History & Stories

Dreaming Our Futures features twenty-eight Native painters, primarily Dakota and Ojibwe, who live in the Midwest or have family or tribal connections here. The artists represent a range of generations, professional experience, and...

Indigenous Peoples have always carried the knowledge necessary to heal. When our people heal, our families heal, our communities heal and our land will heal. You cannot have one without the other. These stories are teachings, prophecy and protocols...

If you think you know the Curtis story, think again. This landmark publication is not only packed with stunning illustrations but also astounding discoveries about Curtis's life. For example, the 1898 perpetually repeated legend of Curtis rescuing George...

A groundbreaking survey of contemporary Indigenous art and its enduring connections to the land.The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans brings together works by many of today’s most boldly innovative Native...

John William Dear was born in 1845 into a close-knit farming family in Northern Virginia. After the Civil War, when he fought as a Confederate soldier with Mosby's Rangers, he went West. For fifteen years, until his premature death, Dear lived a...

Red Nation Rising is the first book ever to investigate and explain the violent dynamics of bordertowns. Bordertowns are white-dominated towns and cities that operate according to the same political and spatial logics as all other American towns and...

Our Way: A Parallel History dispels the myths, stereotypes, and absence of information about American Indian, Native Alaskan, and Native Hawaiian people in the master narrative of US history. For most of American history, stories of the country’s...

The first posthumous survey of Ojibwe artist Jim Denomie’s paintings, which invite further conversation about American history, memory, and place. A prolific artist, Jim Denomie (La Courte Oreilles Band, Ojibwe, 1955–2022) did not begin...

When the cultural identity of the Turtle Mountain Band of Pembina Chippewa was challenged by European Americans--who conceived of progress in terms of cultivated farmland--a tribal-federal conundrum occurred. Historian John M. Shaw untangles the...

Born at the turn of the 21st century, The Storyteller, also known as Ishkwegaabawiikwe (Last Standing Woman), carries her people’s past within her memories. The White Earth Anishinaabe people have lived on the same land for over a thousand years...

The gripping, forgotten tale of Ira Hayes—a Native American icon and World War II legend who famously helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima but spent the latter half of his life haunted by being a war hero.IRA HAYES tells the...

The long-awaited, profoundly moving, and unforgettable new novel from PEN Award–winning Native American author Mona Susan Power, spanning three generations of Yanktonai Dakota women from the 19th century to the present day.From the mid-century...

Back From the Collapse is a clarion call for restoring one of North America’s most underappreciated and overlooked ecosystems: the grasslands of the Great Plains. This region has been called America’s Serengeti in recognition of its...

The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize Mines - his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.  Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable...

It's back! In search of the century, the American photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) started his thirty-year project to produce a monumental study of North American Indians.  Using an approach that was both artistically and...

This bold and breathtaking speculative fiction anthology showcases a number of new and emerging Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island.  These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive...

Pervasive myths of European domination and indigenous submission in the Americas receive an overdue corrective in this far-reaching revisionary work. Despite initial upheavals caused by the European intrusion, Native people often thrived after contact,...

A photographic and narrative celebration of contemporary Native American life and cultures, alongside an in-depth examination of issues that Native people face, by celebrated photographer and storyteller Matika Wilbur of the Swinomish and Tulalip...

The summer of 1865 marked the transition from the Civil War to Indian war on the western plains. With the rest of the country’s attention still focused on the East, the U.S. Army began an often forgotten campaign against the Sioux, Cheyenne, and...

In the 140 years since the defeat of George Armstrong Custer and his troops at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, scholars and other visitors have combed the site of today’s Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument for evidence that might...

A pathbreaking account of how Indigenous Americans created rich mythologies to make sense of the fossil remains of dinosaurs and other extinct creatures. Well before Columbus, Native Americans observed the enormous and mysterious petrified bones of...

Where does the Midwest end and the Great Plains begin? And does it matter? The authors of essays in this latest collection from the Center for Western Studies believe such questions are important to understanding how regional identity forms and...

Rhodes Professor of History at the University of Oxford Pekka Hämäläinen leads off this collection of new perspectives on South Dakota history with a stunning interpretation of Lakota power in the Northern Plains. With their mastery of the...

The story of the Apsaalooke (Crow) men who scouted for the Seventh United States Cavalry in 1876 has been told by historians, with details sometimes distorted or fabricated. Biilaachia--better known as White Swan--survived the Battle of Little Bighorn...