Ten Books From Across Indigenous America

In this well-researched and deeply felt account, Brenda J. Child, a professor and a member of the Red Lake Ojibwe tribe, gives Native American women their due, detailing the many ways in which they have shaped Native American life. She illuminates the lives of women such as Madeleine Cadotte, who became a powerful mediator between her people and European fur traders, and Gertrude Buckanaga, whose postwar community activism in Minneapolis helped bring many Indian families out of poverty.

From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community, Ma-Nee Chacaby’s extraordinary story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social and economic legacies of colonialism.

Harriette Shelton Dover was an influential leader of the Tulalip Indians. The daughter of Chief William Shelton, a noted totem pole carver, she served on the Tulalip Tribal Council and later as a tribal chairperson. Over a period of ten years, she worked with anthropologist Darleen Fitzpatrick to record her memories of Tulalip tribal history, including the signing of the Treaty of Point Elliot in 1855, and her own life story, including a vivid description of her years at the Tulalip Indian Boarding School.

Across North America, Indigenous acts of resistance have in recent years opposed the removal of federal protections for forests and waterways in Indigenous lands, halted the expansion of tar sands extraction and the pipeline construction at Standing Rock, and demanded justice for murdered and missing Indigenous women. In As We Have Always Done, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking.

Established in 1884 and operative for nearly a century, the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma was one of a series of off-reservation boarding schools intended to assimilate American Indian children into mainstream American life. Critics have characterized the schools as destroyers of Indian communities and cultures, but the reality that K. Tsianina Lomawaima discloses was much more complex. Lomawaima allows the Chilocco students to speak for themselves. In recollections juxtaposed against the official records of racist ideology and repressive practice, students from the 1920s and 1930s recall their loneliness and demoralization but also remember with pride the love and mutual support binding them together—the forging of new pan-Indian identities and reinforcement of old tribal ones.