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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies
Roberto J. González, "Connected: How a Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network" (U California Press, 2020)
Nathaniel Morris, "Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans: Indigenous Communities and the Revolutionary State in Mexico's Gran Nayar, 1910-1940" (U Arizona Press, 2020)
A. S. Dillingham, "Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico" (Stanford UP, 2021)
Nikki Hessell, "Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry" (SUNY Press, 2021)
Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys, "Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
Barrett Holmes Pitner, "The Crime Without a Name: Combatting Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America" (Counterpoint, 2021)
Luis Sierra, "La Paz's Colonial Specters: Urbanization, Migration, and Indigenous Political Participation, 1900-52" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
Emalani Case, "Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawaiʻi to Kahiki" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)
Elder Little Brown Bear: Healing Wisdom from a Métis Elder
Patricia E. Rubertone, "Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
Damon B. Akins and William J. Bauer, "We Are the Land: A History of Native California" (U California Press, 2021)
Colin Calloway, "The Chiefs Now in This City: Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Peter C. Mancall, "The Trials of Thomas Morton" (Yale UP, 2019)
Association of Asian American Studies Book Awards 2021: Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley and Jan-Henry Gray
Danielle Geller, "Dog Flowers: A Memoir" (One World, 2021)
Patrick Spero, "Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776" (Norton, 2018)
Katrina Phillips, "Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History" (UNC Press, 2021)
Association of Asian American Studies Book Awards 2021: Jian Neo Chen and Quynh Nhu Le
Inside Look: "Tribal College: Journal of American Indian Higher Education"
Dave Auckly, et al., "Inspiring Mathematics: Lessons from the Navajo Nation Math Circles" (AMS, 2019)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
New Books in Philosophy
New Books in Sociology
New Books in Psychoanalysis
New Books in Anthropology
New Books in African American Studies