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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Jack Glazier, "Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race" (MSU Press, 2020)
Natasha Varner, "La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico" (U Arizona Press, 2020)
John G. Turner, "They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty" (Yale UP, 2020)
Tony Tekaroniake Evans, "Teaching Native Pride: Upward Bound and the Legacy of Isabel Bond" (Washington State UP, 2020)
Justin Gage, "We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance" (U Oklahoma Press, 2020)
Liza Black, "Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
Audrey J. Horning, "Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic" (UNC Press, 2017)
Frederick Luis Aldama, "Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)
Julie Gibbings, "Our Time is Now: Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Agnès Delahaye, "Settling the Good Land: Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop’s New England" (Brill, 2020)
Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr., "Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in 18th-Century South America" (UNC Press, 2020)
Charles F. Walker, "Witness to the Age of Revolution: The Odyssey of Juan Bautista Tupac Amaru" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Denise E. Bates, "Basket Diplomacy: Leadership, Alliance-Building, and Resilience among the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, 1884-1984" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
David Tavárez, "The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico" (Stanford UP, 2011)
Andrew C. Isenberg, "The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2000)
Laura Briggs, "Taking Children: A History of American Terror" (U California Press 2020)
Sarah Shulist, "Transforming Indigenity: Urbanization and Language Revitalization in the Brazilian Amazon" (U Toronto Press, 2018)
Maurice S. Crandall, "These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598–1912" (UNC Press, 2019)
Jean Jackson, "Managing Multiculturalism: Indigeneity and the Struggle for Rights in Colombia" (Stanford UP, 2019)
Edward C. Valandra, "Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities" (Living Justice Press, 2020)
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