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.
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Paul Peart-Smith, "Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States: A Graphic Interpretation" (Beacon Press, 2024)
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia" (NYU Press, 2019)
Sarah Miller-Davenport, "Gateway State: Hawai’i and the Cultural Transformation of American Empire" (Princeton UP, 2019)
Mark Valeri, "The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Holly Miowak Guise, "Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II" (U Washington Press, 2024)
Douglas K. Miller, "Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century" (UNC Press, 2019)
Jaclyn Sumner, "Indigenous Autocracy: Power, Race, and Resources in Porfirian Tlaxcala, Mexico" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Tore C. Olsson, "Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)
Derek Taira, "Forward without Fear: Native Hawaiians and American Education in Territorial Hawai'i, 1900-1941" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
Pekka Hämäläinen, "Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power" (Yale UP, 2019)
Jacob Lee, "Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi" (Harvard UP, 2019)
Alfred Peredo Flores, "Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944–1962" (Cornell UP, 2023)
Bayley J. Marquez, "Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space" (U California Press, 2024)
David H. Wilson, "Northern Paiutes of the Malheur: High Desert Reckoning in Oregon Country" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
Matthew Goldmark, "Forms of Relation: Composing Kinship in Colonial Spanish America" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
Kathleen DuVal, "Native Nations: A Millennium in North America" (Random House, 2024)
Timothy G. Anderson and Brian Schoen, "Settling Ohio: First Peoples and Beyond" (Ohio UP, 2023)
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)
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