Fiction. Native American Studies. Red Shoes, the most formidable Choctaw warrior of the eighteenth century, was assassinated by his own people. Why does his death haunt Auda Billy, an Oklahoma Choctaw woman accused in 1991 of murdering Choctaw Chief Redford McAlester? Moving between the known details of Red Shoes' life and the riddle of McAlester's death, this novel traces the history of the Billy women whose destiny it is to solve both murders—with the help of a powerful spirit known as the Shell Shaker. "LeAnne Howe has done it. SHELL SHAKER is an elegant, powerful and knock out story. I'm blown away."—Joy Harjo

By the end of the twentieth century, Adrian C. Louis had become one of the most powerful voices in the canon of Native American literature. Skins, his best-known work, is now offered by the University of Nevada Press with a new foreword by David Pichaske. It’s the early 1990s and Rudy Yellow Shirt and his brother, Mogie, are living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, home of the legendary Oglala Sioux warrior Crazy Horse. Both Vietnam veterans, the men struggle with daily life on the rez. Rudy, a criminal investigator with the Pine Ridge Public Safety Department, must frequently arrest his neighbors and friends, including his brother, who has become a rez wino. But when Rudy falls and hits his head on a rock while pursuing a suspected murderer, Iktome the trickster enters his brain. Iktome restores Rudy’s youthful sexual vigor—long-lost to years of taking high blood pressure pills—and ignites his desire for political revenge via an alter ego, the “Avenging Warrior.” As the Avenging Warrior, Rudy takes direct action to punish local criminals. In a violent act, he torches the local liquor store, nearly burning Mogie alive while he is hiding on the store’s roof, plotting to steal booze. Although the brothers reconcile before Mogie dies, he leaves the Avenging Warrior with one final mission: go to Mount Rushmore and blow the nose off George Washington’s face. Louis’s critically acclaimed novel was made into a movie in 2002, directed by Chris Eyre.

A comprehensive book on the kinds of textiles the Shakers used, how they were produced, and their cultural and economic importance to the communities.

“Savage Conversations takes place somewhere in between its sources, between sanity and madness, between then and now, between the living and the dead. It pushes past the limitations of textual sources for telling indigenous history and accounts of insanity.” —Barrelhouse Reviews May 1875: Mary Todd Lincoln is addicted to opiates and tried in a Chicago court on charges of insanity. Entered into evidence is Ms. Lincoln’s claim that every night a Savage Indian enters her bedroom and slashes her face and scalp. She is swiftly committed to Bellevue Place Sanitarium. Her hauntings may be a reminder that in 1862, President Lincoln ordered the hanging of thirty-eight Dakotas in the largest mass execution in United States history. No one has ever linked the two events—until now. Savage Conversations is a daring account of a former first lady and the ghosts that tormented her for the contradictions and crimes on which this nation is founded.

As LeAnne Howe puts it, "The American Indian adventure stories in Choctalking on Other Realities are three parts memoir, one part tragedy, one part absurdist fiction, and one part 'marvelous realism.'" The stories in this book "form the heart of [Howe's] life's journey, so far," chronicling the contradictions, absurdities, and sometimes tragedies in a life lived crossing cultures and borders. Section one is comprised of three stories about Howe's life in the 1980s working in the bond business for a Wall Street firm. Part of an otherwise all-male group of "guerrilla warfare bond traders," Howe was the only American Indian woman, and (out) democrat, in the company. Section two is about her life in the early 1990s traveling abroad as what she calls an "International Tonto" to places like Jordan, Jerusalem, and Romania, and to Japan, where she served as an American Indian representative during the United Nations' "International Year For The World's Indigenous People." Section three reaches back into Howe's experiences in the 1950s as an "unruly Indian girl" as well as the later evolution of her political consciousness and her activism. The epilogue, "A Tribalography," is a literary discussion of how to read Native and indigenous stories. LeAnne Howe is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation and writes fiction, poetry, screenplays, and creative nonfiction, primarily dealing with American Indian experiences. In 2012 she was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas. Her first novel Shell Shaker received an American Book Award.

A boy discovers his Native American heritage in this Depression-era tale of identity and friendship by the author of Code Talker It's 1932, and twelve-year-old Cal Black and his Pop have been riding the rails for years after losing their farm in the Great Depression. Cal likes being a "knight of the road" with Pop, even if they're broke. But then Pop has to go to Washington, DC--some of his fellow veterans are marching for their government checks, and Pop wants to make sure he gets his due--and Cal can't go with him. So Pop tells Cal something he never knew before: Pop is actually a Creek Indian, which means Cal is too. And Pop has decided to send Cal to a government boarding school for Native Americans in Oklahoma called the Challagi School. At school, the other Creek boys quickly take Cal under their wings. Even in the harsh, miserable conditions of the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school, he begins to learn about his people's history and heritage. He learns their language and customs. And most of all, he learns how to find strength in a group of friends who have nothing beyond each other.

The essays gathered in this volume celebrate the founding of the American Indian Workshop (AIW) twenty-five years ago as a European forum for Native American studies. We present this collection of ongoing debates on the interlaced and interlocking arena of Native American studies and its complicated relation with Native Americans themselves. These debates tie in with such questions as: Can Native American studies shake off its past and deal with the complexity of political and academic issues in the present? Why, by whom and for whom is research conducted within this domain and who decides what the next step should be? This volume is a modest response to these questions, to the validation and substantiation of the cat's cradle of practices of the many disciplines that comprise Native American studies, and an attempt to ask the right questions, to get past the imperial categories, and to thoughtfully mediate and reorientate perspectives.