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Anetso, a centuries-old Cherokee ball game still played today, is a vigorous, sometimes violent activity that rewards speed, strength, and agility. At the same time, it is the focus of several linked ritual activities. Is it a sport? Is it a religious ritual? Could it possibly be both? Why has it lasted so long, surviving through centuries of upheaval and change? Based on work in the field and in the archives, this book argues that members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation continue to perform selected aspects of their cultural identity by engaging in anetso, itself the hub of an extended ceremonial complex, or cycle. A precursor to lacrosse, anetso appears in all manner of Cherokee cultural narratives and has figured prominently in the written accounts of non-Cherokee observers for almost three hundred years. The anetso ceremonial complex incorporates a variety of activities which, taken together, complicate standard scholarly distinctions such as game versus ritual, public display versus private performance, and tradition versus innovation. This book provides a striking opportunity for rethinking the understanding of ritual and performance as well as their relationship to cultural identity. It also offers a sharp reappraisal of scholarly discourse on the Cherokee religious system, with particular focus on the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation.

From 2004 to 2006 the Osage Nation conducted a contentious governmental reform process in which sharply differing visions arose over the new government's goals, the Nation's own history, and what it means to be Osage. The primary debates were focused on biology, culture, natural resources, and sovereignty. This book documents the reform process in order to reveal the lasting effects of colonialism and to illuminate the possibilities for indigenous sovereignty. In doing so, it brings to light the many complexities of defining indigenous citizenship and governance in the twenty-first century. By situating the 2004–6 Osage Nation reform process within its historical and current contexts, the author illustrates how the Osage have creatively responded to continuing assaults on their nationhood. An account of a nation in the midst of its own remaking, the book presents an analysis of how legacies of European invasion and settlement in North America continue to affect indigenous people's views of selfhood and nationhood.

This book brings the histories of Creek Indians, African Americans, and whites in Oklahoma together into one story that explores the way races and nations were made and remade in conflicts over who would own land, who would farm it, and who would rule it. This story disrupts expected narratives of the American past, revealing how identities—race, nation, and class—took new forms in struggles over the creation of different systems of property. Conflicts were unleashed by a series of sweeping changes: the forced “removal” of the Creeks from their homeland to Oklahoma in the 1830s, the transformation of the Creeks' enslaved black population into landed black Creek citizens after the Civil War, the imposition of statehood and private landownership at the turn of the twentieth century, and the entrenchment of a sharecropping economy and white supremacy in the following decades. In struggles over land, wealth, and power, Oklahomans actively defined and redefined what it meant to be Native American, African American, or white.

This sweeping regional history traces the metamorphosis of the Native South from first contact in 1540 to the dawn of the eighteenth century, when indigenous people no longer lived in a purely Indian world but rather on the edge of an expanding European empire. Using a framework that its author calls the “Mississippian shatter zone” to explicate these tumultuous times, this book examines the European invasion, the collapse of the precontact Mississippian world, and the restructuring of discrete chiefdoms into coalescent Native societies in a colonial world. The story of one group—the Chickasaws—is closely followed through this period.

In the heart of Washington, D.C., a centuries-old landscape has come alive in the twenty-first century through a re-creation of the natural environment as the region's original peoples might have known it. Unlike most plantings that surround other museums on the National Mall, the landscape around the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) is itself a living exhibit, carefully created to reflect indigenous ways of thinking about the land and its uses. This book offers beautiful images of the museum's natural environment in every season as well as the uniquely designed building itself. Chapters provide an examination of indigenous peoples' long and varied relationship to the land in the Americas, an account of the museum designers' efforts to reflect traditional knowledge in the design of individual landscape elements, detailed descriptions of the 150 native plant species used, and an exploration of how the landscape changes seasonally.

The Lives in Objects presents a thoroughly researched and engaging study of the deerskin trade in the colonial Southeast, which is equally attentive to British American and Southeastern Indian cultures of production, distribution, and the consumption of goods. It challenges long-standing assumptions about Native American and European economic cultures in Early America, particularly the dichotomy that other scholars have drawn between gift-giving (associated with native pre-capitalist economies) and commodity exchange (associated with colonial market economies). This interpretation has tended to cast Native Americans as unwitting victims drawn into and made dependent on a trans-Atlantic marketplace. This book complicates that picture by showing how both sides (Southeastern Indian and British American) mixed gift-giving and commodity exchange in the deerskin trade, so much so that Southeastern Indians retained much greater agency as producers and consumers than the standard scholarly interpretation accords them. The result is a much more nuanced view of the trade and its impact on the economic and material lives of Southeastern Indian and British individuals. In this pursuit, this book also complicates the deerskin trade from the British perspective, showing that royal and colonial governments were not as willing to embrace modern free market values as we might assume.

Indigenous allies helped the Spanish gain a foothold in the Americas. What did these Indian conquistadors expect from the partnership, and what were the implications of their involvement in Spain's New World empire? This study of Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala places the Nahua, Zapotec, and Mixtec conquistadors of Guatemala and their descendants within a deeply Mesoamerican historical context. Drawing on archives, ethnography, and colonial Mesoamerican maps, it argues that the conquest cannot be fully understood without considering how these Indian conquistadors first invaded and then, of their own accord and largely by their own rules, settled in Central America. Shaped by pre-Columbian patterns of empire, alliance, warfare, and migration, the members of this diverse indigenous community became unified as the Mexicanos—descendants of Indian conquistadors in their adopted homeland. Their identity and higher status in Guatemalan society derived from their continued pride in their heritage, says the author, but also depended on Spanish colonialism's willingness to honor them. Throughout the book, the author charts the power of colonialism to reshape and restrict Mesoamerican society—even for those most favored by colonial policy and despite powerful continuities in Mesoamerican culture.

The election of Evo Morales as Bolivia's president in 2005 made him his nation's first indigenous head of state, a watershed victory for social activists and Native peoples. El Movimiento Sin Tierra (MST), or the Landless Peasant Movement, played a significant role in bringing Morales to power. Following in the tradition of the well-known Brazilian Landless movement, Bolivia's MST activists seized unproductive land and built farming collectives as a means of resistance to large-scale export-oriented agriculture. This book illustrates how landless peasants politicized indigeneity to shape grassroots land politics, reform the state, and secure human and cultural rights for Native peoples. It takes readers into the personal spaces of home and work, on long bus rides, and into meetings and newly built MST settlements to show how, in response to displacement, Indigenous identity is becoming ever more dynamic and adaptive. In addition to advancing this rich definition of indigeneity, the author explores the ways in which Morales has found himself at odds with Indigenous activists and, in so doing, shows that Indigenous people have a far more complex relationship to Morales than is generally understood.

The 1830s forced removal of Cherokees from their southeastern homeland became the most famous event in the Indian history of the American South, an episode taken to exemplify a broader experience of injustice suffered by Native peoples. In this book, Andrew Denson explores the public memory of Cherokee removal through an examination of memorials, historic sites, and tourist attractions dating from the early twentieth century to the present. White southerners, Denson argues, embraced the Trail of Tears as a story of Indian disappearance. Commemorating Cherokee removal affirmed white possession of southern places, while granting them the moral satisfaction of acknowledging past wrongs. During segregation and the struggle over black civil rights, removal memorials reinforced whites' authority to define the South's past and present. Cherokees, however, proved capable of repossessing the removal memory, using it for their own purposes during a time of crucial transformation in tribal politics and U.S. Indian policy. In considering these representations of removal, Denson brings commemoration of the Indian past into the broader discussion of race and memory in the South.

This book reconsiders the complex and often misunderstood history of Native peoples' engagement with Christianity and with Euro-American missionaries. Surveying mission encounters from contact through the mid-nineteenth century, the book looks at both American Christianity and indigenous religion. Chapters here explore a variety of postcontact identities, including indigenous Christians, “mission friendly” non-Christians, and ex-Christians, thereby exploring the shifting world of Native-white cultural and religious exchange. Rather than questioning the authenticity of Native Christian experiences, the chapters reveal how indigenous peoples negotiated change with regard to missions, missionaries, and Christianity. This book challenges the pervasive stereotype of Native Americans as culturally static and ill-equipped to navigate the roiling currents associated with colonialism and missionization.

Modern western Oregon was a crucial site of imperial competition in North America during the formative decades of the United States. This book examines relations among newcomers and between newcomers and Native peoples—focusing on political sovereignty, religion, trade, sexuality, and the land—from initial encounters to Oregon's statehood. It emphasizes Native perspectives, using the Chinook word Illahee (homeland) to refer to the indigenous world it examines, and argues that the process of Oregon's founding is best understood as a contest between the British Empire and a nascent American one, with Oregon's Native people and their lands at the heart of the conflict. The chapter identifies race, republicanism, liberal economics, and violence as the key ideological and practical components of American settler-colonialism. Native peoples faced capriciousness, demographic collapse, and attempted genocide, but they fought to preserve Illahee even as external forces caused the collapse of their world.

For decades, most American Indians have lived in cities, not on reservations or in rural areas. Still, scholars, policymakers, and popular culture often regard Indians first as reservation peoples, living apart from non-Native Americans. This book reorients our understanding of the experience of American Indians by tracing their migration to cities, exploring the formation of urban Indian communities, and delving into the shifting relationships between reservations and urban areas from the early twentieth century to the present. With a focus on Los Angeles, which by 1970 had more Native American inhabitants than any place outside the Navajo reservation, it shows how cities have played a defining role in modern American Indian life and examines the evolution of Native American identity in recent decades. The author emphasizes the lived experiences of Native migrants in realms including education, labor, health, housing, and social and political activism to understand how they adapted to an urban environment, and to consider how they formed—and continue to form—new identities. Though still connected to the places where indigenous peoples have preserved their culture, he argues that Indian identity must be understood as dynamic and fully enmeshed in modern global networks.

In 1663, the Puritan missionary John Eliot, with the help of a Nipmuck convert whom the English called James Printer, produced the first Bible printed in North America. It was printed not in English but in Algonquian, making it one of the first books printed in a Native language. This book examines the relationship between Native Americans and printed books over a two-hundred-year period, uncovering the individual, communal, regional, and political contexts for Native peoples' use of the printed word. From the northeastern woodlands to the Great Plains, the book argues, alphabetic literacy and printed books mattered greatly in the emergent, transitional cultural formations of indigenous nations threatened by European imperialism. The book showcases the varied ways that Native peoples produced and utilized printed texts over time, approaching them as both opportunity and threat. Surveying this rich history, the book addresses such issues as the role of white missionaries and Christian texts in the dissemination of print culture in Indian Country, the establishment of “national” publishing houses by tribes, the production and consumption of bilingual texts, the importance of copyright in establishing Native intellectual sovereignty, and the significance of illustrations.

Between the 1870s and the 1930s, the Lake Superior Ojibwe negotiated dramatic economic, political, and social changes. Spanning that period, which began with the tribe's removal to reservations and closed with the Indian New Deal, this book explores the critical relationship between Ojibwe sovereignty and labor. Following the transitions within key industries where the Ojibwe made their living, from the fur trade to agricultural and timber production to cultural tourism, the book argues that while encroaching white settlement forced the Ojibwe of Minnesota and Wisconsin to adapt to rapidly changing political and economic circumstances, they nevertheless strategically used treaty rights claims to sustain the seasonally determined subsistence activities that supplied the rhythm and texture of traditional Ojibwe life. Synthesizing information from diverse sources, including WPA documents, government reports, news stories, tourist scrapbooks, and Ojibwe memoirs, the book shows that even as American expansion and colonialism curtailed the Ojibwe's land base and sovereignty, Ojibwe people advocated for and exercised treaty rights in ways that allowed them to sustain indigenous lifeways while simultaneously meeting contemporary needs—a process of self-determination that continues today.

In this ethnography of Navajo (Diné) popular music culture, Kristina M. Jacobsen examines questions of Indigenous identity and performance by focusing on the surprising and vibrant Navajo country music scene. Through multiple first-person accounts, Jacobsen illuminates country music’s connections to the Indigenous politics of language and belonging, examining through the lens of music both the politics of difference and many internal distinctions Diné make among themselves and their fellow Navajo citizens. As the second largest tribe in the United States, the Navajo have often been portrayed as a singular and monolithic entity. Using her experience as a singer, lap steel player, and Navajo language learner, Jacobsen challenges this notion, showing how cultural intimacy and generational nostalgia play key roles in the ways Navajos distinguish themselves from one another through musical taste, linguistic abilities, geographic location, physical appearance, degree of Navajo or Indian blood, and class affiliations. By linking cultural anthropology to ethnomusicology, linguistic anthropology, and critical Indigenous studies, Jacobsen shows how Navajo poetics and politics offer important insights into the politics of Indigeneity in Native North America, highlighting the complex ways that identities are negotiated in multiple, often contradictory, spheres.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the federal government sought to forcibly assimilate Native Americans into American society through systematized land allotment. This book illuminates the impact of this policy on the Cherokee Nation, particularly within individual families and communities in modern-day northeastern Oklahoma. Emphasizing Cherokee agency, it reveals that Cherokee families' organization, cultural values, and social and economic practices allowed them to adapt to private land ownership by incorporating elements of the new system into existing domestic and community-based economies. Drawing on evidence from a range of sources, including Cherokee and United States censuses, federal and tribal records, local newspapers, maps, county probate records, family histories, and contemporary oral histories, the book demonstrates that Cherokee management of land perpetuated the values and behaviors associated with their sense of kinship, therefore uniting extended families. Although the loss of access to land and communal resources slowly impoverished the region, it reinforced the Cherokees' interdependence. The book argues that the persistence of extended family bonds allowed indigenous communities to retain a collective focus and resist aspects of federal assimilation policy during a period of great social upheaval.

The Colorado River region looms large in modern history, but has, in fact, played a pivotal role in the colonial designs of Euro-Americans since the first Spanish journey up the Colorado River in the sixteenth century. This book examines more than three centuries of indigenous life in the West, revealing how native peoples of present-day southern California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico maintained their autonomy amidst the unprecedented political, economic, and cultural changes occurring throughout the region. Over three hundred years, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans all encountered an “interior world”—a vast indigenous borderlands peopled by Mojaves, Quechans, Southern Paiutes, Utes, Yokuts, and others, and bound by trading and raiding among and between the tribes. These borders pulsated throughout the centuries before and after Spanish contact, solidifying to create an autonomous, interethnic indigenous space that expanded amidst an ever-encroaching global market economy. Situating itself within Indian country, the book investigates the borders and borderlands forged during this period, connecting the coastlines of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds with a vast indigenous continent.

Beginning with the iconic Indian Head test pattern, which followed television station sign-offs and preceded sign-ons from the mid-1940s through the 1970s, representations of Native Peoples have been a constant presence on TV. This book examines these representations, focusing on situational comedies of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Analyzing dozens of sitcoms from the United States and Canada, the book complicates assumptions that Native representations on TV are inherently stereotypical and escapist. From The Andy Griffith Show, The Brady Bunch, and Barney Miller to Different Strokes, King of the Hill, and Mixed Blessings, the sitcom has long integrated politics and social policy into its comforting format to communicate competing visions of “America” and indigenous-settler relations. Examining in detail indigenous portrayals, producers, and actors in sitcoms, the book underscores the complexity of Indian representations in the genre of the sitcom to show how such representations have been critical contributors to indigenous identities and relations between Natives and non-Natives.