New Books in Native American Studies
Society & Culture
Historians of the American South have come to consider the mechanization and consolidation of cotton farming—the “Southern enclosure movement”—to be a watershed event in the region’s history. In the decades after World War II, this transition pushed innumerable sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and smallholders off the land, redistributing territory and resources upward to a handful of large, mainly white operators. By disproportionately displacing Black farmers, enclosure also slowed the progress of the civil rights movement and limited its impact.
Dr. John Cable’s Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi (University Press of Kansas, 2023) is among the first studies to explore that process through the interpretive lens of settler colonialism. Focusing on east-central Mississippi, home of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Dr. Cable situates enclosure in the long history of dispossession that began with Indian Removal. The book follows elite white landowners and Black and Choctaw farmers from World War II to 1960—the period when the old, labor-intensive farm structure collapsed. By acknowledging that this process occurred on taken land, Dr. Cable demonstrates that the records of agricultural agents, segregationist politicians, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) are traces of ongoing colonization.
The settler colonial framework, rarely associated with the postwar South, sheds important light on the shifting categories of race and class. It also prompts comparisons with other settler societies (states in southern and eastern Africa, for instance) whose timelines, racial regimes, and agrarian transitions were similar to those of the South. This postwar history of the South suggests ways in which the BIA’s termination policy dovetailed with Southern segregationism and, at the same time, points to some of the shortcomings of the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Daniel Ruiz-Serna, "When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories" (Duke UP, 2023)
Christen T. Sasaki, "Pacific Confluence: Fighting Over the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Hawai'i" (U California Press, 2022)
Timothy R. Pauketat, "Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America" (Oxford UP,
Elliott West, "Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
Elizabeth Elbourne, "Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770-1842" (Cambridge UP., 2022)
Joel E. Correia, "Disrupting the Patrón: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay's Chaco" (U California Press, 2023)
Susan Burch, "Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and Beyond Institutions" (UNC Press, 2021)
Andrew Curley, "Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation" (U Arizona Press, 2023)
Rani-Henrik Andersson and David C. Posthumus, "Lakhota: An Indigenous History" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)
Woody Holton, "Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution" (Simon and Schuster, 2021)
Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O'Brien, "Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
The Native American Veterans of Connecticut's Volunteer Regiments and the Union Army
Ronald L. Trosper, "Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands" (U Arizona Press, 2022)
Caroline Dodds Pennock, "On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe" (Knopf, 2023)
A History of the Métis Nation
Laura Janet Feller, "Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia: Powhatan People and the Color Line" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)
Sarah Foss, "On Our Own Terms: Development and Indigeneity in Cold War Guatemala" (UNC Press, 2022)
Elisabeth Eittreim, "Teaching Empire: Native Americans, Filipinos, and Us Imperial Education 1879-1918" (UP of Kansas, 2019)
Molly H. Bassett and Natalie Avalos, "Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes" (Equinox Publishing, 2022)
Benjamin Hoy, "A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border Across Indigenous Lands" (Oxford UP, 2021)
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