Indigenous Research & Knowledges in North America

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowing together to reveal what it means to see humans as "the younger brothers of creation."

This book addresses the intersections between the interdisciplinary realms of Ecocriticism and Indigenous and Native American Studies, and between academic theory and pragmatic eco-activism conducted by multiethnic and indigenous communities. Includes a book chapter by CU Scholars, Clint Carroll and Angelica Lawson.

Professor Robin Wall Kimmerer is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a professor of Environmental Biology. In this book, Kimmerer weaves traditional knowledge and scientific information together to explore the lives of mosses.

Melissa K. Nelson is Anishinaabe/Métis, member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. She is a Native ecologist and professor of Indigenous sustainability. In this edited book collection, Indigenous leaders suggest solutions to today's global crisis.

Liboiron (Métis) is an Associate Professor in Geography and founder of founder of Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), a feminist, anti-colonial, marine science laboratory whose methods foreground values of humility, equity, and good land relations. This article outlines Liboiron’s anti-colonial environmental research philosophy: “Starting from your place and moving toward research, rather than starting from research and terraforming the environment, lets knowledge breathe and lets the landscape move into scientific spaces on its own terms.”

Liboiron (Métis) is an Associate Professor in Geography and founder of founder of Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), a feminist, anti-colonial, marine science laboratory whose methods foreground values of humility, equity, and good land relations. Focusing on plastic pollution, “Pollution is Colonialism” models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Métis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations.

Don Hankins (Miwko and Osage) is a Professor of Geography and Planning. This article explores the potential impact of training and employment with wildfire management agencies on the retention of Indigenous fire knowledge. It focuses on the comparative knowledge and experiences of Indigenous Elders, cultural practitioners, and land stewards in connection with ‘‘modern’’ political constructs of fire in New South Wales and Queensland, Australia, and California in the United States of America. This article emphasises the close link between cross-cultural acceptance, integration of Indigenous and agency fire cultures, and the ways in which knowledge types are shared or withheld. While agency fire fighting provides an opportunity for Indigenous people to connect and care for country, it simultaneously allows for the breaking of traditional rules surrounding what knowledge is shared with whom in the context of Indigenous cultural burning. By highlighting how privilege intersects with ethnicity, class, gender and age, this article demonstrates how greater cross-cultural acceptance could aid ongoing debates on how to coexist with wildfire today.

In "Roots of Our Renewal, " Prof. Clint Carroll tells how Cherokee people have developed material, spiritual, and political ties with the lands they have inhabited since removal from their homelands in the southeastern United States. Although the forced relocation of the late 1830s had devastating consequences for Cherokee society, Carroll shows that the reconstituted Cherokee Nation west of the Mississippi eventually cultivated a special connection to the new land, a connection that is reflected in its management of natural resources."

Professor hagwil hayetsk (Charles Menzies) is a member of Gitxaała Nation and a member of the Tlingit and Haida Tribes. He is a professor of Anthropology. This edited book collection examines how traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is taught and practiced today among Native communities.

In 2017, Ute youth and elders filmed nine videos about the history, culture, and traditional knowledge of the Ute people of Colorado, including Ute knowledge and science, ethnobotany in the San Luis valley, and connections between traditional knowledge and science.

Ali Meders-Knight is a Mechoopda tribal member, traditional basketweaver, and practitioner of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), collaborating on environmental education and land restoration projects with Chico State University and the City of Chico. This podcast conversation covers TEK, evolving ecosystem knowledge and land tending techniques acquired by Indigenous peoples over hundreds or thousands of years through direct contact with the land, and issues around forest management in California and the U.S.

Interview with Charles F. "Chuck" Sams III (enrolled member, Cayuse and Walla Walla, of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation), the first Native American director of the National Park Service. Sams discusses how the National Parks are incorporating Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

"The Article considers how a better understanding of the human rights
dimensions of the problem-and especially a more thoughtful approach to the "implementation" of human rights in both law and society-could help to advance remedial and ongoing measures toward the realization
of indigenous peoples language rights going forward."

In Indigenous Peoples in International Law, CU Law professor and Dean, James Anaya, explores the development and contours of international law as it concerns the world's indigenous peoples, culturally distinctive groups that are descended from the original inhabitants of lands now dominated by others.

"Indigenous people in the U.S. and Canada define self-determination as the right to be recognized as an autonomous nation with international status free from paternalistic intervention by settler-state governments. The discourse on Native self-governance suggests that self-determination can be best realized through Native centered practices and logics." Article by CU Scholar, Natalie Avalos.

Journal article from the New Mexico Law Review detailing Navajo justice concepts, "Navajo justice is unique, because it is a product of the experience of the Navajo People. Prior to contact with European cultures, Navajos developed their ways of approaching life through many centuries of dealing with obstacles to their survival."

Navajo peacemaking is one of the most renowned restorative justice programs in the world. Neither mediation nor alternative dispute resolution, it has been called a "horizontal system of justice" because all participants are treated as equals with the purpose of preserving ongoing relationships and restoring harmony among involved parties.

During a three-year secondment with Justice Canada, Ross travelled from the Yukon to Cape Breton Island, examining--and experiencing--the widespread Aboriginal preference for "peacemaker justice." In this remarkable book, he invites us to accompany him as he moves past the pain and suffering that grip so many communities and into the exceptional promise of individual, family and community healing that traditional teachings are now restoring to Aboriginal Canada.

The freely available guide, "Tribal Nations and the United States: An Introduction" developed by the National Congress of American Indians, seeks to provide a basic overview of the history and underlying principles of tribal governance.

The current paper reviews research that has explored the intergenerational effects of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system in Canada, in which Aboriginal children were forced to live at schools where various forms of neglect and abuse were common. Intergenerational IRS trauma continues to undermine the well-being of today’s Aboriginal population, and having a familial history of IRS attendance has also been linked with more frequent contemporary stressor experiences and relatively greater effects of stressors on well-being. Together, these findings provide empirical support for the concept of historical trauma, which takes the perspective that the consequences of numerous and sustained attacks against a group may accumulate over generations and interact with proximal stressors to undermine collective well-being.

The Yakama Nation of present-day Washington State has responded to more than a century of historical trauma with a resurgence of grassroots activism and cultural revitalization. Yakama Rising: Indigenous Cultural Revitalization, Activism, and Healing argues that Indigenous communities themselves have the answers to the persistent social problems they face. Michelle M. Jacob employs ethnographic case studies to demonstrate the tension between reclaiming traditional cultural practices and adapting to change. Focusing on three domains of Indigenous revitalization--dance, language, and foods--Jacob carefully elucidates the philosophy underlying and unifying each domain while also illustrating the importance of these practices for Indigenous self-determination, healing, and survival.

Examines how the creatures found in the stories of the Caddos, Wichitas, Pawnees, and Arikaras embody specific historical events and the negative effects of European contact--Provided by publisher.

For Native Americans, tribal politics are paramount. They determine the standards for tribal enrollment, guide negotiations with outside governments, and help set collective economic and cultural goals. But how, asks Raymond I. Orr, has history shaped the American Indian political experience? By exploring how different tribes' politics and internal conflicts have evolved over time, Reservation Politics offers rare insight into the role of historical experience in the political lives of Native Americans. To trace variations in political conflict within tribes today to their different historical experiences, Orr conducted an ethnographic analysis of three federally recognized tribes: the Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico, the Citizen Potawatomi in Oklahoma, and the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota. His extensive interviews and research reveal that at the center of tribal politics are intratribal factions with widely different worldviews. These factions make conflicting claims about the purpose, experience, and identity of their tribe. Reservation Politics points to two types of historical experience relevant to the construction of tribes' political and economic worldviews: historical trauma, such as ethnic cleansing or geographic removal, and the incorporation of Indian communities into the market economy. In Orr's case studies, differences in experience and interpretation gave rise to complex worldviews that in turn have shaped the beliefs and behavior at play in Native politics. By engaging a topic often avoided in political science and American Indian studies, Reservation Politics allows us to see complex historical processes at work in contemporary Native American life. Orr's findings are essential to understanding why tribal governments make the choices they do.

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER "My Grandmother's Hands will change the direction of the movement for racial justice."-- Robin DiAngelo, New York Times bestselling author of White Fragility In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology. The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. Menakem argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies. Our collective agony doesn't just affect African Americans. White Americans suffer their own secondary trauma as well. So do blue Americans--our police. My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not only about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide. Paves the way for a new, body-centered understanding of white supremacy--how it is literally in our blood and our nervous system. Offers a step-by-step healing process based on the latest neuroscience and somatic healing methods, in addition to incisive social commentary. Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, SEP, is a leading voice in today's conversation on racialized trauma and the creator of Cultural Somatics, which utilizes the body and its natural resilience as mechanisms for growth. As a therapist and the founder of Justice Leadership Solutions, a leadership consulting firm, Resmaa dedicates his expertise to coaching leaders through civil unrest, organizational change, and community building

It's time to heal the invisible wounds of complex trauma and reclaim your mind, body, and spirit. If you are a person of color who has experienced repeated trauma--such as discrimination, race-related verbal assault, racial stigmatization, poverty, sexual trauma, or interpersonal violence--you may struggle with intense feelings of anger, mistrust, or shame. You may feel unsafe or uncomfortable in your own body, or struggle with building and keeping close relationships. Sometimes you may feel very alone in your pain. But you are not alone. This groundbreaking work illuminates the phenomena of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) as it is uniquely experienced by people of color, and provides a much-needed path to health and wholeness. In The Pain We Carry, you'll find powerful tools to help you understand and begin healing from repeated trauma. You'll discover ways to feel safer in your body, build self-compassion and resilience, and reclaim your health and wellness by reconnecting with your sense of self and your ancestral wisdom. You'll learn how trauma is connected to grief, how it can affect both the mind and the body, and how it can persist from one generation to the next. Most importantly, you'll find the validation you need to begin mending your heart, and the skills you need to live a life of intention--even in the midst of an oppressive system. It's time to find relief from the trauma and burdens you have been carrying and start celebrating and rediscovering who you are. With this guide, you will uncover your own strength in order to work toward healing C-PTSD within the external constraints you face to live a life of resilience, empowerment, reflection, and perseverance.

Winner of the 2019-20 Huguenot Society of Canada Award "Powerful ... A deeply empathetic and inspiring work with insights of value to anyone struggling to overcome personal or communal trauma." -- Library Journal "[A] beautifully written book about strategies for healing from intergenerational trauma ... In crystal-clear prose, Methot has written a book that is both easy to follow and crucial to read." -- LitHub Five hundred years of colonization have taken an incalculable toll on the Indigenous peoples of the Americas: substance use disorders and shockingly high rates of depression, diabetes, and other chronic health conditions brought on by genocide and colonial control. With passionate logic and chillingly clear prose, author and educator Suzanne Methot uses history, human development, and her own and others' stories to trace the roots of Indigenous cultural dislocation and community breakdown in an original and provocative examination of the long-term effects of colonization. But all is not lost. Methot also shows how we can come back from this with Indigenous ways of knowing lighting the way.

Very few studies have examined the worldview of the Anishinaabeg from within the culture itself and none have explored the Anishinaabe worldview in relation to their efforts to maintain their culture in the present-day world. This book fills that gap. Focusing mainly on the Minnesota Anishinaabeg, Lawrence Gross explores how their worldview works to create a holistic way of living. However, as Gross also argues, the Anishinaabeg saw the end of their world early in the 20th century and experienced what he calls 'postapocalypse stress syndrome.' As such, the book further explores how the values engendered by the worldview of the Anishinaabeg are finding expression in the modern world as they seek to rebuild their society.

This book explores the exchange of Blackfoot "medicine bundles" within contemporary Blackfoot culture and between the Blackfoot Peoples and Euro-Americans. These ceremonial bundles, which are circulated as gifts in their native context, are robbed of their statuses as living beings or persons, when they are treated as symbolic objects or commodities by cultural outsiders. Much of the original, ethnographic data presented in this book deals with the attempts of some Blackfeet to repatriate ceremonial materials from Euro-American hands. This book represents a valuable study of contemporary Blackfoot religion as well as the repatriation movement. Kenneth Lokensgard also contributes to the studies of material culture and exchange; central to his investigation is the critical examination and reapplication of the interpretative terms "gift" and "commodity." Careful use of these terms, Lokensgard argues, can better help scholars appreciate how different peoples perceive the worlds they inhabit.

Drawing on Indigenous methodologies, this book uses a close analysis of James R. Walker's 1917 monograph on the Lakota Sun Dance to explore how the Sun Dance communal ritual complex - the most important Lakota ceremony - creates moral community, providing insights into the cosmology and worldview of Lakota tradition. The book uses Walker's primary source to conduct a reading of the Sun Dance in its nineteenth-century context through the lenses of Lakota metaphysics, cosmology, ontology, and ethics. The author argues that the Sun Dance constitutes a cosmic ethical drama in which persons of all types - human and nonhuman - come together in reciprocal actions and relationships. Drawing on contemporary animist theory and a perspectivist approach that uses Lakota worldview assumptions as the basis for analysis, the book enables a richer understanding of the Sun Dance and its role in the Lakota moral world. Offering a nuanced understanding that centers Lakota views of the sacred, this book will be relevant to scholars of religion and animism, and all those interested in Native American cultures and lifeways.

First published in 1972, Vine Deloria Jr.'s God Is Red remains the seminal work on Native religious views, asking new questions about our species and our ultimate fate. Celebrating three decades in publication with a special 30th-anniversary edition, this classic work reminds us to learn "that we are a part of nature, not a transcendent species with no responsibilities to the natural world." It is time again to listen to Vine Deloria Jr.'s powerful voice, telling us about religious life that is independent of Christianity and that reveres the interconnectedness of all living things.

In this collection of goddess stories gleaned from the vast oral tradition of Native America, the author evokes a world of personal freedom and communal harmony, of free communication among people, animals, and spirits, of magic and its discipline, of balance between the sacred and the mundane.--From publisher description.

Drawn from 30 years of Parabola magazine, this compelling collection edited by former CU faculty member Linda Hogan illuminates the vast scope of the Native American spiritual tradition.

This book seeks to explore historical changes in the lifeworld of the Mi'kmaq Indians of Eastern Canada. The Mi'kmaq culture hero Kluskap serves as a key persona in discussing issues such as traditions, changing conceptions of land, and human-environmental relations. This study discusses the eco-cosmology that has been formulated by modern reserve inhabitants and that could be labeled a 'sacred ecology'.

"This paper examines the religious regeneration of Native American and Chicanx community living in Albuquerque's South Valley." An article by CU Scholar, Natalie Avalos.

Winona LaDuke (White Earth Reservation) is a writer and activist working on environmental and human rights issues, including environmental justice, climate change, renewable energy, sustainable development strategies, and protecting Indigenous plants and heritage foods.
In this book, LaDuke examines the connections between sacred objects and the sacred bodies of her people. The indigenous imperative to honor nature is undermined by federal laws approving resource extraction through mining and drilling. Formal protections exist for Native American religious expression, but not for the places and natural resources integral to ceremonies. Under what conditions can traditional beliefs be best practiced?

"American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research is a professionally refereed scientific journal. It contains empirical research, program evaluations, case studies, unpublished dissertations, and other articles in the behavioral, social, and health sciences which clearly relate to the mental health status of American Indians and Alaska Natives." The journal is based out of the Centers for American Indian & Alaska Native Health on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus.

"The mission for the Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health (CAIANH) is to promote the health and well-being of American Indians and Alaska Natives" and is housed at the Colorado School of Public Health on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus.

"The National Indian Health Board (NIHB) represents Tribal governments—both those that operate their own health care delivery systems through contracting and compacting, and those receiving health care directly from the Indian Health Service (IHS).

Located in Washington DC on Capitol Hill, the NIHB, a non-profit organization, provides a variety of services to tribes, Area Health Boards, Tribal organizations, federal agencies, and private foundations."

"The Florence G. Strauss-Leonard A. Wisneski Indigenous and Integrative Medicine Collection consists of thousands of books, and other materials, related to complementary health practices and indigenous therapies from around the world. Often very distinct from and sometimes at odds with conventional Western approaches to medicine, the resources in this special collection provide an opportunity to learn about different healing traditions, philosophies and attitudes toward health and disease."

Native Knowledge 360° (NK360°) provides educators and students with new perspectives on Native American history and cultures. Most Americans have only been exposed to part of the story, as told from a single perspective through the lenses of popular media and textbooks. NK360° provides educational materials, virtual student programs, and teacher training that incorporate Native narratives, more comprehensive histories, and accurate information to enlighten and inform teaching and learning about Native America.

This ground-breaking text explores the intersection between dominant modes of critical educational theory and the socio-political landscape of American Indian education. Grande asserts that, with few exceptions, the matters of Indigenous people and Indian education have been either largely ignored or indiscriminately absorbed within critical theories of education. Furthermore, American Indian scholars and educators have largely resisted engagement with critical educational theory, tending to concentrate instead on the production of historical monographs, ethnographic studies, tribally-centered curricula, and site-based research. While the author acknowledges the dire need for practical-community based research, she maintains that the global encroachment on Indigenous lands, resources, cultures and communities points to the equally urgent need to develop transcendent theories of decolonization and to build broad-based coalitions.

Teaching Resistance is a collection of the voices of activist educators from around the world who engage inside and outside the classroom from pre-kindergarten to university and emphasise teaching radical practice from the field. Features a chapter "Insurgent Pedagogies" by CU Scholar Natalie Avalos.

"The Tribal Early Childhood Research Center (TRC) is a national network of tribal early childhood researchers and program leaders who work in partnership with American Indian and Alaska Native communities and tribal Head Start, Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV), and Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) programs to grow the field of research on young children’s development."

Professor Robin Wall Kimmerer is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a professor of Environmental Biology. In this article she highlights how “new directions in applied biology … have direct parallels and precedents in traditional knowledge include ecosystem management, medicine, pharmacology, agroecology, wildlife, fisheries, and animal behavior. Biological research is moving to explore these approaches, yet acknowledgment or understanding of traditional ecological knowledge is rare in the scientific community.” “Thus, college biology graduates have a high probability of encountering issues involving indigenous cultures and TEK. However, the majority of scientific professionals and educators have little understanding of the value of TEK or its cultural context.” The article argues that higher education should exposure students to TEK.

To the colonized, the term 'research' is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which academic research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory. This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research - specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth.' Concepts such as 'discovery' and 'claiming' are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being.

From Oceania to North America, indigenous peoples have created storytelling traditions of incredible depth and diversity. The term "indigenous storywork" has come to encompass the sheer breadth of ways in which indigenous storytelling serves as a historical record, as a form of teaching and learning, and as an expression of indigenous culture and identity. But such traditions have too often been relegated to the realm of myth and legend, recorded as fragmented distortions, or erased altogether. Decolonizing Research brings together indigenous researchers and activists to assert the unique value of indigenous storywork as a focus of research, and to develop methodologies that rectify the colonial attitudes inherent in much past and current scholarship.

What are Indigenous research methodologies, and how do they unfold? Indigenous methodologies flow from tribal knowledge, and while they are allied with several western qualitative approaches, they remain distinct. These are the focal considerations of Margaret Kovach's study, which offers guidance to those conducting research in the academy using Indigenous methodologies. Kovach includes topics such as Indigenous epistemologies, decolonizing theory, story as method, situating self and culture, Indigenous methods, protocol, meaning-making, and ethics.

Research methods textbook that situates research in a larger, historical, cultural, and global context with case studies from around the globe to make very visible the specific methodologies that are commensurate with the transformative paradigm of research and the historical and cultural traditions of indigenous peoples. Chapters cover the history of research methods, colonial epistemologies, research within postcolonial societies, relational epistemologies, emergent and indigenous methodologies, Afrocentric research, feminist research, language frameworks, interviewing, and building partnerships between researchers and the researched.

Lori Lambert (Mi'kmaq/Abenaki) examines the problems that researchers encounter when adjusting research methodologies in the behavioral sciences to Native values and tribal community life. In addition to surveying the literature with an emphasis on Native authors, she has also interviewed a sampling of indigenous people in Australia, northern Canada, and Montana's Flathead Indian Reservation.   Members of four indigenous communities speak about what they expect from researchers who come into their communities. Their voices and stories provide a conceptual framework for non-indigenous researchers who anticipate doing research with indigenous peoples in the social, behavioral, or environmental sciences.

Indigenous researchers are knowledge seekers who work to progress Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing in a modern and constantly evolving context. This book describes a research paradigm shared by Indigenous scholars in Canada and Australia, and demonstrates how this paradigm can be put into practice. Relationships don't just shape Indigenous reality, they are our reality. Indigenous researchers develop relationships with ideas in order to achieve enlightenment in the ceremony that is Indigenous research. Indigenous research is the ceremony of maintaining accountability to these relationships. For researchers to be accountable to all our relations, we must make careful choices in our selection of topics, methods of data collection, forms of analysis and finally in the way we present information.

This 1969 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tells the story of a young American Indian struggling to reconcile the traditional ways of his people with the demands of the 20th century.Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From USA TODAY bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones comes a "masterpiece" (Locus Magazine) of a novel about revenge, cultural identity, and the cost of breaking from tradition. Labeled "one of 2020's buzziest horror novels" (Entertainment Weekly), this is a remarkable horror story that "will give you nightmares--the good kind of course" (BuzzFeed). From New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones comes a novel that is equal parts psychological horror and cutting social commentary on identity politics and the American Indian experience. Fans of Jordan Peele and Tommy Orange will love this story as it follows the lives of four American Indian men and their families, all haunted by a disturbing, deadly event that took place in their youth. Years later, they find themselves tracked by an entity bent on revenge, totally helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way.

This collectively authored volume celebrates a group of Native critics performing community in a lively, rigorous, sometimes contentious dialogue that challenges the aesthetics of individual literary representation. Janice Acoose infuses a Cree reading of Canadian Cree literature with a creative turn to Cree language; Lisa Brooks looks at eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Native writers and discovers little-known networks among them; Tol Foster argues for a regional approach to Native studies that can include unlikely subjects such as Will Rogers; LeAnne Howe creates a fictional character, Embarrassed Grief, whose problematic authenticity opens up literary debates; Daniel Heath Justice takes on two prominent critics who see mixed-blood identities differently than he does in relation to kinship; Phillip Carroll Morgan uncovers written Choctaw literary criticism from the 1830s on the subject of oral performance; Kimberly Roppolo advocates an intertribal rhetoric that can form a linguistic foundation for criticism. Cheryl Suzack situates feminist theories within Native culture with an eye to applying them to subjugated groups across Indian Country; Christopher B. Teuton organizes Native literary criticism into three modes based on community awareness; Sean Teuton opens up new sites for literary performance inside prisons with Native inmates; Robert Warrior wants literary analysis to consider the challenges of eroticism; Craig S. Womack introduces the book by historicizing book-length Native-authored criticism published between 1986 and 1997, and he concludes the volume with an essay on theorizing experience. Reasoning Together proposes nothing less than a paradigm shift in American Indian literary criticism, closing the gap between theory and activism by situating Native literature in real-life experiences and tribal histories. It is an accessible collection that will suit a wide range of courses--and will educate and energize anyone engaged in criticism of Native literature.

Spirit & Reason is a collection of the works of one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century--Vine Deloria, Jr. Author of such classics as Red Earth, White Lies, and God is Red, Deloria takes readers on a momentous journey through Indian country and beyond by exploring some of the most important issues of the past three decades. The essays gathered here are wide-ranging and essential and include representative pieces from some of Deloria's most influential books, some of his lesser-known articles, and ten new pieces written especially for Spirit & Reason. Tellingly, in the course of reviewing his body of work, Deloria found much that he had written in the past remained current and compelling because "people have not made much progress in resolving issues." Whether disputing theories of religion and science, examining the problems of modern education, or expounding on our understanding of the world, Deloria consistently urges readers toward an intimate connection with the world in which we live. For those familiar with Deloria's works as well as those discovering him for the first time, this essential anthology will teach, provoke, and enlighten in equal measure.

Selected as one of Oprah Winfrey's "Books That Help Me Through" United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into the first historically comprehensive Native poetry anthology. This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries. Opening with a blessing from Pulitzer Prize-winner N. Scott Momaday, the book contains powerful introductions from contributing editors who represent the five geographically organized sections. Each section begins with a poem from traditional oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a young Diné poet born in 1991, and including renowned writers such as Luci Tapahanso, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, and Ray Young Bear. When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through offers the extraordinary sweep of Native literature, without which no study of American poetry is complete.