This work examines the world's indigenous peoples, their cultures, the countries in which they reside, and the issues that impact these groups.

Now in its third edition, First Americans has been fully updated to trace Native Americans' experiences through the 2020 election and the Biden administration, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the crisis of murdered and missing indigenous women. This book provides a comprehensive history of Native Americans from their earliest appearances in North America to the present, highlighting the complexity and diversity of their cultures and experiences. Contrasting the misconception that Native Americans were consistently victims without power, native voices permeate the text and shape its narrative, underlining the vitality of native peoples and cultures in the context of regional, continental, and global developments. The new edition highlights the role of Native Americans as agents of resistance and progress, rooted in the perspective that their activism has been instrumental throughout history and in the present day. To enrich student understanding, the book also includes a variety of pedagogical tools including short biographical profiles, key review questions, a rich series of maps and illustrations, chapter chronologies, a glossary, and recommendations for further reading. Spanning centuries of developments into the present day, First Americans is the approachable, essential student introduction to Native American history.

Covering Central America, the United States, and Canada, this book not only provides an introduction to the history of North American Indians, but also offers a description of the material and intellectual ways that Native American cultures have influenced the life and institutions of people across the globe.

Rich with photos, maps, and sidebars, Native Peoples of the Americas covers native peoples from the past and present. Readers will learn about early civilizations, languages, religions, arts, and cultures of the indigenous peoples of the United States, Canada, and Middle and South America

In the nineteenth century, nearly all Native American men living along the southern New England coast made their living traveling the world's oceans on whaleships. Many were career whalemen, spending twenty years or more at sea. Their labor invigorated economically depressed reservations with vital income and led to complex and surprising connections with other Indigenous peoples, from the islands of the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean. At home, aboard ship, or around the world, Native American seafarers found themselves in a variety of situations, each with distinct racial expectations about who was "Indian" and how "Indians" behaved. Treated by their white neighbors as degraded dependents incapable of taking care of themselves, Native New Englanders nevertheless rose to positions of command at sea. They thereby complicated myths of exploration and expansion that depicted cultural encounters as the meeting of two peoples, whites and Indians. Highlighting the shifting racial ideologies that shaped the lives of these whalemen, Nancy Shoemaker shows how the category of "Indian" was as fluid as the whalemen were mobile.

This book defines the broad parameters of social change for Native American nations in the twenty-first century, as well as their prospects for cultural continuity. Many of the themes Champagne tackles are of general interest in the study of social change including governmental, economic, religious, and environmental perspectives.