Popular media depict miners as a rough-and-tumble lot who diligently worked the placers along scenic rushing rivers while living in roaring mining camps in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Trafzer and Hyer destroy this mythic image by offering a collection of original newspaper articles that describe in detail the murder, rape, and enslavement perpetrated by those who participated in the infamous gold rush. "It is a mercy to the Red Devils," wrote an editor of the Chico Courier, "to exterminate them." Newspaper accounts of the era depict both the barbarity and the nobility in human nature, but while some protested the inhumane treatment of Native Americans, they were not able to end the violence. Native Americans fought back, resisting the invasion, but they could not stop the tide of white miners and settlers. They became "strangers in a stolen land."
Michigan State University Press

The thirteen contributors to As We Are Now invite readers to explore with them the untamed territory of race and mixblood identity in North America. A "mixblood," according to editor W.S. Penn, recognizes that his or her identity comes not from distinct and separable strains of ancestry but from the sum of the tension and interplay of all his or her ancestral relationships. These first-person narratives cross racial, national, and disciplinary boundaries in a refreshingly experimental approach to writing culture. Their authors call on similar but varied cultural and aesthetic traditions--mostly oral--in order to address some aspect of race and identity about which they feel passionate, and all resist the essentialist point of view. Mixblood Native American, Mestizo/a, and African-American writers focus their discussion on the questions indigenous and minority people ask and the way in which they ask them, clearly merging the singular "I" with the communal "we." These are new voices in the dialogue of ethnic writers, and they offer a highly original treatment of an important subject.
University of California Press

These remarkable essays by contemporary native Alaskans preserve traditional ways and offer a vision of a sustainable life that encompasses both the old and the new. Mostly Inupiat (northern Eskimo) living near Kotzebue in far northwest Alaska, the writers live off of the grid and off of the highway system in villages accessible only by air and water or, seasonally, by snowmobile. In fresh and unassuming prose, they describe such subsistence traditions as digging roots from mouse caches, fishing for sea mammals, gathering wild greens, and making seal oil. The culture, from potlatch dancing to blanket toss, that sustained and was sustained by these food-gathering activities is also brought vividly to life. Far from purveying a romanticized vision of native life, these essays include chilling memoirs of near-death on frozen trails, drunken life on urban streets, and abusive educational experiences. But contemporary modern life has its pleasures, too, including Internet cruising and university studies. An enlightening and lively exploration of native Alaskan life. - Patricia Monaghan
University of Nebraska Press

The environmental destruction of Indian lands is charted in a hard-hitting account tracing five hundred years of atrocities. From strip-mining and uranium mining to contamination of lands with toxic materials, this continues the ongoing saga of white exploitation of Indian communities, presenting a grim and revealing portrait of the politics involved on all sides. - Midwest Book Review
Clear Light Books

This first volume of a series of books that explores the relationship between traditional Nez Perce culture and the environment focuses on wildlife within a unique part of the traditional Nez Perce homelands--570 square miles within the Hanford Nuclear Reservation that have been off-limits to the public for more than four decades. Over 200 color photos.
Confluence Press

"I do not know of any book quite like this one. Not only does it gather eighteen eloquent autobiographical essays in one place--a rarity in itself--but they are the life stories of some very significant Native American writers. The combination is unique... On many levels, then, this is a book both enlightening and necessary."--Washington Post Book World "Rings with an urgency and honesty that promises to go far in setting the record straight about Native American experience in non-Indian dominated America."--Bloomsbury Review
Bison Books

Joining a reclaimed past to a vibrant present, this work provides a broad view of male and female homosexuality in Native American cultural history through anthropological reports, biography, mission records, photographs, oral literature, diaries, interviews, essays, autobiographical excerpts, poems, and selections from novels. In the past, individuals whose behavior varied from tribal norms could adopt a variety of honorable roles: healer, artist, mediator, shaman. But homophobia saturates the modern Indian world. Contemporary voices (notably Roscoe, Beth Brant, Paula Gunn Allen, Maurice Kenny, and Chrystos) explain and dramatize survival despite chronic and ritualized oppression. Includes contacts, resources, a list of tribes, and a detailed bibliography.
St. Martin's Griffin

Native American literary works have often been ignored by serious critics or examined by social scientists in ways that rob them of their effectiveness as works of art. The emphasis of postmodern theory on the creative power of language, on narrative discourse, and on signs and semiotics allows an original and perceptive approach to Native American literature. The 11 critical essays in this collection focus on translation and representation in tribal literatures, comic and tragic world views, trickster discourse, and on selected works by novelists N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, D'Arcy McNickle, Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, and other Native American authors. The essays are "A Postmodern Introduction" by Gerald Vizenor; "Technology and Tribal Narrative" by Karl Kroeber;"'The Way to Rainy Mountain': Momaday's Work in Motion" by Kimberly Blaeser; "The Dialogic of Silko's 'Storyteller'" by Arnold Krupat; "Tayo, Death, and Desire: A Lacanian Reading of 'Ceremony'" by Gretchen Ronnow; "Textual Perspectives and the Reader in 'The Surrounded'" by James Ruppert; "Opening the Text: 'Love Medicine' and the Return of the Native American Woman" by Robert Silberman; "The Trickster Novel," by Alan Velie; "Ecstatic Strategies: Gerald Vizenor's 'Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart'" by Louis Owens; "Metalanguages" by Elaine Jahner; and "Trickster Discourse: Comic Holotropes and Language Games" by Gerald Vizenor. This book includes bibliographies, notes on contributors, and an index.
University of New Mexico

A comprehensive look at the indigenous peoples of the US and Canada from pre-Columbian times to the present. Each of the signed essays is written by an expert in the field and covers such topics as history, religion, arts, language, communication, and biography.
Visible Ink Press