Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity – serie

A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern AmericaNational BestsellerWinner of the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction • Finalist for the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Award in History • Winner of 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction • Winner of the 2024 Mark Lynton History PrizeNamed a best book of 2023 by New Yorker, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, Barnes & NobleA New York Times Notable Book of 2023 • A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction of 2023 • An NPR “Book We Love” for 2023“Eloquent and comprehensive. . . . In the book’s sweeping synthesis, standard flashpoints of U.S. history take on new meaning.”—Kathleen DuVal, Wall Street Journal“In accounts of American history, Indigenous peoples are often treated as largely incidental—either obstacles to be overcome or part of a narrative separate from the arc of nation-building. Blackhawk . . . [shows] that Native communities have, instead, been inseparable from the American story all along.”—Washington Post Book WorldThe most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, as a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this transformative synthesis he shows that• European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success• Native nations helped shape England’s crisis of empire• the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior• California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War• the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West• twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policyBlackhawk’s retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.

This book, the first of its kind, comprehensively explores Native American claims against the United States government over the past two centuries. Despite the federal government’s multiple attempts to redress indigenous claims, a close examination reveals that even when compensatory programs were instituted, Native peoples never attained a genuine sense of justice. David E. Wilkins addresses the important question of what one nation owes another when the balance of rights, resources, and responsibilities have been negotiated through treaties. How does the United States assure that guarantees made to tribal nations, whether through a century old treaty or a modern day compact, remain viable and lasting?

An imaginative retelling of London’s history, framed through the experiences of Indigenous travelers who came to the city over the course of more than five centuries  “Thrush has certainly offered a powerful corrective to the usual geographies imagined for Indigenous people in the past, as well as a new layer to the palimpsest history of Britain’s imperial capital.”—Kate Fullagar, William and Mary Quarterly  London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. In Indigenous London, historian Coll Thrush offers an imaginative vision of the city’s past crafted from an almost entirely new perspective: that of Indigenous children, women, and men who traveled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, beginning in the sixteenth century. They included captives and diplomats, missionaries and shamans, poets and performers. Some, like the Powhatan noblewoman Pocahontas, are familiar; others, like an Odawa boy held as a prisoner of war, have almost been lost to history. In drawing together their stories and their diverse experiences with a changing urban culture, Thrush also illustrates how London learned to be a global, imperial city and how Indigenous people were central to that process.

Challenges the myth of the United States as a nation of immigrants by bringing together two groups rarely read together: Native Americans and Eastern European immigrants  In this cultural history of Americanization during the Progressive Era, Cristina Stanciu argues that new immigrants and Native Americans shaped the intellectual and cultural debates over inclusion and exclusion, challenging ideas of national belonging, citizenship, and literary and cultural production. Deeply grounded in a wide-ranging archive of Indigenous and new immigrant writing and visual culture—including congressional acts, testimonies, news reports, cartoons, poetry, fiction, and silent film—this book brings together voices of Native and immigrant America.  Stanciu shows that, although Native Americans and new immigrants faced different legal and cultural obstacles to citizenship, the challenges they faced and their resistance to assimilation and Americanization often ran along parallel paths. Both struggled against idealized models of American citizenship that dominated public spaces. Both participated in government-sponsored Americanization efforts and worked to gain agency and sovereignty while negotiating naturalization.  Rethinking popular understandings of Americanization, Stanciu argues that the new immigrants and Native Americans at the heart of this book expanded the narrow definitions of American identity.

Amid the decline of U.S. military campaigns against Native Americans in the late nineteenth century, assimilation policy arose as the new front in the Indian Wars, with its weapons the deployment of culture and law, and its locus the American Indian home and family. In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Piatote tracks the double movement of literature and law in the contest over the aims of settler-national domestication and the defense of tribal-national culture, political rights, and territory.

Winner of the 2019 Bancroft Prize: A compelling and original recovery of Native American resistance and adaptation to colonial America“By making what we thought was a small story very large indeed—Ms. Brooks really does give us ‘A New History of King Philip’s War.’”—The Wall Street Journal“Provides a wealth of information for both scholars and lay readers interested in Native American history.”—Publishers WeeklyWith rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the “First Indian War” (later named King Philip’s War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. Brooks’s pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England, reading the actions of actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history.

A bird’s-eye look at the Ghost Dance, the first instance of modern, collective racial self-consciousness for Native peoples in the United StatesFrom the Sand Creek Massacre (1864) to the Massacre at Wounded Knee (1890), Indigenous religious practices—legally banned after 1883—took on new meanings as acts of defiance against colonialism and white supremacy. By reexamining the familiar story of the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee Massacre and placing it into the context of resistance by Black and Native peoples during Reconstruction and Redemption, historian Tiffany M. Hale explains the Ghost Dance not just as a religious movement but also as a complex social phenomenon that enabled Indigenous people to maintain their identities and communities despite the pervasive force of colonialism and the challenges of modernity.Chronicling how individual Native people, their families, and communities navigated the fraught post–Civil War conditions of the United States, Hale suggests that Ghost Dances hold something in common with blues traditions of working-class African Americans. By giving Ghost Dance participants a chance to reflect on their lived experiences of warfare, deracination, and diplomacy, “fugitive religion” helped create modern racial self-consciousness in the United States.

A history of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, from Revolutionary War allies to modern resurgenceHow did the Oneida Nation of northeastern Wisconsin—stripped of nearly all its reservation lands by the early twentieth century—rise to become a powerful political and economic force in Native America and the present-day Midwest? Doug Kiel traces the journey of resurgence, adaptation, and nation rebuilding of the Oneida people, who navigated federal policies and socioeconomic shifts to chart their own future, transforming adversity into opportunity.Kiel shows how Oneidas harnessed New Deal programs to advance their goals of self-determination; how urban migration, often seen as a marker of Indigenous displacement, became a tool of community empowerment; and how the Nation has reclaimed land and authority despite predictable backlash from neighboring towns. Drawing on extensive archival records, family photographs, and oral histories—including stories from his grandmother—Kiel highlights the everyday acts that have sustained the Oneida Nation across generations and offers vital insights into the broader fight for Indigenous nationhood in twenty-first-century America.

How a Mvskoke traditionalist leader forged a movement to resist the division of tribal lands and keep his people on the everlasting Medicine WayChitto Harjo (“Crazy Snake”) had several names—Wilson Jones, Bill Jones, Bill Harjo, Bill Snake—and people called him many things: troublemaker, rebellion leader, uncivilized Indian, martyr, murderer. Many called him crazy for fighting against progress and for his commitment to traditions that they believed were outdated and dying out. Yet in the eyes of many Mvskokes and traditionalists of other nations, he was a hero, a defender of the old ways, a Native patriot, and a leader of the Medicine Way.These traditionalists believed in the Mvskoke worldview, which has inspired the Mvskokes and other Southeastern peoples to carry on their traditions as they have done for hundreds of years. In this engaging account, historian Donald L. Fixico tells the story of the Mvskoke people and their fight for survival and unity amid enduring tensions between white “civilization” and traditional culture. A personal story that begins with Fixico attending a Green Corn Ceremony with his father and young son, this engrossing narrative integrates traditional knowledge with historical method to present an Indigenous perspective on Mvskoke and Native American history.

An imaginative retelling of London’s history, framed through the experiences of Indigenous travelers who came to the city over the course of more than five centuries  “Thrush has certainly offered a powerful corrective to the usual geographies imagined for Indigenous people in the past, as well as a new layer to the palimpsest history of Britain’s imperial capital.”—Kate Fullagar, William and Mary Quarterly  London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. In Indigenous London, historian Coll Thrush offers an imaginative vision of the city’s past crafted from an almost entirely new perspective: that of Indigenous children, women, and men who traveled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, beginning in the sixteenth century. They included captives and diplomats, missionaries and shamans, poets and performers. Some, like the Powhatan noblewoman Pocahontas, are familiar; others, like an Odawa boy held as a prisoner of war, have almost been lost to history. In drawing together their stories and their diverse experiences with a changing urban culture, Thrush also illustrates how London learned to be a global, imperial city and how Indigenous people were central to that process.

A comprehensive history of the Native American community at the heart of the HaudenosauneeThe people of the Onondaga Nation have lived in central New York State for hundreds of years. This is the incredible story of their survival and of the Nation’s commitment to their land, rituals, and cultural values. Michael Leroy Oberg traces the Onondaga from their emergence, through the formation of the Iroquois League, and into the present day. Oberg describes how despite military invasions, outbreaks of epidemic disease, efforts to deprive them of their lands and traditional government, and attempts to eradicate their culture, the Onondaga have endured. Indeed, even today, just south of Syracuse, New York, the Central Fire still burns at the center of the Haudenosaunee Longhouse, and the site remains an Indigenous capital.Drawing on meticulous archival work and interviews with members of the Onondaga Nation, this book not only sheds light on the resilience of a vibrant and influential culture but examines the intricate diplomatic politics that shaped the relationship between the Onondaga—and the entire Haudenosaunee Confederacy—and the emerging American states, and how the legacy of these early encounters continues to resonate in the twenty-first century.