Culture

A century ago, a Philadelphia philanthropist sponsored a series of journeys to the American West to document Native American cultures and traditions. The Wanamaker Expeditions, conducted between 1908 and 1913, visited Crow Agency, Montana, near the site...

Mitch Caddo started out with the best of intentions. After his mother’s sudden death in a car crash, he finished law school and returned to Passage Rouge—the reservation where he grew up—hoping to represent disadvantaged families in...

Ethnographer and American Indian studies scholar David Kamper examines how Indigenous youth and adults are making basketball and skateboarding meaningful to their communities by sustaining the transmission of intergenerational knowledge and combatting...

During the drought-stricken summer of 1950, two Lakota boys, ages eleven and six, huddle in a boxcar hurtling through the prairie night as they run from a government agent sent to take the younger boy to an Indian boarding school. But what begins as a...

Regarding peyote use among Native Americans, an ethnologist noted in 1891: “The ceremonial eating of the plant has become the great religious rite of all tribes of the southern plains.” But, as Lisa D. Barnett observes in Peyote...

Follow the concept of “right crop, right place” to grow delicious fruits and vegetables that will thrive in your outdoor space Expert gardener Lucy Chamberlain grows more than 150 varieties of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and crops in her...

Take charge of your health naturally with tried-and-true plant based treatments.  Explore the health properties and practical uses of more than 140 medicinal herbs, such as turmeric, rosemary, and ginger.  Browse the fully illustrated expert...

The older I get I think back to my childhood when life was simple.  We were grateful to get something to eat and were never picky about the food that was set in front of us.  We didn’t have indoor plumbing.  We got wood from nearby...

South Dakota Warriors in Khaki is a record of the native veterans from the nine reservations in South Dakota.  It includes some veterans who served in the 1920s. In the 1930 Federal Census, these men were listed as veterans of the World War. South...

Abe Jacobs is Kanien’kehá:ka from Ahkwesáhsne―or, as white people say, a Mohawk Indian from the Saint Regis Tribe. At eighteen, Abe left the reservation where he was raised and never looked back. He met the love of his life, started...

In Bad Medicine, Sarah A. Whitt exposes how Native American boarding schools and other settler institutions like asylums, factories, and hospitals during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worked together as a part of an...

Forage more than 100 delicious edible plants straight from your backyard with this useful, engaging, beautifully illustrated guide. Nature-lovers, gardeners, and foodies can turn their backyard into a bounty with tips for identifying wild plants, advice...

In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner traveled to Fort Laramie to document the federal government’s treaty negotiations with the Lakota and other tribes of the northern plains. Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of...

How colonial conquest was driven by state-sponsored, profit-driven campaigns to murder and mutilate Indian peoples in North America From the mid-1600s through the late 1800s, states sponsored scalp bounties and volunteer campaigns to murder and mutilate...

Frances Densmore's Teton Sioux Music and Culture is one of the many volumes that resulted from her prolific life-long project to record and transcribe the traditional music of American Indian peoples. The book explores the role of music in all...

The story of "western expansion" is a familiar one: U.S. government agents, through duplicity and force, persuaded Native Americans to sign treaties that gave away their rights to the land. But this framing, argues Martin Case, hides a deeper story. Land...

In this rich collection of prose, poetry, and recipes, Teresa Peterson shares how she found refuge from the struggle to reconcile her Christianity and Dakota spirituality, discovering solace and ceremony in communing with the earth. Observing and...

Plants for Desperate Times is an introduction to the diversity of plant foods that have saved millions of lives during lethal food shortages. While not a field guide, it addresses questions about what famine foods are and why they are important. The...

The untold history of the multiracial making of the border between Canada and the United States.Often described as the longest undefended border in the world, the Canada-United States border was born in blood, conflict, and uncertainty. At the end of the...

Prominent Redoubt County rancher Hal Lamar and retired Smokey River Bureau of Indian Affairs Agency Superintendent William Black Spotted Horse could not be more different. Forced to travel to a different continent to cooperate in a daring rescue mission...

It falls to university professor Dr. Gavin Lone Wolf to protect and preserve his family's surprising legacy and to solve a murder on South Dakota's Smokey River Indian Reservation. Set within the framework of the historical Battle of the Little Bighorn...

Stephen Graham Jones takes familiar horror tropes—zombies, camping mishaps, damaged children—and intertwines them with the dark forces of human nature to create unique and unforgettable short fiction. These thirteen tales run the gamut,...

In the second volume of The Great Vanishing Act, voices from Indian Country convey the insidious impacts of the Indian Reorganization Act confronting the existential and pragmatic questions facing many Native Nations to determine who is—and...

Of Living Stone: Perspectives on Continuous Knowledge and the Work of Vine Deloria, Jr. is a collection of new essays on the legacy of Vine Deloria, Jr., one of the most influential thinkers of our time. This insightful collection features more than...