Books:

Anderson, Gary. Little Crow: Spokesman for the Sioux.  St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1986.

Biography portraying the Sioux leader as an accommodationist.  The study examines how Little Crow exploited kinship relations with mixed blood relatives and white trader in-laws.  This system for personal success declined in the 1860s as white traders felt less inclined to observe former kinship obligations.

Anderson, Karen. Chain Her By One Foot: The Subjugation of Native Women in Seventeenth-Century New France. New York: Routledge, 1991. 

Discusses how Native American culture was disrupted by the arrival of Europeans, particularly gender roles.  Employing Foucault power theory Anderson demonstrates how disease, war, famine and trade promoted the subjugation of women among the Huron and Montaignais Indians.

Axtell, James. Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

A collection of essays exploring both European and Indian perspectives on the invasion of North America.  The text is concerned with the moral implications of early interactions and concludes with a historiographical discussion of the debate with special emphasis on the quincentenary of Columbus’ arrival.

_____, James. The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Ten essays that employ a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches to present both a discussion and example of ethnohistory in Colonial America.  Themes addressed include methodology, image, kinship, language, and cultural adaptations.  The text is divided into four parts: first, an analysis of ethnohistory methods; second, European efforts to convert the Indian; third, Indian impact on Europeans; and finally, a summation of mutual impact and labels applied in the “American Encounter.” 

_____. The Invasion Within: the Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Examination of French and British efforts to civilize Native American populations that emphasizes socio-cultural interaction and adaptation.  Contrasts the successful adaptive nature of French approach with English designs to “destroy the Indian.”

 

_____. Natives and Newcomers: the Cultural Origins of North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

“The volume is anchored geographically—East of the Appalachian Mountains—an chronologically—between Columbus’ voyage in 1492 and the conclusion of the American Revolution in 1783.  The fourteen essays.... contains elements of history, anthropology, culture, and lively analysis of the porous nature of the barrier between natives and newcomers.”  James T. Carroll, The History Teacher, vol. 35:1 (Nov. 2001), p. 108-9.

Biolsi, Thomas and Larry J. Zimmerman, (eds). Indians and Anthropologists: Vine  Deloria Jr. and the Critique of Anthropology.  Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997.

Collection of essays evaluating the changing and controversial relationship between Indians and anthropologists since Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969).  Explores interpretations of Deloria’s message and application today.  Concludes with a new essay by Deloria.

Brooks, James F. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, 2002.

Examines the use of slaves and transmission of slavery practices among the Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos, Utes, and Spaniards.  Brooks demonstrates how the institution served to enhance and redistribute wealth while fostering kinship relations between otherwise hostile groups.

Calloway, Colin G.  New Worlds For All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America.  Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Examines the early interactions of Indians with English, French, and Dutch colonists.  Calloway demonstrates how Native American’s influenced mainstream Euro-American culture.

_____, Colin G.  One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark.  Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

Covers all North America from pre-history through the mid-18th century.  Employs broad archeological, historical, and ethnographic materials, including oral traditions.  Demonstrates secondary role of Europeans and infuses Native American communities with dynamic attributes of innovation and adaptation, peace and conflict, accommodation and resistance.

_____, Colin G. (ed). Our Hearts Fell to the Ground:  Plains Indians Views of How the West Was Lost. Boston: Bedford Books/St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Demonstrates Plains Indian distinctiveness as a product of innovation more than tradition.  Emphasis on how Plains Indians employed horses and firearms to revolutionize their culture, and notes the opportunities and problems that accompanied these adaptations. 

_____, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities.  Cambridge: Cambridge  University Press, 1995.

Study of eight Indian communities during the Revolutionary War.  Emphasizes Indian agency in tracing their diplomacy, strategies, and conflicts.

Brave Bird, Mary.  Lakota Woman.  New York : Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.

Autobiography tracing the anguished childhood of Mary Brave Bird, the 1973 stand off at Wounded Knee, her marriage to AIM activist and medicine man Leonard Crow Dog, cultural trends such as Indian macho-ism, and spiritual renewal movements.

Deloria, Ella Cara.  Waterlily.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

Ethnographic novel conveying the 19th century life and culture of a young Sioux girl.  Offers a female perspective as it conveys the daily experience, maturation, and ritual, of young Waterlily.

Deloria, Vine, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto.  New York: Macmillan Company, 1969.

Examines the relationship between Indians and the broader American public with special emphasis on myths, perceptions, and the failure of the reservation system.  Deloria gives insight to the Indian experience and is sure to evoke laughter and/or anger as he calls Indians to intellectually mobilize to resolve “the white problem.”

Dennis, Matthew. Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.

“[T]ells the story of Iroquois, Dutch, and French interaction before 1666.... divided into three parts, one each for the Iroquois, the Dutch, and the French.  Dennis’s approach, which he calls ‘Cubist history’ (p. 4), is first to explain the history of each group from its own perspective and then to discuss the ways in which the Iroquois interacted initially with the Dutch and then the French.  By this method Dennis hopes to ‘elucidate the nature and meaning of life’ (p. 2) among these three groups as well as describe the landscapes they created fro themselves individually and collectively.”  --J.A. Brandao, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 2 (Apr., 1994), p. 320.

Dowd, Gregory Evans.  A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Traces intertribal relations and religious revitalizations during the last half of the eighteenth century.  Dowd explores commonalities and pan-Indianism among the Delawares, Shawnees, Cherokees, and Creeks.

Dowd, Gregory Evans.  War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Edmonds, R. David.  The Shawnee Prophet.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

Foster, Morris.  Being Comanche: a social history of a Native American community.  Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991.

“Foster argues persuasively that the Comanche of Oklahoma have endured as a separate cultural entity despite the destruction of their traditional way of life, their being dispossessed, and their exposure to an ongoing federal assimilation program.  The most important ingredient of cultural cohesiveness has been the ability of the group and its subdivisions to congregate in public gatherings, to set and govern its own standards of acceptable behavior.” – James Riding In, The Journal of American History, vol. 79: 3 (Dec., 1992), 1192-1193.

Fowler, Loretta.  Shared Symbols, Contested Meanings: Gros Ventre Culture and History, 1778-1984.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Among the first wave of works to reject the wholesale acculturation model, “Fowler explores their differing, sometimes contested interpretations of common symbols, seeking to understand how viable communities persist in the face of pressure to merge with other Indians and to submerge within the dominant American pattern.” –Alice Kehoe, American Anthropologists, Vol. 91:1 (March, 1989), 205.

Frank, Andrew. Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Study of relationships between Creek Indian women and “Indian countrymen “ (European men living among Indians) in the Southeast.  Examines how these relationships impacted residence, status, and identity, and how participants balanced demands from two different cultural worlds.

Green, Michael. The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

This case study on removal offers a Creek Nation tribal history from pre-history through the mid-nineteenth century, and is organized by chronological themes of pre-European contact ethnography, erosion of tribal autonomy, politicization of the tribal agency, treaties with Europeans, and repeated removals. 

Gutierrez, Ramon. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1991. 

Controversially explores three eras in Pueblo culture, beginning with the autochthonous Indians, the Spanish occupation, and the Mexican nation.  All eras are bound together by themes of power, sexuality, and nation building.

 

Hudson, Charles M and Carmen Chaves Tesser. The Forgotten Centuries : Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Seventeen essays in four sections devoted to Spanish exploration, specific communities, transformation of indigenous societies, and the constitution of new societies from a patchwork of predecessors.  Though at times a bit disconnected, the text offers a broad approach to cultural transmission and change.

 

Kehoe, Alice B.  North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account, 2nd Edition, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1981.

Epic history of Native Americans from before the arrival of Europeans through the close of the twentieth century.  It is anthropological in scope and includes thorough bibliographies and suggested readings lists.

Krech, Shepard, III, (ed). Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the Game.  Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981.

A “critique by seven anthropologists of Martin’s The Keepers of the Game.  Each accuses martin of naively borrowing concepts and interpretations from anthropology.... [It] presents a new interpretation of the over-hunting of beavers in northern North America by Indians who were involved in trade with Europeans.  Martin argues that the cause was not the introduction of the profit motive and superior technology, but rather a kind of ‘holy war’ conducted against apostatizing allies.” –Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Journal of interdisciplinary History, 14:1 (Summer, 1983), 170.

Leow, Patty. Indian Nations of Wisconsin: Histories of Endurance and Renewal. Madison : Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2001.

A collection of twelve tribal histories that builds on Native sources—oral history, songs and stories, recorded Indian comments and interviews, tribal newspapers, etc—and prepared in conjunction with elders and tribal historians from each community.

Lightfoot, Kent G, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: the Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

“Lightfoot exemplifies the historical approach in anthropology by critically synthesizing documentary, oral, and archaeological data to examine late seventeenth and early eighteenth Century encounters involving Spanish and Russian colonies and the native peoples of coastal California.” Arthur A. Joyce, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 6:2 (Fall, 2005).

Mancall, Peter C. and James Hart Merrell. American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500-1850. New York: Routledge, 2000.

This collection of twenty-five previously published but classic articles discuss Indian-European interactions stressing a variety of issues including resistance, cultural exchange, and wage labor.

Martin, Calvin. Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

“Carefully limiting his analysis to the Ojibwa, Cree, Montagnais-Naskapi and Micmac, the author challenges the standard economic interpretation of the indians’ role in the fur trade.  He points out the fallacy of assigning them acquisitive western marketplace values.” Laurence M. Hauptman, The Pacific Historical Review, 49:4 (Nov., 1980), 653.

Merrell, James. The Indians New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press,
1989. 

Uses archeology, anthropology, and folklore to trace the Carolina Piedmont tribe from the sixteenth century until mid nineteenth century focusing on the Indians’ adaptations as they interacted with disease, diplomats, missionaries, and traders.

O'Brien, Jean. Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 

Examines the progressive dispossession of New England Indians and how they retained identity despite territorial pressures and subsequent cultural adaptation.  Rather than disappear, Indians resisted European expansion and employed English cultural practices and institutions to rebuild their own communities.

 

Ray, Arthur J. Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role As Hunters, Trappers, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660-1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974.

This text explores Canadian Indians’ place in the fur trade, emphasizing Indian strategies and trade systems.

Richter, Daniel K. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. 

Examines Iroquois from pre-contact until about 1730, exploring gender, clan, and community patterns of obligation to emphases creative adaptations in politics and diplomacy that preserved cultural autonomy.  Effectively demonstrates how historians should use oral tradition.

Ronda, James P. Lewis and Clark Among the Indians.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Follows the expedition west while examining the tribes encountered by the captains.  Not a comprehensive history of the expedition, but rather a study of their interactions with various tribes that features misunderstandings, mistakes, and subtle implications of each tribe’s unique culture and geo-political situation.

Sahlins, Marshall. Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii, vol.1: Historical Ethnography.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

“The work embodies a synthesis of late-twentieth-century knowledge of Hawaii, with new and compelling interpretations of Hawaiian archaeology, anthropology, and history… The result is a classic study of the impact of the world system on one remote upland segment of rural Hawaii between the 1770s and the 1880s.” – Caroline Ralston, Ethnohistory, vol. 41:2 (Spring, 1994), 323.

Sahlins, Marshall.  Island History.  Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Collection of theoretical essays that employ the islands of Hawaii, Fiji, and New Zeland to facilitate a larger critique of “Western scholarship that creates false dichotomies between past and present, between structure and event, between the individual and society.”  --from the publisher

Silko, Leslie. Ceremony. New York, N.Y. : Penguin Books, 1977, 1986.

Fictional account of a Laguna Indian and the personal and social struggles he faces when returning home from World War II.  Unable to find solace in the alcoholic retreat of his piers, young Toyo accepts the guidance of a medicine man and turns to the land and ancient rituals to find peace.

Wilkinson, Charles. Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations. New York : Norton, 2005.

Legal and political centered discussion of activism and sovereignty of Indian Nations from the reservation period to present.  “Wilkinson effectively demonstrates the rise of modern Indian nations from the ashes of termination.... The establishment of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), Menominee Restoration, and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) all emerge as particularly important stories in the movement toward tribal self-determination.” -- Doug Kiel, H-AmIndian review (August, 2006)

Articles:

Blackhawk, Ned.  “The Displacement of Violence: Ute Diplomacy and the Making of New Mexico’s Eighteenth-century Northern Borderlands,” Ethnohistory (2007), 37-70

Biolsi, Thomas.  “The Birth of the Reservation: Making the Modern Individual Among the Lakota,” American Ethnologist 22 (1995), 28-53

Clifford, James. “Identity at Mashpee,” Predicament of Culture (1988), 277-346

Hamalainen, Pekka.  “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,” Journal of American History 90 (2003), 833-862

Richter, Daniel K. “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly (1983), 528-559