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November marks the beginning of Native American Heritage Month. Take some time this month to learn more about the rich cultures, histories, and people who have faced many past and present challenges and hardships. Please enjoy this selection of eBooks celebrating Native American Heritage and continue to celebrate America’s diverse and rich cultures that have helped to make this nation one of a kind. For more information, please visit the Native American Heritage Month website hosted by The Library of Congress.
Native American Heritage Month
The Alabama-Coushatta Indians
All of the most emotional issues among contemporary Southeast Texas Native Americans--including repatriation of remains, educational funding, health care, and cultural preservation--in some way address the question of personal identity. Difficulties in determining who and what are "Indian" continually divide the community, and analyzing the Alabama-Coushatta cultural transition is complicated by the dearth of written sources and the repression by 1930 of most overt evidence of the old ways. In this book Jonathan Hook engagingly discovers the earlier cultural tradition and the influences that caused it to evolve to its present form and conceptualizes those changes in a way that explores the very concept of identity. He draws on written sources where they are available but also on the oral history of tribal members, to whom he had unprecedented access.
Grandmothers of the Light
This extraordinary collection of goddess stories from Native American civilizations across the continent, Paula Gunn Allen shares myths that have guided female shamans toward an understanding of the sacred for centuries. Allen’s gift is for teasing out the spirit of myths whose original character was lost to the depredations of colonists and cavalry, the expectations of anthropologists and the pressure of priests and bureaucrats. She introduces each group of myths the way you’d introduce one very good friend to another – with affection, intelligence and a sense that a powerful relationship between reader and story is about to begin.
Music of the First Nations
This unique anthology presents a wide variety of approaches to the ethnomusicology of Inuit and Native North American musical expression. Contributors include Native and non-Native scholars who provide erudite and illuminating perspectives on aboriginal culture, incorporating both traditional practices and contemporary musical influences. Gathering scholarship on a realm of intense interest but little previous publication, this collection promises to revitalize the study of Native music in North America, an area of ethnomusicology that stands to benefit greatly from these scholars' cooperative, community-oriented methods.
A Navajo Legacy
For almost ninety years, Navajo medicine man John Holiday has watched the sun rise over the rock formations of his home in Monument Valley, Utah. Author and scholar Robert S. McPherson interviewed Holiday extensively and in A Navajo Legacy records his full and fascinating life. At an early age, Holiday began an apprenticeship with his grandfather to learn the Blessingway ceremony and traveled over the desert with family members to find forage for the animals and plants for healing practices. Holiday also details family and tribal teachings and how his experiences reflect the thoughts of a traditional practitioner who has found in life both beauty and lessons for future generations.
Prayer on Top of the Earth
The Plains Apaches' mystical kinship with the land and the natural environment that the tribes perceived and nurtured are embodied in their four sacred medicine bundles -- the nÒ·bÌkÁgsÈlÍ· (prayer on top of the earth). In this book, we are introduced to the fascinating world of Apache birds, animals, and human spirits, a world enlivened by the antics of the beloved Coyote. Intrigued by the world of the medicine man, we follow the Apaches' vibrant ever-evolving religious community from the US government's banning of native religions to the arrival of evangelistic Christianity to the birth of the peyote religion. And finally, we share in the Apaches' frustration with the lack of cultural sensitivity displayed by Anglo-America. Prayer on Top of the Earth presents and preserves important ethnographic information on the Plains Apaches for the first time in a single source.
We Will Always Be Here
The history of Native Americans in the U.S. South is a turbulent one, rife with conflict and inequality. Since the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the fifteenth century, Native peoples have struggled to maintain their land, cultures, and ways of life. In We Will Always Be Here, contemporary tribal leaders, educators, and activists share their struggles for Indian identity, self-determination, and community development. Reflecting on such issues as poverty, education, racism, cultural preservation, and tribal sovereignty, the contributors to this volume offer a glimpse into the historical struggles of southern Native peoples, examine their present-day efforts, and share their hopes for the future. They also share examples of cultural practices that have either endured or been revitalized. In a country that still faces challenges to civil rights and misconceptions about Indian identity and tribal sovereignty, this timely book builds a deeper understanding of modern Native peoples within a region where they are often overlooked.
Basket Diplomacy
Before the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana became one of the state's top private employers, with its vast landholdings and economic enterprises, they lived well below the poverty line and lacked any clear legal status. After settling near Bayou Blue in 1884, they forged friendships with their neighbors, sparked local tourism, and struck strategic alliances with civic and business leaders, aid groups, legislators, and other tribes. The Coushattas also engaged the public with stories about the tribe's culture, history, and economic interests that intersected with the larger community, all while battling legal marginalization exacerbated by inconsistent government reports regarding their citizenship, treaty status, and eligibility for federal Indian services. Basket Diplomacy demonstrates how the Coushatta community worked together with each generation laying a foundation for the next and how they leveraged opportunities so that existing and newly acquired knowledge, timing, and skill worked in tandem.
Algonquian Spirit
When Europeans first arrived on this continent, Algonquian languages were spoken from the northeastern seaboard through the Great Lakes region, across much of Canada, and even in scattered communities of the American West. The rich and varied oral tradition of this Native language family, one of the farthest-flung in North America, comes brilliantly to life in this remarkably broad sampling of Algonquian songs and stories from across the centuries. An essential introduction and captivating guide to Native literary traditions still thriving in many parts of North America, Algonquian Spirit contains vital background information and new translations of songs and stories reaching back to the seventeenth century.
Northwest Coast Indian Art
The 50th-anniversary edition of this classic work on the art of Northwest Coast Indians now offers color illustrations for a new generation of readers along with reflections from contemporary Northwest Coast artists about the impact of this book. The masterworks of Northwest Coast Native artists are admired today as among the great achievements of the world's artists. The painted and carved wooden screens, chests and boxes, rattles, crest hats, and other artworks display the complex and sophisticated northern Northwest Coast style of art that is the visual language used to illustrate inherited crests and tell family stories. This book is a foundational reference on northern Northwest Coast Native art. Through his careful studies, Bill Holm described this visual language using new terminology that has become part of the established vocabulary that allows us to talk about works like these and understand style changes both through time and between individual artists' styles.
Geronimo
Renowned for ferocity in battle, legendary for an uncanny ability to elude capture, and feared for the violence of his vengeful raids, the Apache fighter Geronimo captured the public imagination in his own time and remains a figure of mythical proportion today. This thoroughly researched biography by a renowned historian of the American West strips away the myths and rumors that have long obscured the real Geronimo and presents an authentic portrait of a man with unique strengths and weaknesses and a destiny that swept him into the fierce storms of history. Utley unfolds the story through the alternating perspectives of whites and Apaches, and he arrives at a more nuanced understanding of Geronimo's character and motivation than ever before.
Living Stories of the Cherokee
This remarkable book, the first major new collection of Cherokee stories published in nearly a hundred years, presents seventy-two traditional and contemporary tales from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina. The tales gathered here include animal stories, creation myths, legends, and ghost stories as well as family tales and stories about such events in Cherokee history as the Trail of Tears. Taken together, they demonstrate that storytelling is a living, vital tradition. As new stories are added and old stories are changed or forgotten, Cherokee storytelling grows and evolves.
Medicine Women
At Ganado Mission in the Navajo country of northern Arizona, a group of missionaries and doctors persuaded local parents and medicine men to allow them to educate their daughters as nurses. The young women struggled to step into the world of modern medicine, but they knew they might become nurses who could build a bridge between the old ways and the new. In this detailed history, Jim Kristofic traces the story of the Ganado Mission on the Navajo Indian Reservation. Kristofic's personal connection with the community creates a nuanced historical understanding that blends engaging narrative with a careful scholarship to share the stories of the people and their commitment to this place. Winner of the 2019 Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library Association. Winner of the 2020 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for History-Arizona.
Voices from Four Directions
Storytelling and singing continue to be a vital part of community life for Native peoples today. Voices from Four Directions gathers stories and songs from thirty-one Native groups in North America. Vivid stories of cosmological origins and transformation, historical events remembered and retold, as well as legendary fables can be found in these pages. Well-known Trickster figures like Raven, Rabbit, and Coyote figure prominently in several tales as do heroes of local fame such as Tom Laporte of the Maliseets. The stories and songs entertain, instruct, and recall rich legacies as well as obligations. Many are retellings and reinventions of classic narratives, while others are more recent creations.
The Comanche Code Talkers of World War II
The true story of the US Army's Comanche Code Talkers, from their recruitment and training to active duty in World War II and postwar life. Among the allied troops that came ashore in Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944, were thirteen Comanches in the 4th Infantry Division, 4th Signal Company. Under German fire, they laid communications lines and began sending messages in a form never before heard in Europe: coded Comanche. For the rest of World War II, the Comanche Code Talkers played a vital role in transmitting orders and messages in a code that was never broken by the Germans. This book tells the full story of the Comanche Code Talkers for the first time. Drawing on interviews with all surviving members of the unit, their original training officer, and fellow soldiers, as well as military records and news accounts, William C. Meadows follows the group from their recruitment and training to their active duty in World War II and on through their postwar lives up to the present.
Traditions of the Arapaho
Anthropologists George A. Dorsey and Alfred L. Kroeber joined forces to record and preserve the rich cultural traditions of the Arapaho Indians, long split into two bands. This collection of tales bears witness to the religious feeling, imagination, and humor of the Arapaho. Beginning with creation myths and entities marvelous and mundane populate these vibrant tales, where spirit permeates everything, and everything has meaning.
I Am Where I Come From
I Am Where I Come From presents the autobiographies of thirteen Native American undergraduates and graduates of Dartmouth College, ten of them current and recent students.