During his invasion of Creek Indian territory in 1813, future U.S. president Andrew Jackson discovered a Creek infant orphaned by his troops. Moved by an âeoeunusual sympathy,âe Jackson sent the child to be adopted into his Tennessee plantation household. Through the stories of nearly a dozen white adopters, adopted Indian children, and their biological parents, Dawn Peterson opens a window onto the forgotten history of adoption in early nineteenth-century America. Indians in the Family shows the important role that adoption played in efforts to subdue Native peoples in the name of nation-building. As the United States aggressively expanded into Indian territories between 1790 and 1830, government officials stressed the importance of assimilating Native peoples into what they styled the United Statesâe(tm) âeoenational family.âe White households who adopted Indiansâe"especially slaveholding southern planters influenced by leaders such as Jacksonâe"saw themselves as part of this expansionist project. They hoped to inculcate in their young charges American attitudes toward private property, patriarchal family, and the value of slave labor. White Americans were not the only ones driving this process. Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw families sought to place their sons in white households, to be educated in the ways of American governance and political economy. But there were unintended consequences for all concerned. As adults, these adopted Indians used their educations to thwart U.S. federal claims to their homelands, setting the stage for the political struggles that would culminate in the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Winner of the 2020 Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal A 2020 American Indian Youth Literature Picture Book Honor Winner “A wonderful and sweet book . . . Lovely stuff.” —The New York Times Book Review Told in lively and powerful verse by debut author Kevin Noble Maillard, Fry Bread is an evocative depiction of a modern Native American family, vibrantly illustrated by Pura Belpre Award winner and Caldecott Honoree Juana Martinez-Neal. Fry bread is food. It is warm and delicious, piled high on a plate. Fry bread is time. It brings families together for meals and new memories. Fry bread is nation. It is shared by many, from coast to coast and beyond. Fry bread is us. It is a celebration of old and new, traditional and modern, similarity and difference. A 2020 Charlotte Huck Recommended Book A Publishers Weekly Best Picture Book of 2019 A Kirkus Reviews Best Picture Book of 2019 A School Library Journal Best Picture Book of 2019 A Booklist 2019 Editor's Choice A Shelf Awareness Best Children's Book of 2019 A Goodreads Choice Award 2019 Semifinalist A Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Book of 2019 A National Public Radio (NPR) Best Book of 2019 An NCTE Notable Poetry Book A 2020 NCSS Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People A 2020 ALA Notable Children's Book A 2020 ILA Notable Book for a Global Society 2020 Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Books of the Year List One of NPR's 100 Favorite Books for Young Readers Nominee, Pennsylvania Young Readers Choice Award 2022-2022 Nominee, Illinois Monarch Award 2022

When L. Frank and Marina Drummer went on the road in 2002, they set out to visit as many people from different California tribes as possible. Crisscrossing the state, they taped hundreds of hours of interviews and collected copies of nearly fifteen hundred family photos. The documentary project, funded by the California State Library and LEF Foundation, paints an unprecedented portrait of California's indigenous people using their own words and photographs from their own family albums. In turns moody, beautiful, warm, and humorous, First Families is a one-of-a-kind book that combines extremely personal images with text that gives readers a broader, deeper view of Indian history and many complex living cultures.

In Race and Family: A Structural Approach, author Roberta L. Coles looks at ethnic minority families in a novel way— through a structural lens. Unlike many texts on race and family, this book offers an approach that illustrates overarching structural factors affecting all families as opposed to examining each ethnicity in isolation from one another. By focusing on various structural factors such as demographic, economic, and historical aspects, this book analyzes various family trends in a cross-cutting manner to exemplify the similarities and distinctions among all racial and ethnic groups.

To an outsider, Native American family life may seem simple. In reality, the societies within Native American tribes are incredibly rich and complex. Nor is family life the same from tribe to tribe. Some tribes are organized into clans; others trace their lineage according to matrilineal lines. This book discusses some of the familial arrangements of various tribes, including the reasons for such arrangements as well as the roles individuals played in their respective societies.

The Nim (North Fork Mono) Indians have lived for centuries in a remote region of California’s Sierra Nevada. In this memoir, Gaylen D. Lee recounts the story of his Nim family across six generations. Drawing from the recollections of his grandparents, mother, and other relatives, Lee provides a deeply personal account of his people’s history and culture. In keeping with the Nim’s traditional life-style, Lee’s memoir takes us through their annual seasonal cycle. He describes communal activities, such as food gathering, hunting and fishing, the processing of acorn (the Nim’s staple food), basketmaking, and ceremonies and games. Family photographs, some dating to the beginning of this century, enliven Lee’s descriptions. Woven into the seasonal account is the disturbing story of Hispanic and white encroachment into the Nim world. Lee shows how the Mexican presence in the early nineteenth century, the Gold Rush, the Protestant conversion movement, and, more recently, the establishment of a national forest on traditional land have contributed to the erosion of Nim culture. Walking Where We Lived is a bittersweet chronicle, revealing the persecution and hardships suffered by the Nim, but emphasizing their survival. Although many young Nim have little knowledge of the old ways and although the Nim are a minority in the land of their ancestors, the words of Lee’s grandmother remain a source of strength: "Ashupá. Don’t worry. It’s okay."