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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Brenden W. Rensink, "The North American West in the Twenty-First Century" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
Cynthia Radding, "Bountiful Deserts: Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain" (U Arizona Press, 2022)
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Samuel J. Redman, "Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums" (Harvard UP, 2022)
Elizabeth N. Ellis. "The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
Paul Barba, "Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
Antonio T. Bly, "Escaping Slavery: A Documentary History of Native American Runaways in British North America" (Lexington Books, 2022)
On Religion, Public Health, and the Media
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James Griffiths, "Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language" (Zed Books, 2021)
Jeremy Bangs, "New Light on the Old Colony: Plymouth, the Dutch Context of Toleration, and Patterns of Pilgrim Commemoration" (Brill, 2019)
Night of the Living Rez
Sam W. Haynes, "Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas" (Basic Books, 2022)
Chelsey Luger and Thosh Collins, "The Seven Circles: Indigenous Teachings for Living Well" (HarperOne, 2022)
Jeffers Lennox, "North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution" (Yale UP, 2022)
Rafico Ruiz, "Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier" (Duke UP, 2021)
A Region of the Mind: U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies
Ian Macpherson McCulloch, "John Bradstreet's Raid 1758: A Riverine Operation in the French and Indian War" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)
The Canada-US Border: A History of a Fluid and Unstable Boundary
The History and Ethnography of Indigenous Peoples in the Canadian Northwest
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