The first and only memoir by one of the original Navajo code talkers of WWII. His name wasn't Chester Nez. That was the English name he was assigned in kindergarten. And in boarding school at Fort Defiance, he was punished for speaking his native language, as the teachers sought to rid him of his culture and traditions. But discrimination didn't stop Chester from answering the call to defend his country after Pearl Harbor, for the Navajo have always been warriors, and his upbringing on a New Mexico reservation gave him the strength--both physical and mental--to excel as a marine. During World War II, the Japanese had managed to crack every code the United States used. But when the Marines turned to its Navajo recruits to develop and implement a secret military language, they created the only unbroken code in modern warfare--and helped assure victory for the United States over Japan in the South Pacific. INCLUDES THE ACTUAL NAVAJO CODE AND RARE PICTURES
Experience the riveting, powerful story of the Native American civil rights movement and the resulting struggle for identity told through the high-flying career of West Coast rock 'n' roll pioneers Redbone. You've heard the hit song "Come and Get Your Love" in the movie Guardians of the Galaxy, but the story of the band behind it is one of cultural, political, and social importance. Brothers Pat and Lolly Vegas were talented Native American rock musicians that took the 1960s Sunset Strip by storm. They influenced The Doors and jammed with Jimmy Hendrix before he was "Jimi," and the idea of a band made up of all Native Americans soon followed. Determined to control their creative vision and maintain their cultural identity, they eventually signed a deal with Epic Records in 1969. But as the American Indian Movement gained momentum the band took a stand, choosing pride in their ancestry over continued commercial reward.
Selected from the oral tradition of North American Indians and from contemporary tribal poets, the poems evoke the concerns and visions of American Indian young people.
This engaging collection of Native American profiles examines these individuals' unique life experiences within the larger context of U.S. history. Profiles collected here are written to be enjoyable as well as instructive, presented as examples of personal storytelling that should be savored not only for their factual content, but also for the humanity they evoke. The book spotlights Native American lives in the United States and Canada, mainly after 1900, though a few older figures are included because their lives evoke strikingly modern themes.
Offers profiles of one hundred Native American women involved in social activism, literature, politics, medicine, and the arts.
This book highlights the contributions and careers of Native Americans who have carved impressive careers in Hollywood, from the silent film era of the early 1900s to the present, becoming advocates for their heritage. This book explores how the heritage and behind-the-scenes activities of Native American actors and filmmakers helped shape their own movie images. Native artists have impacted movies for more than a century, but until recently their presence had passed largely unrecognized. From the silent era to contemporary movies, this book features leading Native American actors whose voices have reached a broad audience and are part of the larger conversation about the exploitation of underrepresented people in Hollywood.
This volume will revise the way we look at the modern populations of Latin America and North America by providing a totally new view of the history of Native American and African American peoples throughout the hemisphere. The book explores key issues relating to the evolution of racial terminology and European colonialists' perceptions of color, analyzing the development of color classification systems and the specific evolution of key terms such as black, mulatto, and mestizo, which no longer carry their original meanings.
While the success of higher education and student affairs is predicated on understanding the students we serve, the reality is, where the Native American population is concerned, that knowledge is generally lacking. The purpose of this book is to better understand Native students, challenge the status quo, and provide an informed base for leaders in student and academic affairs, and administrators concerned with the success of students on their campuses. The authors of this book share their understanding of Native epistemologies, culture, and social structures, offering student affairs professionals and institutions a richer array of options, resources, and culturally-relevant and inclusive models to better serve this population.
This classic bottom-up history examines the legacy of Indigenous peoples' resistance, resilience, and steadfast fight against imperialism. Going beyond the story of America as a country "discovered" by a few brave men in the "New World," Indigenous human rights advocate Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals the roles that settler colonialism and policies of American Indian genocide played in forming our national identity.
Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin) was one of the early Indian writers to record tribal legends and tales from oral tradition. These pieces, largely autobiographical, were first collected and published in 1921. With their reissue, Zitkala-Sa takes her rightful place among such native interpreters of Sioux culture as Charles A. Eastman and Luther Standing Bear.
Zitkala-Sa wrestled with the conflicting influences of American Indian and white culture throughout her life. Raised on a Sioux reservation, she was educated at boarding schools that enforced assimilation and was witness to major events in white-Indian relations in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Tapping her troubled personal history, Zitkala-Sa created stories that illuminate the tragedy and complexity of the American Indian experience. In evocative prose laced with political savvy, she forces new thinking about the perceptions, assumptions, and customs of both Sioux and white cultures and raises issues of assimilation, identity, and race relations that remain compelling today.
In 1972, the Bureau of Indian Affairs terminated its twenty-year-old Voluntary Relocation Program, which encouraged the mass migration of roughly 100,000 Native American people from rural to urban areas. At the time the program ended, many groups--from government leaders to Red Power activists--had already classified it as a failure, and scholars have subsequently positioned the program as evidence of America's enduring settler-colonial project. But Douglas K. Miller here argues that a richer story should be told--one that recognizes Indigenous mobility in terms of its benefits and not merely its costs. In their collective refusal to accept marginality and destitution on reservations, Native Americans used the urban relocation program to take greater control of their socioeconomic circumstances.
In Indian Voices, Alison Owings takes readers on a fresh journey across America, east to west, north to south, and around again. Owings's most recent oral history--engagingly written in a style that entertains and informs--documents what Native Americans say about themselves, their daily lives, and the world around them. Young and old from many tribal nations speak with candor, insight, and (unknown to many non-Natives) humor about what it is like to be a Native American in the twenty-first century.
After 1850, Americans swarmed to take in a raft of new illustrated journals and papers. Engravings and drawings of "buckskinned braves" and "Indian princesses" proved an immensely popular attraction for consumers of publications like Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly. In Indians Illustrated , John M. Coward charts a social and cultural history of Native American illustrations--romantic, violent, racist, peaceful, and otherwise--in the heyday of the American pictorial press.
Relying on US Department of Defense documents, never-before-seen or heard interviews with Choctaw, Comanche, and Navajo code talkers, and other primary sources, filmmaker and American Indian historian Gary Robinson delivers a meticulously researched account of this little-known part of US history. In this multifaceted story, Robinson discusses the evolution of military communications and delves into the historical, cultural, and linguistic developments of the American Indians prior to World War I that led to their significant contribution during both world wars. Robinson digs deeper than the historical record. With skillful precision, he contrasts the changing federal government policies that transformed Native American languages from cultural relics worthy only of the trash bin to valued gems demanding preservation. He also questions how America's history might have been altered if missionaries and government agencies had successfully eliminated America's indigenous languages.
This collection, which includes magazine articles, speeches, a white paper, and introductions and chapters of books, gives a generous and reasoned view of five hundred years of Indian history in North America from first settlements in the East to the long trek of the Nez Perce Indians in the Northwest. The essays deal with the origins of still unresolved troubles with treaties and territories to fishing and land rights, and who should own archeological finds, as well as the ideologies that underpin our Indian policy. Taken together the pieces give a revelatory introduction to American Indian history, a history that continues both to fascinate and inform.
American Indian customs, stories, and history come to life in this important and authoritative reference, artfully designed and packaged for kids and students. More than 160 tribes are featured in this outstanding new encyclopedia, which presents a comprehensive overview of the history of North America's Native peoples. From the Apache to the Zuni, readers will learn about each tribe's history, traditions, and culture, including the impact of European expansion across the land and how tribes live today.
Journeying back to a time before Europeans set foot in North America, readers meet the colorful Native American groups that once called Texas home. The tribes addressed include the Caddo, Hasinai, Karankawa, Apache, and the Comanche. Readers also learn how these Native Americans influenced European settlers--an effect that can still be seen today.
An accessible and educational illustrated book profiling 50 notable American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian people, from NBA star Kyrie Irving of the Standing Rock Lakota to Wilma Mankiller, the first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. The book celebrate the lives, stories, and contributions of Indigenous artists, activists, scientists, athletes, and other change makers in this beautifully illustrated collection. From luminaries of the past, like nineteenth-century sculptor Edmonia Lewis--the first Black and Native American female artist to achieve international fame--to contemporary figures like linguist Jessie Little Doe Baird, who revived the Wampanoag language. Notable Native People highlights the vital impact Indigenous dreamers and leaders have made on the world. This powerful and informative collection also offers accessible primers on important Indigenous issues, from the legacy of colonialism and cultural appropriation to food sovereignty, land and water rights, and more.
Native Americans State by State details the history of the tribes associated with every state of the Union and the provinces of Canada, from past to present. Each state entry contains its own maps and timeline. The 2010 census identified 5.2 million people in the United States as American Indian or Alaskan Natives--less than 2% of the overall population of nearly 309 million. In Canada, the percentage is 4%--1.1 million of a total population of around 34 million. Most of these people live on reservations or in areas set aside for them in the nineteenth century. The numbers are very different from those in the sixteenth century, when European colonists brought disease and a rapacious desire for land and wealth with them from the Old World.
From the earliest traces of first arrivals to the present, the Native peoples of North America represent a diverse and colorful array of cultures. From Central America to Canada, from recent archaeological discoveries to accounts of current controversies, this comprehensive study uses both traditional story telling and a powerful narrative to bring history to life. Johansen provides a critical narrative of European-American westward expansion through use of Native American voices, including compelling personal sketches of key figures such as: Tecumseh, alliance builder in the Ohio Valley; Chief Joseph the Younger, leader of the Nez Perce long march; and Susette LaFlesche, an Omaha Indian who reported on the Wounded Knee massacre for the Omaha-Herald.
These are fascinating stories of the memories of ex-slaves, fourteen of which have never been published before. Although many African Americans had relocated in Oklahoma after emancipation in1865, some of the interviewees had been slaves of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, or Creeks in the Indian territory.
With the advent of European colonization, the North American landscape and the indigenous cultures that inhabited it changed irrevocably. While a large part of Native Americans' past has been marked by struggles for equality and sovereignty, a survey of the early history of various tribes reveals prosperous societies that frequently managed to live peaceably with each other and a parade of interlopers. This volume examines the trajectory of Native American cultures over the centuries, detailing how they have retained their longstanding values and traditions in the face of war, disease, resettlement and assimilation.
Twelve Native American kids present historical and contemporary laws, policies, struggles, and victories in Native life, each with a powerful refrain: We are still here! Too often, Native American history is treated as a finished chapter instead of relevant and ongoing. This companion book to the award-winning We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga offers readers everything they never learned in school about Native American people's past, present, and future. Precise, lyrical writing presents topics including: forced assimilation (such as boarding schools), land allotment and Native tribal reorganization, termination (the US government not recognizing tribes as nations), Native urban relocation (from reservations), self-determination (tribal self-empowerment), Native civil rights, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), religious freedom, economic development (including casino development), Native language revival efforts, cultural persistence, and nationhood.
Through the story of Tamara, an abused Native American child, North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan describes the plight of many children living on reservations--and offers hope for the future. On a winter morning in 1990, U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota picked up the Bismarck Tribune. On the front page, a small Native American girl gazed into the distance, shedding a tear. The headline: "Foster home children beaten--and nobody's helping." Dorgan, who had been working with American Indian tribes to secure resources, was upset. He flew to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation to meet with five-year-old Tamara who had suffered a horrible beating at a foster home. He visited with Tamara and her grandfather and they became friends. Then Tamara disappeared. And he would search for her for decades until they finally found each other again. This book is her story, from childhood to the present, but it's also the story of a people and a nation. More than one in three American Indian/Alaskan Native children live in poverty. AI/AN children are disproportionately in foster care and awaiting adoption.
Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice's shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn't been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life. Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice's best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice. In the Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence.
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. He also provides the first comparison of Native American code talking programs, comparing the Comanche Code Talkers with their better-known Navajo counterparts in the Pacific and with other Native Americans who used their languages, coded or not, for secret communication. Meadows sets this history in a larger discussion of the development of Native American code talking in World Wars I and II, identifying two distinct forms of Native American code talking, examining the attitudes of the American military toward Native American code talkers, and assessing the complex cultural factors that led Comanche and other Native Americans to serve their country in this way.
Many Americans know something about the Navajo code talkers in World War II--but little else about the military service of Native Americans, who have served in our armed forces since the American Revolution, and still serve in larger numbers than any other ethnic group. But, as we learn in this splendid work of historical restitution, code talking originated in World War I among Native soldiers whose extraordinary service resulted, at long last, in U.S. citizenship for all Native Americans. The first full account of these forgotten soldiers in our nation's military history, The First Code Talkers covers all known Native American code talkers of World War I--members of the Choctaw, Oklahoma Cherokee, Comanche, Osage, and Sioux nations, as well as the Eastern Band of Cherokee and Ho-Chunk, whose veterans have yet to receive congressional recognition. William C. Meadows, the foremost expert on the subject, describes how Native languages, which were essentially unknown outside tribal contexts and thus could be as effective as formal encrypted codes, came to be used for wartime communication. While more than thirty tribal groups were eventually involved in World Wars I and II, this volume focuses on Native Americans in the American Expeditionary Forces during the First World War. Drawing on nearly thirty years of research--in U.S. military and Native American archives, surviving accounts from code talkers and their commanding officers, family records, newspaper accounts, and fieldwork in descendant communities--the author explores the origins, use, and legacy of the code talkers. In the process, he highlights such noted decorated veterans as Otis Leader, Joseph Oklahombi, and Calvin Atchavit and scrutinizes numerous misconceptions and popular myths about code talking and the secrecy surrounding the practice. With appendixes that include a timeline of pertinent events, biographies of known code talkers, and related World War I data, this book is the first comprehensive work ever published on Native American code talkers in the Great War and their critical place in American military history.
On February 23, 1945, U.S. Marines claimed victory in the battle of Iwo Jima, one of the most important battles in the Pacific islands during World War II. Instrumental to this defeat of Japanese forces was a group of specialized Marines involved in a secret program. Throughout the war, Japanese intelligence agencies were able to intercept and break nearly every battlefield code the United States created. The Navajo Code Talkers, however, devised a complex code based on their native language and perfected it so that messages could be coded, transmitted, and decoded in minutes. The Navajo Code was the only battlefield code that Japan never deciphered. Unsung Heroes of World War II details the history of the men who created this secret code and used it on the battlefield to help the United States win World War II in the Pacific.
Invisible Heroes of World War II documents ten fascinating true stories of a diverse group of soldiers and noncombatants from all over the world, including African Americans, women, and Native Americans, who fought with the Allies during World War II. These heroes made significant contributions in the war effort, and sometimes gave their lives for freedom and liberty, often without much recognition or fanfare. Some were frontline soldiers who were captured by the enemy and endured horrific conditions as POWs, others were ordinary citizens who fought in the French Resistance and provided vital operations to undermine Nazi occupation, while others were engineers, workers in industry, or war correspondents and photographers. All served with valor and distinction as part of the massive Allied forces who fought to free the world from tyranny and oppression.
American Indian Collection
Aztec
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Iroquios
Legacy Native American photogravures and music
Squanto a warrior's tale
We shall remain America through native eyes