New Books in Native American Studies
Society & Culture
The birchbark canoe is among the most remarkable Indigenous technologies in North America, facilitating mobility throughout the watery world of the Great Lakes region and its borderlands. In Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (UNC Press, 2023), Texas Tech University historian John William Nelson argues that canoes, and a deep understanding of portages sites where canoes could be carried between waterways, helped secure the region around Chicago as decidedly Native space until well into the nineteenth century. By using the methodologies of borderlands history, ecotone and environmental history, and Indigenous Studies, Nelson demonstrates how the story of Chicago's array of portages runs counter to traditional narratives of the inexorable growth of European and American power in North America from the seventeenth century onwards. Indeed, the more colonizers tried to maintain a grip on this slipper landscape, the more it seemed to slide through their grasp. In Muddy Ground, Nelson takes one of the most written-about American spaces - Chicago - and turns the usual narrative on its head, showing how until settlers could actively change Chicago's landscape, it would remain a place of Indigenous power and historical possibility.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies
Benjamin Bryce and David M. K. Sheinin, "Race and Transnationalism in the Americas" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)
John H. Cable, "Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi" (UP of Kansas, 2023)
Danielle Taschereau Mamers, "Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing: Documentation, Administration, and the Interventions of Indigenous Art" (Fordham UP, 2023)
Lorenza B. Fontana, "Recognition Politics: Indigenous Rights and Ethnic Conflict in the Andes" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Rose Miron, "Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
Annaliese Jacobs Claydon, "Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge: The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Politics of Truth" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Brooke Larson, "The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia" (Duke UP, 2023)
Stefan Aune, "Indian Wars Everywhere: Colonial Violence and the Shadow Doctrines of Empire" (U California Press, 2023)
Christina Gish Hill et al., "National Parks, Native Sovereignty: Experiments in Collaboration" (U Oklahoma Press, 2024)
Sarah Keyes, "American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
Gregory D. Smithers, "Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019)
Emily Legg, "Stories of Our Living Ephemera: Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907" (Utah State UP, 2023)
Matthew C. Ward, "Making the Frontier Man: Violence, White Manhood, and Authority in the Early Western Backcountry" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)
Ian Saxine, "Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier" (NYU Press, 2019)
Deborah Taffa, "Whiskey Tender: A Memoir" (Harper, 2024)
Daniel Immerwahr, "How to Hide an Empire: The History of the Greater United States" (FSG, 2019)
Matthew Kruer, "Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Charlotte Coté, "A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast" (U Washington Press, 2022)
Cynthia J. Sylvester, "The Half-White Album" (U New Mexico Press, 2023)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
The Modern West
New Books in Philosophy
New Books in Sociology
New Books in Psychoanalysis
New Books in Economics
New Books in Psychology