.

Kirstin L. Ellsworth holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Indiana University and is Associate Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hills.

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Harriett Gilbert talks to the multi-award-winning Trinidadian-British author Monique Roffey about her enchanting novel The Mermaid of Black Conch, which won the 2020 Costa Book of the Year. Roffey spins the mesmerising tale of a cursed mermaid and the lonely fisherman who falls in love with her.

When American bounty-hunters capture Aycayia from the deep seas off the island of Black Conch, David rescues her and vows to win her trust. With Aycayia in hiding, their love grows as they navigate both the joys and dangers of life on shore. But on an island whose history reaches back to darker times nothing is straightforward as old jealousies and ancient grudges surface amongst the inhabitants.

(Photo: Monique Roffey.. Credit: Marcus Bastel.)

After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands (Princeton UP, 2021) confronts the harsh truth that the United States was founded on the violent dispossession of Indigenous people and asks what reconciliation might mean in light of this haunted history. In this timely and urgent book, settler historian Margaret Jacobs tells the stories of the individuals and communities who are working together to heal historical wounds—and reveals how much we have to gain by learning from our history instead of denying it. Jacobs traces the brutal legacy of systemic racial injustice to Indigenous people that has endured since the nation’s founding. Explaining how early attempts at reconciliation succeeded only in robbing tribal nations of their land and forcing their children into abusive boarding schools, she shows that true reconciliation must emerge through Indigenous leadership and sustained relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people that are rooted in specific places and histories. In the absence of an official apology and a federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ordinary people are creating a movement for transformative reconciliation that puts Indigenous land rights, sovereignty, and values at the forefront. With historical sensitivity and an eye to the future, Jacobs urges us to face our past and learn from it, and once we have done so, to redress past abuses. Drawing on dozens of interviews, After One Hundred Winters reveals how Indigenous people and settlers in America today, despite their troubled history, are finding unexpected gifts in reconciliation.

Brady McCartney is a scholar of religion, history, and environmental studies at the University of Florida.

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Kevin Bruyneel confronts the chronic displacement of Indigeneity in the politics and discourse around race in American political theory and culture, arguing that the ongoing influence of settler-colonialism has undermined efforts to understand Indigenous politics while also hindering conversation around race itself. By reexamining major episodes, texts, writers, and memories of the political past from the seventeenth century to the present, Bruyneel reveals the power of settler memory at work in the persistent disavowal of Indigeneity. 

In Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), he also shows how Indigenous and Black intellectuals have understood ties between racism and white settler memory, even as the settler dimensions of whiteness are frequently erased in our discourse about race, whether in conflicts over Indian mascotry or the white nationalist underpinnings of Trumpism.

Envisioning a new political future, Bruyneel challenges readers to refuse settler memory and consider a third reconstruction that can meaningfully link antiracism and anticolonialism.

John Cable will begin a teaching appointment at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in January 2022. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020.

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A vast and desolate region, the Texas-New Mexico borderlands have long been an ideal setting for intrigue and illegal dealings--never more so than in the lawless early days of cattle trafficking and trade among the Plains tribes and Comancheros. This book takes us to the borderlands in the 1860s and 1870s for an in-depth look at Union-Confederate skullduggery amid the infamous Comanche-Comanchero trade in stolen Texas livestock.

In 1862, the Confederates abandoned New Mexico Territory and Texas west of the Pecos River, fully expecting to return someday. Meanwhile, administered by Union troops under martial law, the region became a hotbed of Rebel exiles and spies, who gathered intelligence, disrupted federal supply lines, and plotted to retake the Southwest. Using a treasure trove of previously unexplored documents, authors James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely trace the complicated network of relationships that drew both Texas cattlemen and Comancheros into these borderlands, revealing the urban elite who were heavily involved in both the legal and illegal transactions that fueled the region's economy.

James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely's Confederates and Comancheros: Skullduggery and Double-Dealing in the Texas-New Mexico Borderlands (U Oklahoma Press, 2021) deftly weaves a complex tale of Texan overreach and New Mexican resistance, explores cattle drives and cattle rustling, and details shady government contracts and bloody frontier justice. Peopled with Rebels and bluecoats, Comanches and Comancheros, Texas cattlemen and New Mexican merchants, opportunistic Indian agents and Anglo arms dealers, this book illustrates how central these contested borderlands were to the history of the American West.

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