NATIONAL BESTSELLER New York Times Book Review • 100 Notable Books of 2022 Best Books of 2022 — New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence “I can only wish that, when I was that lonely college junior and was finishing Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I’d had Hämäläinen’s book at hand.” —David Treuer, The New Yorker “[T]he single best book I have ever read on Native American history.” —Thomas E. Ricks, New York Times Book Review A prize-winning scholar rewrites 400 years of American history from Indigenous perspectives, overturning the dominant origin story of the United States. There is an old, deeply rooted story about America that goes like this: Columbus “discovers” a strange continent and brings back tales of untold riches. The European empires rush over, eager to stake out as much of this astonishing “New World” as possible. Though Indigenous peoples fight back, they cannot stop the onslaught. White imperialists are destined to rule the continent, and history is an irreversible march toward Indigenous destruction. Yet as with other long-accepted origin stories, this one, too, turns out to be based in myth and distortion. In Indigenous Continent, acclaimed historian Pekka Hämäläinen presents a sweeping counternarrative that shatters the most basic assumptions about American history. Shifting our perspective away from Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, the Revolution, and other well-trodden episodes on the conventional timeline, he depicts a sovereign world of Native nations whose members, far from helpless victims of colonial violence, dominated the continent for centuries after the first European arrivals. From the Iroquois in the Northeast to the Comanches on the Plains, and from the Pueblos in the Southwest to the Cherokees in the Southeast, Native nations frequently decimated white newcomers in battle. Even as the white population exploded and colonists’ land greed grew more extravagant, Indigenous peoples flourished due to sophisticated diplomacy and leadership structures. By 1776, various colonial powers claimed nearly all of the continent, but Indigenous peoples still controlled it—as Hämäläinen points out, the maps in modern textbooks that paint much of North America in neat, color-coded blocks confuse outlandish imperial boasts for actual holdings. In fact, Native power peaked in the late nineteenth century, with the Lakota victory in 1876 at Little Big Horn, which was not an American blunder, but an all-too-expected outcome. Hämäläinen ultimately contends that the very notion of “colonial America” is misleading, and that we should speak instead of an “Indigenous America” that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial. The evidence of Indigenous defiance is apparent today in the hundreds of Native nations that still dot the United States and Canada. Necessary reading for anyone who cares about America’s past, present, and future, Indigenous Continent restores Native peoples to their rightful place at the very fulcrum of American history.

In this thoughtful book, Robert J. Muckle provides a brief, thematic overview of the key issues facing Indigenous peoples in North America from prehistory to the present.

Categorized into eight geographical regions, this encyclopedic reference examines the history, beliefs, traditions, languages, and lifestyles of indigenous peoples of North America.

Groundbreaking historical scholarship on the complex attitudes toward gender and sexual roles in Native American culture, with a new preface and supplemental bibliography Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the New World, Native Americans across the continent had developed richly complex attitudes and forms of expression concerning gender and sexual roles. The role of the "berdache," a man living as a woman or a woman living as a man in native societies, has received recent scholarly attention but represents just one of many such occurrences of alternative gender identification in these cultures. Editors Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough have brought together scholars who explore the historical implications of these variations in the meanings of gender, sexuality, and marriage among indigenous communities in North America. Essays that span from the colonial period through the nineteenth century illustrate how these aspects of Native American life were altered through interactions with Europeans. Organized chronologically, Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400–1850 probes gender identification, labor roles, and political authority within Native American societies. The essays are linked by overarching examinations of how Europeans manipulated native ideas about gender for their own ends and how indigenous people responded to European attempts to impose gendered cultural practices at odds with established traditions. Many of the essays also address how indigenous people made meaning of gender and how these meanings developed over time within their own communities. Several contributors also consider sexual practice as a mode of cultural articulation, as well as a vehicle for the expression of gender roles. Representing groundbreaking scholarship in the field of Native American studies, these insightful discussions of gender, sexuality, and identity advance our understanding of cultural traditions and clashes that continue to resonate in native communities today as well as in the larger societies those communities exist within.

The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America's history Named One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2019 - Named One of the 10 Best History Books of 2019 by Smithsonian Magazine - Winner of the MPIBA Reading the West Book Award for narrative nonfiction "Turned many of the stories I thought I knew about our nation inside out."--Cornelia Channing, Paris Review, Favorite Books of 2019 "My favorite non-fiction book of this year."--Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opinion "A briliant, bold, gripping history."--Simon Sebag Montefiore, London Evening Standard, Best Books of 2019 "All nations deserve to have their stories told with this degree of attentiveness"--Parul Sehgal, New York Times This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then--in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion--as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains. The Lakotas are imprinted in American historical memory. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. Hämäläinen's deeply researched and engagingly written history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.

"The White Man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative process. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped rock and soil." The words of Lakota writer Luther Standing Bear foretold the current debate on the value of Native American studies in higher education. Studying Native America addresses for the first time in a comprehensive way the place of this critical discipline in the university curriculum. Leading scholars in anthropology, demography, English and literature, history, law, social work, linguistics, public health, psychology, and sociology have come together to explore what Native American studies has been, what it is, and what it may be in the future. The book's thirteen contributors and editor Russell Thornton, stress the frequent incompatibility of traditional academic teaching methods with the social and cultural concerns that gave rise to the field of Native American studies. Beginning with the intellectual and institutional history of Native American studies, the book examines its literature, language, historical narratives, and anthropology. The volume discusses the effects on Native American studies of law and constitutionalism; cosmology, epistemology, and religion; identity; demography; colonialism and post-colonialism; science and technology; and repatriation of human remains and cultural objects. Contributors to Studying Native America include Raymond J. DeMallie, Bonnie Duran, Eduardo Duran, Raymond D. Fogelson, Clara Sue Kidwell, Kerwin Lee Klein, Melissa L. Meyer, John H. Moore, Peter Nabokov, Katheryn Shanley, C. Matthew Snipp, Rennard Strickland, Russell Thornton, J. Randolph Valentine, Robert Allen Warrior, Richard White, and Maria Yellowhorse-Braveheart. The book is sponsored in part by the Social Science Research Council.

“An inspiring book.… American Visions beautifully shows how remarkably resilient dreams of a better republic remained even in the darkest of times.” —Christoph Irmscher, Wall Street Journal A revealing history of the formative period when voices of dissent and innovation defied power and created visions of America still resonant today. With so many of our histories falling into dour critique or blatant celebration, here is a welcome departure: a book that offers hope as well as honesty about the American past. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery, Native dispossession, and wars with Canada and Mexico. Mass immigration and powerful religious movements sent tremors through American society. But even as the powerful defended the status quo, others defied it: voices from the margins moved the center; eccentric visions altered the accepted wisdom, and acts of empathy questioned self-interest. Edward L. Ayers’s rich history examines the visions that moved Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, the Native American activist William Apess, and others to challenge entrenched practices and beliefs. So, Lydia Maria Child condemned the racism of her fellow northerners at great personal cost. Melville and Thoreau, Joseph Smith and Samuel Morse all charted new paths for America in the realms of art, nature, belief, and technology. It was Henry David Thoreau who, speaking of John Brown, challenged a hostile crowd "Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?" Through decades of award-winning scholarship on the Civil War, Edward L. Ayers has himself ventured beyond the interpretative status quo to recover the range of possibilities embedded in the past as it was lived. Here he turns that distinctive historical sensibility to a period when bold visionaries and critics built vigorous traditions of dissent and innovation into the foundation of the nation. Those traditions remain alive for us today.