History & Stories

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 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...

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...

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...

This book presents two of the most important traditions of the Dakota people, the Red Road and the Holy Dance, as told by Samuel Mniyo and Robert Goodvoice, two Dakota men from the Wahpeton Dakota Nation near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada...

Pandemonium wafted up out of Deadwood Gulch whenever bellowing, muddy oxen teams led wagons rattling into town. For a decade, thousands of bull trains hauled all that miners, settlers and ne'er-do-wells needed to survive in that isolated prairie oasis...

In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers. Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries...

This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty‑first century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakota roots as marginal hunter‑gatherers and...

Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones brings readers a spine-tingling Native American horror novella. Walking through his own house at night, a fifteen-year-old thinks he sees another person stepping through a doorway. Instead of the people who could be...

Dispatches of radical political engagement from people taking a stand against the Dakota Access Pipeline It is prophecy. A Black Snake will spread itself across the land, bringing destruction while uniting Indigenous nations. The Dakota Access Pipeline...

“Land of Nakoda” is a vivid account of the history, legends, customs, crafts, and ceremonies of the Assiniboine Indians of the northern plains. First published in 1942, it was written and illustrated by tribal members who interviewed the Old...

The largest known collection of ledger art ever acquired by one individual is Mark Lansburgh’s diverse assemblage of more than 140 drawings, now held by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and catalogued in this important book. The...

For Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people, historical trauma, chronically underfunded federal programs, and broken promises on the part of the US government have resulted in gaping health, educational, and economic disparities compared to the general...

Since its founding in 1988, the Autry Museum of the American West has expanded its vision and its collections in profound ways. From its original focus on the history, art, and popular culture inspired by the West and its attendant myths, the...

On August 19, 1854, U.S. Army lieutenant John L. Grattan led a detachment of twenty-nine soldiers and one civilian interpreter to a large Lakota encampment near Fort Laramie to arrest an Indian man accused of killing a Mormon emigrant’s cow. The...

Over the course of his career, artist Paul Dyck (1917–2006) assembled more than 2,000 nineteenth-century artworks created by the buffalo-hunting peoples of the Great Plains. Only with its acquisition by the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill...

Howard Terpning is one of the most lauded painters of Western art and considered by many to be a national treasure. He is known as the "storyteller of the Native American" because of his devotion to and respect for his subject matter, almost exclusively...

More than one hundred color reproductions--accompanied by an illuminating text by Elmer Kelton--capture the rich history and culture of native Americans in artwork inspired by the traditions of the Crow, Sioux, Apache, Blackfeet, Nez Perce, and other...

Although some aspects of Sioux history such as the Battle of the Little Big Horn and the Massacre at Wounded Knee are included in American history texts, along with mention of famous Sioux leaders such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, little attention is...

The last significant clash of arms in the American Indian Wars took place on December 29, 1890, on the banks of Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. Of the 350 Teton Sioux Indians there, two-thirds were women and children. When the smoke cleared, 84 men...

On December 29, 1890, the U.S. Seventh Cavalry killed more than two hundred Lakota Ghost Dancers – including men, women, and children – at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota.  After the work of death ceased at Wounded Knee, the work of...

The history of black Elk Peak - previously known as Hinhan Kaga and more recently, as Harney Peak - remained segmented and scattered throughout the shadows of antiquity, until now.The natural landmark's namesake, Black Elk, experienced his great vision...