New Books in Native American Studies
Society & Culture
The birchbark canoe is among the most remarkable Indigenous technologies in North America, facilitating mobility throughout the watery world of the Great Lakes region and its borderlands. In Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (UNC Press, 2023), Texas Tech University historian John William Nelson argues that canoes, and a deep understanding of portages sites where canoes could be carried between waterways, helped secure the region around Chicago as decidedly Native space until well into the nineteenth century. By using the methodologies of borderlands history, ecotone and environmental history, and Indigenous Studies, Nelson demonstrates how the story of Chicago's array of portages runs counter to traditional narratives of the inexorable growth of European and American power in North America from the seventeenth century onwards. Indeed, the more colonizers tried to maintain a grip on this slipper landscape, the more it seemed to slide through their grasp. In Muddy Ground, Nelson takes one of the most written-about American spaces - Chicago - and turns the usual narrative on its head, showing how until settlers could actively change Chicago's landscape, it would remain a place of Indigenous power and historical possibility.
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Christine M. DeLucia, "Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast" (Yale UP, 2018)
Harriet Washington, "A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind" (Little, Brown Spark, 2019)
Andrew Newman, "Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities" (UNC Press, 2019)
Dean Itsuji Saranillio, "Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood" (Duke UP, 2018)
Juan Javier Rivera Andía, "Non-Humans in Amerindian South America" (Berghahn, 2018)
Mike Jay, "Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic" (Yale UP, 2019)
Rachel B. Herrmann, "No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution" (Cornell UP, 2019)
M. L. Mitma and J. P. Heilman, "Now Peru is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist" (Duke UP, 2016)
Yuko Miki, "Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Daniel Nemser, "Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico" (U Texas Press, 2017)
Gregory D. Smithers, "Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019)
P. L. Caballero and A. Acevedo-Rodrigo, "Beyond Alterity: Destabilizing the Indigenous Other in Mexico" (U Arizona Press, 2018)
Nick Estes, "Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline" (Verso, 2019)
Ian Saxine, "Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier" (NYU Press, 2019)
Manu Karuka, "Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad" (U California Press, 2019)
Robbie Richardson, "The Savage and Modern Self: North American Indians in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture" (U Toronto Press, 2018)
Lisa Blee and Jean M. O'Brien, "Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit" (UNC Press, 2019)
Sarah Miller-Davenport, "Gateway State: Hawai’i and the Cultural Transformation of American Empire" (Princeton UP, 2019)
Kris Lane, "Potosí: The Silver City That Changed the World" (U California Press, 2019)
Rosalyn LaPier, "Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet" (U Nebraska Press, 2017)
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