I grew up in Michigan, in the United States, where I was surrounded by places named with Native American names. I drove to Saginaw to play in basketball tournaments and to Pontiac to watch an NBA team play. Now in Kansas,

Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Harvard University Press, 2016) maps the intricate, intersecting channels of information exchange in the early American South, exploring how people in the colonial world came into possession of...

Heather Miyano Kopelson explores how religion, primarily expressed through bodily action, contributed to colonial notions of difference in her recent book Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (NYU Press, 2014).

On November 11, 2015, leaders and citizens of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy–Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk and Tuscarora–will gather in the small lakeside city of Canandaigua, New York to commemorate the 221st anniversary o...

Owning property. Being property. Becoming propertyless. These are three themes of white possession that structure Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s brilliant new inquiry into the dynamics of race and Indigeneity in “postcolonizing” societies like Australia.

13,000-years ago, the people of the first identifiable culture in North America were hunting mammoth and mastodon, bison, and anything else they could launch their darts and spears at, and undoubtedly, most assuredly,

In this episode of New Books in Archaeology we talk with Douglas B. Bamforth about his new book The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska (University of New Mexico Press, 2015). Bamforth focuses primarily on Paleoindian land use repre...

When Howard Zinn published A People’s History of the United States in 1980, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was thrilled. “I used it as a text immediately,” she remembers. Comrades in the movement anti-war movement, Zinn and Dunbar-Ortiz shared a belief that a ra...

In his new book Native Americans on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths, and the ‘Good Indian’ (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), Michael Ray FitzGerald reviews how television represented Native Americans, including in both positive and negative stereotypes.

For as long as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick has been a staple of the American literary canon, one element often goes unnoticed. The ship commanded by the monomanacial Ahab on his quest to slay the great white whale is named the Pequod,

Last month, VICE NEWS released a short documentary about the Navajo Nation called “Cursed by Coal.” The images and stories confirm the title. “Seems like everything’s just dying out here,” says Navajo citizen Joe Allen. “It’s because of the mine.

In 2012, a young Cherokee girl named Veronica became famous. The widespread and often coercive adoption and fostering of Indigenous children by non-Native families has long been known, discussed, and challenged in Indian Country. Now,

If George Armstrong Custer had kept off of Greasy Grass that June day in 1875, Vine Deloria, Jr.’s manifesto might well have been called “Canby Died For Your Sins.” The highest ranking U.S. military official to be killed in the so-called “Indian Wars,

Often when we think of missions to Native Americans or people of African descent, we think of white missionaries. In his book Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2013), Dr. Edward E.

Few years in U.S. history call to mind such immediate stock images as 1776. Powdered wigs. Founding fathers. Red coats. And if asked to place this assembly of objects and people, a few cities stand out: Boston. Philadelphia. Williamsburg, perhaps.

In Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance  (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Mark Rifkin, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and incoming president of the Native American and In...

For all the incisive work published in Native American and Indigenous studies over the past decades, troubling historical myths still circulate in both academic and popular discourse. One of the most persistent is how we tell the story of the Atlantic ...

Arica Coleman did not start out to write a legal history of “the one-drop rule,” but as she began exploring the relationship between African American and Native peoples of Virginia, she unraveled the story of how the law created a racial divide that th...

If you have spent a bit of time in Germany or with German friends, you may have noticed the deep interest and affinity many Germans have for American Indians. What are the origins of this striking and enduring fascination? In many ways,

Is genetic testing a new national obsession? From reality TV shows to the wild proliferation of home testing kits, there’s ample evidence it might just be. And among the most popular tests of all is for so-called “Native American DNA.

We all know the song. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” And now, thankfully, we all know the controversy; celebrating a perpetrator of genocide might say a few unpleasant things about the country doing the celebrating.

The maps drawn up by early settlers to plot their inexorable expansion were not the first representations of North American space. Colonialism does not simply impose a new reality, after all, but attempts to shatter and discard whole systems of underst...

Pauline Turner Strong‘s new book American Indians and the American Imaginary: Cultural Representation Across the Centuries (Paradigm Publishers, 2012) traces the representations of Native Americans across various public spheres of the American imaginar...

“School was a place that devalued who we are as Indigenous people,” says Noelani Goodyear-Kapua. These were institutions — at least since white settlers deposed the Indigenous government in the late 19th century — that Native students “tolerated and su...