UC Riverside Library

In Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun, Crystal Mun-hye Baik blends different genres, from narrative prose to epistles to ancestral mourning rites, to offer an intimate cultural history of war, illness, and estrangement through the experiential lens of her family.

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

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.

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. Trafzer argues that Native Americans living on the Yakama Reservation were, in fact, in jeopardy as a result of the "reservation system" itself. Not only did this alien and artificial culture radically alter traditional ways of life, but sanitation methods, housing, hospitals, public education, medicine, and medical personnel affiliated with the reservation system all proved inadequate, and each in its own way contributed significantly to high Yakama death rates.

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