Native American Studies category: 1415 books

Henry W. Tate (d. 1914), a Tsimshian informant to ethnographer Franz Boas, first wrote these stories in English before giving Boas Tsimshian equivalents between 1903 and 1913. Boas published them in the much-consulted ethnology classic, Tsimshian Mythology (1916). In Ralph Maud’s selection of the...

A 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title In People of the Saltwater, Charles R. Menzies explores the history of an ancient Tsimshian community, focusing on the people and their enduring place in the modern world. The Gitxaała Nation has called the rugged north coast of British Columbia home...

From the co-author of Lakota Woman, which has sold more than 150,000 paperback copies, comes a compelling account detailing the unique experiences and spiritual knowledge accumulated by four generations of powerful medicine men.

Published through the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation  Today, indigenous communities throughout North America are grappling with the dual issues of language loss and revitalization. While many communities are making efforts...

The Huichols (or Wixárika) of western Mexico are among the most resilient and iconic indigenous groups in Mexico today. In the Lands of Fire and Sun examines the Huichol Indians as they have struggled to maintain their independence over two centuries. From the days of the Aztec Empire, the history...

Boys Become Men through the Eyes of War is a story of two young boys growing up in the mountains of Western North Carolina during the turbulent years surrounding the Civil War. Having become blood brothers following a Cherokee Indian tradition, they promised to always have each others back. Although...

Cherokee people have lived in the Great Smoky Mountains for thousands of years. During all this time, they have told stories to each other to explain how things came to be, to pass on lessons about life, and to describe the mountains, animals, plants, and spirits around them. The Origin of the Milky...

First published in 1961, Neil R. Johnson’s The Chickasaw Rancher tells the story of Montford T. Johnson and the first white settlement of Oklahoma. Abandoned by his father after his mother’s death and then left on his own following his grandmother’s passing in 1868, Johnson became the owner...

Here is an utterly new departure in biography of the Old West. Writing in the hangered, hard-boiled style made famous by Hemingway and O’Hara, James B. O’Neil has succeeded in transferring the color and idiom of the wild and roaring days of the West to the printed page. They Die But Once is authentic...

Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars' Club paints a vivid, fascinating portrait of a community deeply grounded in tradition and dynamically engaged in the present. A collection of forty interwoven stories, conversations, and teachings about Western Cherokee life, beliefs, and the art of storytelling,...

Saddles East: Horseback Over the Old Oregon Trail, a book by the WWI ‘fighting chaplain,’ John W. Beard, was first published in 1949. It is an informal narrative of a horseback ride in modern times over the famous covered-wagon route of the pioneers. For countless ages the Red Man knew this trail....

The Quantrill legend is rooted in acts of savage violence throughout Kansas and Missouri during the Civil War--deeds both romanticized and vilified. In William Clarke Quantrill, Albert Castel’s classic biography, the story of Quantrill and his men comes alive through facts verified from firsthand,...

First published in 1951, this book is a recollection of the memories of the pioneer days in Horse Heaven Hills, gleaned from letter correspondence between the author and early settlers. From the early days of pioneer, James Gordon Kinney, the fertile undisturbed rolling landscape attracted many settlers....

Still wet behind the ears in 1894, Carl Benedict was “crazy to get away and work on the range.” In the summer, he hooked up with a big outfit called the Figure 8 to round up cattle in the Texas Panhandle. Out of that experience came this book, published fifty years later, about what it was really...