History & Stories

As we face an ever-more-fragmented world, What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? demands a return to the force of lineage—to spiritual, social, and ecological connections across time. It sparks a myriad of ageless-yet-urgent questions:...

On a walk through a snow-covered garden, big sister Miriam claims to hear the sound of a snow dragon. Little sister Celeste has lots of questions: snow dragons are real? Where do they hide? What do they eat? And is that frost on the greenhouse windows or...

Northern Plains Native Americans: A Modern Wet Plate Perspective (VOLUME 3) presents a selection from Balkowitsch's photographic project which aims to capture 1000 wet plate portraits of Native Americans over four volumes. Following in the footsteps of...

“The single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States,” Vine Deloria Jr. called it. For the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara communities living on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, the...

Haskell Institute of Lawrence, Kansas, first opened its doors in 1884 to twenty-two Ponca and Ottawa children, sent there to be taught Anglo-Protestant cultural values. For a century and a quarter since that time, this famous boarding school institution...

In The Sacred Wisdom of the Native Americans, Professor Larry J. Zimmerman tells the tragic tale of their conquest and dispossession, followed by their survival against the odds and the renewal of pride in a distinctive cultural heritage. Learn...

Lamesa, Texas, July 1989.  It’s the summer before senior year for best friends Tolly Driver and Amber Dennison.  They’re not in the marching band, they’re not in the FFA - they don’t really count.  Amber’s the...

Ezra Cloud hates living in Northeast Minneapolis. His father is a professor of their language, Ojibwe, at a local college, so they have to be there. But Ezra hates the dirty, polluted snow around them. He hates being away from the rez at...

Tessa loves how her grandmother always smells of campfire stories.  Mom says it’s because Kohkom spends her days sewing onto smoked hides.  Inspired, Tessa asks Kokomo to teach her beading, but first she must listen and learn the many...

References to the Indian Wars, those conflicts that accompanied US continental expansion, suffuse American military history. From Black Hawk helicopters to the exclamation “Geronimo” used by paratroopers jumping from airplanes, words and...

The American buffalo—our nation’s official mammal—is an improbable, shaggy beast that has found itself at the center of many of our most mythic and sometimes heartbreaking tales. The largest land animals in the Western Hemisphere, they...

It took less than a century.  A bison population that once numbered in the millions and stretched across North America was reduced, in a relative blink, to just a few dozen animals primarily in Yellowstone National Park.  With the bison’s...

Billy Mills was once an orphan on the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation. But before his father was called to the ancestors, he told Billy how to conquer his suffering: You have broken wings, son. You have to dig deeper, below the anger, the...

When Mother Earth was very young and the Great Spirit had created all the beings, he noticed how quiet everything was. As he walked about the earth, listening to the sounds of the animals and the wind and the waters, some birds flying by caught his eye...

This book examines the importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and how it can provide models for a time-tested form of sustainability needed in the world today. The essays, written by a team of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds,...

Once number ing in the tens of millions, these magnificent creatures played a significant role in the varies ecosystems they occupied and North American Indigenous People depended upon them. With the arrival of Europeans, the Buffalo were all but...

The Rights of Indians and Tribes explains Federal Indian Law in a conversational manner, yet is highly authoritative, containing over 2000 footnotes with citations to relevant court decisions, statutes, and agency regulations. Since its initial...

When local girl Loren includes Mara in a traditional Blackfeet Giveaway to honor Loren’s missing sister, Mara thinks she’ll finally make some friends on the Blackfeet reservation.  Instead, a girl from the Giveaway, Samantha White...

Sing for the Red Dress is both a love story between university professor Dr. Gavin Lone Wolf and Washington DC lawyer Katherine Hill and a haunting narrative of the ongoing problem on Indian reservations of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW)...

It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their...

“In my seventh winter, when my head only reached my Appe’s rib, a White Man came into camp. Bare trees scratched sky. Cold was endless. He moved through trees like strikes of sunlight. My Bia said he came with bad intentions, like a Water...

When Dr. Van Vierlans receives an invitation from Mrs. Elizabeth Van der Horst to give a lecture at her island mansion off the coast of South Carolina, he doesn't think twice. There’s a generous honorarium, and he relishes the chance to revisit the...

First published in 1970 and long out of print, The Indians Won is a stunning work of speculative fiction that imagines that, following the defeat of Custer and Benteen at the Little Bighorn in 1876, the many Indigenous tribes of America formed...

Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did...