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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Megan Kate Nelson, "Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America" (Scribner, 2022)
Linda LeGarde Grover, "Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
Kyle T. Mays, "An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States" (Beacon Press, 2021)
Jennifer Scheper Hughes, "The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas" (NYU Press, 2021)
Paulette F. C. Steeves, "The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
Fay A. Yarbrough, "Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country" (UNC Press, 2021)
Philip J. Deloria, "Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract" (U Washington Press, 2019)
Samantha Seeley, "Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States" (UNC Press, 2021)
Aldona Jonaitis, "Art of the Northwest Coast," Second Edition (U Washington Press, 2021)
Kevin Bruyneel, "Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States" (UNC Press, 2021)
Margaret D. Jacobs, "After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands" (Princeton UP, 2021)
James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely, "Confederates and Comancheros: Skullduggery and Double-Dealing in the Texas-New Mexico Borderlands" (U Oklahoma Press, 2021)
Marilyn Lake, "Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform" (Harvard UP, 2019)
Efrén O. Pérez, "Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
Alaina E. Roberts, "I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
Andrea Warner, "Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography" (Graystone Books, 2018)
Dina Gilio-Whitaker, "As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock" (Beacon Press, 2019)
Roberto J. González, "Connected: How a Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network" (U California Press, 2020)
Nathaniel Morris, "Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans: Indigenous Communities and the Revolutionary State in Mexico's Gran Nayar, 1910-1940" (U Arizona Press, 2020)
A. S. Dillingham, "Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico" (Stanford UP, 2021)
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