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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Ryan Hall, "Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720-1877" (UNC Press, 2020)
Samuel J. Redman, "Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Paul Conrad, "The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
Mark R. Anderson, "Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution" (U Oklahoma Press, 2021)
Kelly Bauer, "Negotiating Autonomy: Mapuche Territorial Demands and Chilean Land Policy" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)
Anne F. Hyde, "Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West" (Norton, 2022)
Shawn Michael Austin, "Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay" (U New Mexico Press, 2020)
Nitasha Tamar Sharma, "Hawai'i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific" (Duke UP, 2021)
Tessa Murphy, "The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
Thomas F. Thornton and Madonna L. Moss, "Herring and People of the North Pacific: Sustaining a Keystone Species" (U Washington Press, 2021)
Martin Rizzo-Martinez, "We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
Larissa Fasthorse, "The Thanksgiving Play / What Would Crazy Horse Do?" (Theatre Communications Group, 2021)
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Megan Kate Nelson, "Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America" (Scribner, 2022)
Linda LeGarde Grover, "Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
Kyle T. Mays, "An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States" (Beacon Press, 2021)
Jennifer Scheper Hughes, "The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas" (NYU Press, 2021)
Paulette F. C. Steeves, "The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
Fay A. Yarbrough, "Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country" (UNC Press, 2021)
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