Culture

Through meticulous research, Hidden Disgrace pierces through the veil of descriptions of Indians as either savages or “Noble Savages” and describes them as real people with both strengths and weaknesses. Likewise, it takes a hard look at the...

When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom. In her absence, the landscape had been altered beyond recognition, her tribal...

From the wily – and some say dangerous – jackalope to the world’s larges mammoth grave, this book makes history fun and pulls back the curtain on some of Mount Rushmore State’s most fascinating and compelling stories.  This...

This book is a reprinted series of bible stories that was first published in 1924, written as history, in the language of the Teton Sioux Indians (Lakota), by Father Buechel, who lived and worked among the Lakota people on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge...

Within six months of the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, seventy-five hundred American Indians enlisted in the military, and the numbers grey steadily.  By war's end, at least twenty-five thousand American Indian men and women had...

Historians and others have long debated events surrounding the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 1890, which followed decades of conflict between American Indians and the United States military in the West. Government officials, reporters, and white...

Nothing can change the terrible facts of the Sand Creek Massacre. The human toll of this horrific event and the ensuing loss of a way of life have never been fully recounted until now. In Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway, Louis Kraft tells...

The Battle of the Rosebud may well be the largest Indian battle ever fought in the American West. The monumental clash on June 17, 1876, along Rosebud Creek in southeastern Montana pitted George Crook and his Shoshone and Crow allies against Sioux and...

Territorial politics in the late-nineteenth-century West is typically viewed as a closed-door game of unprincipled opportunism or is caricatured, as in the classic film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, as a drunken exercise in bombast and...

The Last Sovereigns is the story of how Sioux chief Sitting Bull resisted the white man’s ways as a last best hope for the survival of an indigenous way of life on the Great Plains—a nomadic life based on buffalo and indigenous plants...

In War-Path and Bivouac, published in 1890, John Finerty (1846–1908) recalled his summer following George Crook’s infamous campaign against the Sioux in 1876. Historians have long surmised that Finerty’s correspondence covering the...

The years between 1875 and 1910 saw a revolution in the economy of the Flathead Reservation, home to the Salish and Kootenai Indians. In 1875 the  tribes had supported themselves through hunting—especially buffalo—and gathering...

Why We Serve commemorates the 2020 opening of the National Native American Veterans Memorial at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the first landmark in Washington, DC, to recognize the bravery and sacrifice of Native veterans...

Dismissed as a “gaudy liar” by most historians and often discredited by writers who deprecated his mixed blood, James Pierson Beckwourth was one of the giants of the early West, certainly deserving to rank alongside Kit Carson, Bill Williams,...

Fort Union and Fort William offers a window into the fur and bison robe trade of the early 1830s, building upon the previous work of editors W. Raymond Wood and Michael M. Casler in Fort Tecumseh and Fort Pierre Chouteau: Journal and Letter Books,...

Historian Jerome A. Greene is renowned for his memorable chronicles of egregious events involving American Indians and the U.S. military, including Sand Creek, Washita, and Wounded Knee. Now, inJanuary Moon, Greene draws from extensive research and...

Since its first publication in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me has become one of the most important—and successful—history books of our time. Having sold nearly two million copies, the book also won an American Book Award and the...

Edible wild plants, mushrooms, fruits, and nuts grow along roadsides, amid country fields, and in urban parks. All manner of leafy greens, mushrooms, and herbs that command hefty prices at the market are bountiful outdoors and free for the taking. But to...

Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the...

Through the interpretive lens of colonial theory, Jeffrey Ostler presents an original analysis of the tumultuous relationship between the Plains Sioux and the United States in the 1800s. He provides novel insights on well-known aspects of the Sioux...

Robert Hopkins was a man caught between two worlds. As a member of the Dakota Nation, he was unfairly imprisoned, accused of taking up arms against U.S. soldiers when war broke out with the Dakota in 1862. However, as a Christian convert who was also a...

Too Strong to Be Broken explores the dynamic life of Edward J. Driving Hawk, a Vietnam and Korean War veteran, chairman of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, former president of the National Congress of American Indians, husband, father, recovered alcoholic,...

On December 28, 1894, the day before the fourth anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee, Lakota chief Two Sticks was hanged in Deadwood, South Dakota. The headline in the Black Hills Daily Times the next day read “A GOOD...

Indian basketball was born of hard times and hard places, its evolution traceable back to the boarding schools—or “Indian schools”—of the early twentieth century. Davies describes the ways in which the sport, plied as a tool of...