History of the Dawes Act.

In Peyote and the Yankton Sioux, Thomas Constantine Maroukis focuses on Yankton Sioux spiritual leader Sam Necklace, tracing his family’s history for seven generations. Through this history, Maroukis shows how Necklace and his family shaped and were shaped by the Native American Church. Sam Necklace was chief priest of the Yankton Sioux Native American Church from 1929 to 1949, and the four succeeding generations of his family have been members of the Church. As chief priest, Necklace helped establish the Peyote religion firmly among the Yankton, thus maintaining cultural and spiritual autonomy even when the U.S. government denied them, and American Indians generally, political and economic self-determination. Because the message of peyotism resonated with Yankton pre-reservation beliefs and, at the same time, had parallels with Christianity, Sam Necklace and many other Yankton supported its acceptance. The Yanktons were among the first northern-plains groups to adopt the Peyote religion, which they saw as an essential corpus of spiritual truths.

This collection of eleven original essays goes beyond traditional, border-driven studies to place the histories of Native Americans, indigenous peoples, and First Nation peoples in a larger context than merely that of the dominant nation. As Transnational Indians in the North American West shows, transnationalism can be expressed in various ways. To some it can be based on dependency, so that the history of the indigenous people of the American Southwest can only be understood in the larger context of Mexico and Central America. Others focus on the importance of movement between Indian and non-Indian worlds as Indians left their (reserved) lands to work, hunt, fish, gather, pursue legal cases, or seek out education, to name but a few examples. Conversely, even natives who remained on reserved lands were nonetheless transnational inasmuch as the reserves did not fully “belong” to them but were administered by a nation-state. Boundaries that scholars once viewed as impermeable, it turns out, can be quite porous. This book stands to be an important contribution to the scholarship that is increasingly breaking free of old boundaries.

Amid the decline of U.S. military campaigns against Native Americans in the late nineteenth century, assimilation policy arose as the new front in the Indian Wars, with its weapons the deployment of culture and law, and its locus the American Indian home and family. In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Piatote tracks the double movement of literature and law in the contest over the aims of settler-national domestication and the defense of tribal-national culture, political rights, and territory.

Unearthing Indian Land offers a comprehensive examination of the consequences of more than a century of questionable public policies. In this book, Kristin Ruppel considers the complicated issues surrounding American Indian land ownership in the United States. Under the General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act,individual Indians were issued title to land allotments while so-called “surplus”Indian lands were opened to non-Indian settlement. During the forty-seven years that the act remained in effect, American Indians lost an estimated 90 million acres of land—about two-thirds of the land they had held in 1887. Worse, the loss of control over the land left to them has remained an ongoing and insidious result. Unearthing Indian Land traces the complex legacies of allotment, including numerous instructive examples of a policy gone wrong. Aside from the initial catastrophic land loss, the fractionated land ownership that resulted from the act’s provisions has disrupted native families and their descendants for more than a century. With each new generation, the owners of tribal lands grow in number and therefore own ever smaller interests in parcels of land. It is not uncommon now to find reservation allotments co-owned by hundreds of individuals.Coupled with the federal government’s troubled trusteeship of Indian assets,this means that Indian landowners have very little control over their own lands. Illuminated by interviews with Native American landholders, this book is essential reading for anyone who is interested in what happened as a result of the federal government’s quasi-privatization of native lands.

Anthropology, politics, and history come together to form an insightful blend in this authoritative title covering kinship, tribalism, and nonurban cultures the world over. Both the theory and practical examples of tribal cultures are presented, with several chapters dedicated to the various schools of anthropological thought on nonurban societies, accompanied by a survey of tribal and indigenous cultures both historically and in modern times. American Indians, the indigenous peoples of South America, nomadic tribes of the Middle East, and Aboriginal Australians are a few of the societies explored in this extensive text.

Despite the central role blood quantum played in political formations of American Indian identity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there are few studies that explore how tribal nations have contended with this transformation of tribal citizenship. Those Who Belong explores how White Earth Anishinaabeg understood identity and blood quantum in the early twentieth century, how it was employed and manipulated by the U.S. government, how it came to be the sole requirement for tribal citizenship in 1961, and how a contemporary effort for constitutional reform sought a return to citizenship criteria rooted in Anishinaabe kinship, replacing the blood quantum criteria with lineal descent. Those Who Belong illustrates the ways in which Anishinaabeg of White Earth negotiated multifaceted identities, both before and after the introduction of blood quantum as a marker of identity and as the sole requirement for tribal citizenship. Doerfler’s research reveals that Anishinaabe leaders resisted blood quantum as a tribal citizenship requirement for decades before acquiescing to federal pressure. Constitutional reform efforts in the twenty-first century brought new life to this longstanding debate and led to the adoption of a new constitution, which requires lineal descent for citizenship.