Recent uc_libraries_oabooks_monographs_big10 items

The Invasion

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Invasion, a novel originally published in 1932, marked the debut of historical novelist Janet Lewis, who went on to write numerous poems and short stories as well as the novels The Wife of Martin Guerre and The Trial of Soren Quist. Lewis grew up in the Lake country of the Old Northwest and The Invasion is based on family stories she heard as a child. The Invasion displays well-researched historical accuracy, an innate understanding of and feeling for Native American culture enhanced by the author's fluency in the Ojibway language, and an economy of style that is remarkable for a first novel. In 1790, John Johnston, a cultivated young Irishman, came to the far corner of the Northwest Territory to make his fortune intending to spend only a year. Instead he married Ozhah-guscoday- wayquay (The Woman of the Glade), daughter of the Ojibway chief Waub- ojeeg, and settled on the St. Mary's River. Together they founded a family that was loved, respected, and famous throughout...

Native Women's History in Eastern North America before 1900

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This landmark anthology is an essential guide to the histories of Native women’s lives in earlier centuries. Sixteen classic essays, plus new commentary—many by the original authors, describe a broad range of research methods and sources offering insight into the lives of Native American women. The authors explain the use of letters and diaries, memoirs and autobiographies, newspaper accounts and ethnographies, census data and legal documents. This collection offers guidelines for extracting valuable information from such diverse sources and assessing the significance of a such variables as religious affiliation, changes in women’s power after colonization, connections between economics and gender, and representations of Native women.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the University of California Libraries.

Studying Native America: Problems and Prospects

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

"The White Man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative process. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped rock and soil." The words of Lakota writer Luther Standing Bear foretold the current debate on the value of Native American studies in higher education. Studying Native America addresses for the first time in a comprehensive way the place of this critical discipline in the university curriculum. Leading scholars in anthropology, demography, English and literature, history, law, social work, linguistics, public health, psychology, and sociology have come together to explore what Native American studies has been, what it is, and what it may be in the future.

The book's thirteen contributors and editor Russell Thornton, stress the frequent incompatibility of traditional academic teaching methods with the social and cultural concerns that gave rise to the field of Native American...

Death Stalks the Yakama: Epidemiological Transitions and Mortality on the Yakama

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Clifford Trafzer's disturbing new work, Death Stalks the Yakama, examines life, death, and the shockingly high mortality rates that have persisted among the fourteen tribes and bands living on the Yakama Reservation in the state of Washington. The work contains a valuable discussion of Indian beliefs about spirits, traditional causes of death, mourning ceremonies, and memorials. More significant, however, is Trafzer's research into heretofore unused parturition and death records from 1888-1964. In these documents, he discovers critical evidence to demonstrate how and why many reservation people died in "epidemics" of pneumonia, tuberculosis, and heart disease. Death Stalks the Yakama, takes into account many variables, including age, gender, listed causes of death, residence, and blood quantum. In addition, analyses of fetal and infant mortality rates as well as crude death rates arising from tuberculosis, pneumonia, heart disease, accidents, and other causes are presented....

American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

American Pentimento traces the history of colonization and exploitation in the Americas coming to demonstrate how contemporary native struggles are decisively limited by embedded cultural assumptions this history has incorporated into the very constitution of the Americas. As Seed writes, “the most enduring popular images of native Americans originated in common economic ambition shared by Anglo-Saxon or Iberian colonizers.” This book focuses on the European colonies whose rules for acquiring riches have most profoundly influenced the present-day options of most natives of the Americas: England, Spain, and Portugal. Seed brings her argument into the present by warning of the continuity in economic motives between our colonial past and our national present. Throughout the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand today, native communities’s rights to wealth are governed by a host of modern regulations that seem to have deleted traces of the earlier colonial rules. But underneath...