New Books in Native American Studies
Society & Culture
The past several decades have seen a massive shift in debates over who owns and has the right to tell Native American history and stories. For centuries, non-Native actors have collected, stolen, sequestered, and gained value from Native stories and documents, human remains, and sacred objects. However, thanks to the work of Native activists, Native history is now increasingly repatriated back to the control of tribes and communities. Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory (U Minnesota Press, 2024) takes readers into the heart of these debates by tracing one tribe’s fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite its history.
Rose Miron tells the story of the Stockbridge–Munsee Mohican Nation and its Historical Committee, a group composed mostly of Mohican women who have been collecting and reorganizing historical materials since 1968. She shows how their work is exemplary of how tribal archives can strategically shift how Native history is accessed, represented, written, and, most important, controlled. Based on a more than decade-long reciprocal relationship with the Stockbridge–Munsee Mohican Nation, Miron’s research and writing are shaped primarily by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations and input from the Stockbridge–Munsee Historical Committee.
Miron is not Mohican and is careful to consider her own positionality and reflects on what it means for non-Native researchers and institutions to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations in the context of academia and public history, offering a model both for tribes undertaking their own reclamation projects and for scholars looking to work with tribes in ethical ways.
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
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David Narrett, “Adventurism and Empire” (UNC Press, 2015)
Katrina Jagodinsky, “Legal Codes and Talking Trees” (Yale UP, 2016)
Timothy J. Shannon, “Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain” (Harvard UP, 2018)
Andrew Frank, “Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami” (UP of Florida, 2017)
Robert Aquinas McNally, “The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age” (Bison Books, 2017)
Robert Foxcurran, “Songs Upon the Rivers” (Baraka Books, 2016)
David W. Grua, “Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory” (Oxford UP, 2016)
Lisa King, “Legible Sovereignties: Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums” (Oregon State UP, 2017)
Kathryn Troy, “The Specter of the Indian: Race, Gender and Ghosts in American Seances, 1848-1890” (SUNY Press, 2017)
Daniel J. Sharfstein, “Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War” (Norton, 2017)
Lisa Brooks, “Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War” (Yale UP, 2018)
Linda Grover, “Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year” (U Minnesota Press, 2017)
David J. Carlson, “Imagining Sovereignty: Self-Determination in American Indian Law and Literature” (U of Oklahoma Press, 2016)
Paul Magid, “The Gray Fox: George Crook and the Indian Wars” (U. Oklahoma Press, 2015)
James F. Brooks, “Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awat’ovi Massacre” (W.W. Norton and Co., 2016)
Jacqueline Emery, “Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press” (U. Nebraska Press, 2017)
Laura E. Smith, “Horace Poolaw: Photographer of American Indian Modernity” (U. Nebraska Press, 2016)
Sarah Rivett, “Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation” (Oxford UP, 2017)
Keith Richotte Jr., “Claiming Turtle Mountain’s Constitution: The History, Legacy, and Future of a Tribal Nation’s Founding Documents,” (UNC Press, 2017)
John Ryan Fischer, “Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i” (UNC Press, 2015)
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