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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Kathleen Hull and John Douglass, "Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California" (U Arizona Press, 2018)
Yael Ben-zvi, “Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories” (Dartmouth College Press, 2018)
Kiara M. Vigil, “Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880-1930” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
David C. Posthumus, “All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual” (U Nebraska Press, 2018)
Cameron B. Strang, “Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850” (UNC Press, 2018)
B. P. Owensby and R. J. Ross, “Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America” (NYU Press, 2018)
Jorge Coronado, “Portraits in the Andes: Photography and Agency, 1900-1950” (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018)
Christina Snyder, “Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson” (Oxford UP, 2017)
Stephanie Elizondo Griest, “All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands” (UNC Press, 2017)
Seth Archer, “Sharks Upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai’i, 1778-1855” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Wilner, “Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas” (Yale UP, 2018)
Louis Warren, “God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America” (Basic Books, 2017)
Jenny Hale Pulispher, “Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England” (Yale UP, 2018)
Christina Gish Hill, “Webs of Kinship: Family in Northern Cheyenne Nationhood” (U Oklahoma Press, 2017)
Allan Greer, “Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
William S. Kiser, “Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle Over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2017)
Susan Sleeper-Smith, “Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792” (UNC Press, 2018)
Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Comanche Empire” (Yale UP, 2008)
Kirstin Squint, “LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature” (LSU Press, 2018)
Joanna Radin, “Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood” (U Chicago Press, 2017)
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