The NativesOutdoors Reading List for the Outdoor Industry
We’ve received a lot of requests from folks to learn more about tribes, tribal sovereignty, and how they intersect with issues in the outdoors and public lands. We’re incredibly thrilled to help fill this gap as we are well aware about that the education that we all receive about indigenous people in this country is woefully incomplete. We have read and vetted all the books on this list and we will update as we come across new ones.
American Settler Colonialism: A History by Walter L. Hixon
Over the course of three centuries, American settlers helped to create the richest, most powerful nation in human history, even as they killed and displaced millions. This groundbreaking work shows that American history is defined by settler colonialism, providing a compelling framework through which to understand its rise to global dominance.
Dispossessing the Wilderness by Mark David Spence
National parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier preserve some of this country's most cherished wilderness landscapes. While visions of pristine, uninhabited nature led to the creation of these parks, they also inspired policies of Indian removal. By contrasting the native histories of these places with the links between Indian policy developments and preservationist efforts, this work examines the complex origins of the national parks and the troubling consequences of the American wilderness ideal. The first study to place national park history within the context of the early reservation era, it details the ways that national parks developed into one of the most important arenas of contention between native peoples and non-Indians in the twentieth century.
Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America
Confounding the Color Line is an essential, interdisciplinary introduction to the myriad relationships forged for centuries between Indians and Blacks in North America. Since the days of slavery, the lives and destinies of Indians and Blacks have been entwined-thrown together through circumstance, institutional design, or personal choice. Cultural sharing and intermarriage have resulted in complex identities for some members of Indian and Black communities today.
The contributors to this volume examine the origins, history, various manifestations, and long-term consequences of the different connections that have been established between Indians and Blacks. Stimulating examples of a range of relations are offered, including the challenges faced by Cherokee freedmen, the lives of Afro-Indian whalers in New England, and the ways in which Indians and Africans interacted in Spanish colonial New Mexico. Special attention is given to slavery and its continuing legacy, both in the Old South and in Indian Territory. The intricate nature of modern Indian-Black relations is showcased through discussions of the ties between Black athletes and Indian mascots, the complex identities of Indians in southern New England, the problem of Indian identity within the African American community, and the way in which today's Lumbee Indians have creatively engaged with African American church music.
At once informative and provocative, Confounding the Color Line sheds valuable light on a pivotal and not well understood relationship between these communities of color, which together and separately have affected, sometimes profoundly, the course of American history.
"All the Real Indians Died Off": And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Scholars and activists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture and history that have misinformed generations. Tracing how these ideas evolved, and drawing from history, the authors disrupt long-held and enduring myths such as-
"Columbus Discovered America"
"Thanksgiving Proves the Indians Welcomed Pilgrims"
"Indians Were Savage and Warlike"
"Europeans Brought Civilization to Backward Indians"
"The United States Did Not Have a Policy of Genocide"
"Sports Mascots Honor Native Americans"
"Most Indians Are on Government Welfare"
"Indian Casinos Make Them All Rich"
"Indians Are Naturally Predisposed to Alcohol"
Each chapter deftly shows how these myths are rooted in the fears and prejudice of European settlers and in the larger political agendas of a settler state aimed at acquiring Indigenous land and tied to narratives of erasure and disappearance. Accessibly written and revelatory, "All the Real Indians Died Off" challenges readers to rethink what they have been taught about Native Americans and history.
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.
In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.”
Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.
People of the Red Earth - American Indians of Colorado by Sally Crum
Indians are not symbols of a romantic past but living peoples, whose histories evolve throughout the past and in the present. The history of American Indian tribes in Colorado is the unfolding of lives from 12,000 B.P. through the present. Colorado has been the scene of many and varied Indian civilizations, from the earliest nomads who came by foot and hunted the giant wooly mammoth to the Utes, Shoshones, Cheyenne and Arapaho who evolved an exhilarating warrior culture based on the horse and the buffalo.
Lavishly illustrated with maps, drawings, and historic photographs, "People of the Red Earth is the most complete historical guide to Colorado's Indians and a comprehensive guidebook to archeological sites, museums, cultural centers, and other sources of information.
Custer Died For Your Sins by Vine Deloria
In his new preface to this paperback edition, the author observes, "The Indian world has changed so substantially since the first publication of this book that some things contained in it seem new again." Indeed, it seems that each generation of whites and Indians will have to read and reread Vine Deloria’s Manifesto for some time to come, before we absorb his special, ironic Indian point of view and what he tells us, with a great deal of humor, about U.S. race relations, federal bureaucracies, Christian churches, and social scientists. This book continues to be required reading for all Americans, whatever their special interest.
The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty by Vine Deloria
"Those of us who try to understand what is happening in North American Indian communities have learned to see Vine Deloria, Jr., both as an influential actor in the ongoing drama and also as its most knowledgeable interpreter. This new book on Indian self-rule is the most informative that I have seen in my own half-century of reading. Deloria and his co-author focus on John Collier's struggle with both the U.S. Congress and the Indian tribes to develop a New Deal for Indians fifty years ago. It is a blow-by-blow historical account, perhaps unique in the literature, which may be the only way to show the full complexity of American Indian relations with federal and state governments. This makes it possible in two brilliant concluding chapters to clarify current Indian points of view and to build onto initiatives that Indians have already taken to suggest which of these might be most useful for them to pursue. The unheeded message has been clear throughout history, but now we see how?if we let Indians do it their own way? They might, more quickly than we have imagined, rebuild their communities."
-Sol Tax, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of Chicago
There There by Tommy Orange
Tommy Orange’s wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American—grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez
Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of Natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors. Reséndez builds the incisive case that it was mass slavery—more than epidemics—that decimated Indian populations across North America. Through riveting new evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, and Indian captives, The Other Slavery reveals nothing less than a key missing piece of American history. For over two centuries we have fought over, abolished, and tried to come to grips with African American slavery. It is time for the West to confront an entirely separate, equally devastating enslavement we have long failed truly to see.
An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe by Benjamin Madley
Between 1846 and 1873, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
All Our Relations: Native Struggle for Land and Life by Winona LaDuke
A thoughtful and spirited account of indigenous people's resistance to environmental and cultural degradation by a Native American; Highly acclaimed author: Winner of the Reebok Human Rights Award in 1998, Named 'Woman of the Year' by Ms. Magazine (along with the Indigo Girls) in 1997, Ran as the Vice Presidential candidate for the US Green Party in 1996, Listed in 'America's 50 Most Promising Leaders under 40' by Time Magazine in 1994; 'A brilliant, gripping narrative.' Ralph Nader; This eagerly awaited non-fiction debut by acclaimed Native environmental activist Winona LaDuke is a thoughtful and in-depth account of Native resistance to environmental and cultural degradation. LaDuke's unique understanding of Native ideas and people is borne from long years of experience, and is deepened by inspiring testimonies from local Native activists sharing the struggle for survival. LaDuke speaks forcefully for self-deterination and community. Hers is a beautiful and daring vision of spiritual and environmental transformation.
An Inconvenient Indian: A curious account of native people in North America by Thomas King
The Inconvenient Indian is at once a “history” and the complete subversion of a history—in short, a critical and personal meditation that the remarkable Thomas King has conducted over the past 50 years about what it means to be “Indian” in North America.
Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, this book distills the insights gleaned from that meditation, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other. In the process, King refashions old stories about historical events and figures, takes a sideways look at film and pop culture, relates his own complex experiences with activism, and articulates a deep and revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands.
This is a book both timeless and timely, burnished with anger but tempered by wit, and ultimately a hard-won offering of hope—a sometimes inconvenient, but nonetheless indispensable account for all of us, Indian and non-Indian alike, seeking to understand how we might tell a new story for the future.
Alliances: Re-Envisioning Indigenous-non-Indigenous Relationships edited by Lynne Davis
Alliances: Re/Envisioning Indigenous-non-Indigenous Relationships is a collection of 24 essays edited by Lynne Davis, associate professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies at Trent University. The papers are the result of the 2006 Re/Envisioning Relationships conference that brought together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and activists working in the areas of Indigenous self-determination, and social and environmental justice. The book is organized into four themes: Visionaries; From the Front Lines; Linking Theory and Practice; and The Personal is Political. Essays include: Jake Swamp's Kanikonriio: Power of a Good Mind; William Woodsworth's Iroquoian Condolence Practised on a Civic Scale; The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Partnerships to Advance Human Rights; Grassy Narrows: Advocate for Mother Earth; and Picking Up the Wampum Belt as an Act of Protest by Paula Sherman. Other topics include an analysis of the Caledonia situation, fishing rights of the Chippewas of Nawash, Hopi justice work, American Indian Studies in Virginia, the resistance of the Secwepemc Watershed Committee against Sun Peaks Resort, the history of friendship and being allies, and conservation through Indigenous Knowledges in Guyana. The book contains a detailed index and reading lists.
Pushing the Bear by Dianne Glancy
Pushing the Bear tells the story of Cherokee removal in the Trail of Tears. Diane Glancy weaves the story together through the voices of a variety of characters, the majority of whom are Cherokee Indians, but also through historical documents, missionaries and the soldiers who were responsible for guiding the Cherokee along the trail. Glancy describes the horror and tribulations close to thirteen thousand Cherokee Indians faced from the months of September 1838 to February 1839.
Maritole, a mother, wife, daughter and aunt, is the main voice in the novel. Her character reveals the thoughts of the women, the relationship between soldiers and those walking the trail, and the losses, both emotionally and physically, that the people suffered. Through the plethora of voices, Glancy is presents the knowledge of Indian Removal, with the perspectives of those who walked, suffered and died along the trail. After nine hundred miles of trudging through mountains, snow and water, the bitterness and pain experienced by the Cherokee is combined with their sense of helplessness and their sorrow over losing their connection with their land, their livelihood, their traditional gender roles, and their family.
The novel travels chronologically through each month and location along the Trail of Tears. Glancy taps into an emotional and horrific, but historically accurate account of what many now refer to as Indian genocide. In an interview with Jennifer Andrews for the American Indian Quarterly, Glancy tells Andrews that "the land had to give me permission to write. The ancestors had to give permission to write, too. For instance, I started off Pushing the Bear with one voice, and it wasn't enough. I had to go back and add her husband and everybody who had traveled with them on the Trail of Tears. It takes many voices to tell a story, and I think we carry those voices within us".
If You Poison Us: Uranium and Native Americans by Peter H. Eichstaedt
The supply of uranium that fueled the Cold War came largely from the Four Corners area of the United States. Some of the richest deposits were found on the Navajo Reservation. Between 1950 and 1980 as many as fifteen thousand people worked in uranium mines. About one-quarter of the miners and millers were Native Americans. Responding to an urgent plea to help defend our country, and eager to earn miners' wages, poverty-stricken Native Americans labored to feed the atomic mill. For nearly three decades in the face of growing evidence that uranium mining was dangerous, state and federal agencies avoided the responsibility for warning the miners or imposing safety measures in the mines. In this untold chapter of the U.S. government's legacy of the nuclear age, Eichstaedt reveals the sacrifices made by Native Americans to provide raw materials for the buildup of the American nuclear arsenal. He details the devastating physical, psychological, and cultural impact uranium mining has on the Navajo people and on their lands.
Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajos by Judy Pasternak
This investigative feat tells the shocking, heartbreaking story of uranium mining on the Navajo reservation and its terrible legacy of sickness and government neglect, documenting one of the darker chapters in 20th century American history.
Now in paperback, the critically acclaimed Yellow Dirt, “will break your heart. An enormous achievement—literally, a piece of groundbreaking investigative journalism—illustrates exactly what reporting should do: Show us what we’ve become as a people, and sharpen our vision of who we, the people, ought to become” ( The Christian Science Monitor ).
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the United States knowingly used and discarded an entire tribe of people as the Navajos worked, unprotected, in the uranium mines that fueled the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Long after these mines were abandoned, Navajos in all four corners of the Reservation (which borders Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) continued grazing their animals on sagebrush flats riddled with uranium that had been blasted from the ground. They built their houses out of chunks of uranium ore, inhaled radioactive dust borne aloft from the waste piles the mining companies had left behind, and their children played in the unsealed mines themselves. Ten years after the mines closed, the cancer rate on the reservation shot up and some babies began to be born with crooked fingers that fused together into claws as they grew. Government scientists filed complaints about the situation with the government, but were told it was a mess too expensive to clean up.
Judy Pasternak exposed this story in a prizewinning Los Angeles Times series. Her work galvanized both a congressman and a famous prosecutor to clean the sites and get reparations for the tribe. Yellow Dirt is her powerful chronicle of both the scandal of neglect and the Navajos’ fight for justice.
The Firecracker Boys: H-Bombs, Inupiat Eskimos, and the Roots of the Environmental Movement
In 1958, Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, unveiled his plan to detonate six nuclear bombs off the Alaskan coast to create a new harbor. However, the plan was blocked by a handful of Eskimos and biologists who succeeded in preventing massive nuclear devastation potentially far greater than that of the Chernobyl blast. The Firecracker Boys is a story of the U.S. government's arrogance and deception, and the brave people who fought against it-launching America's environmental movement. As one of Alaska's most prominent authors, Dan O'Neill brings to these pages his love of Alaska's landscape, his skill as a nature and science writer, and his determination to expose one of the most shocking chapters of the Nuclear Age.
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more members of the tribe began to die under mysterious circumstances.
In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen like J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes like Al Spencer, the “Phantom Terror,” roamed—many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll climbed to more than twenty-four, the FBI took up the case. It was one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations and the bureau badly bungled the case. In desperation, the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only American Indian agents in the bureau. The agents infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest techniques of detection. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.
In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. Based on years of research and startling new evidence, the book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, as each step in the investigation reveals a series of sinister secrets and reversals. But more than that, it is a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward American Indians that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly compelling, but also emotionally devastating.
The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground by Jeffrey Ostler
Combining historical and legal threads, Ostler surveys the contest between the U.S. government and the Lakota Indians for title to the Black Hills in South Dakota. Weighing evidence of the Lakotas’ presence in the Black Hills in the 1700s, Ostler elaborates a more solid historical footing for Lakota claims based on the sacred significance the Black Hills had acquired by the mid-1800 lifetimes of such renowned Lakotas as Sitting Bull. Phasing into treaties culminating in the cession of the Black Hills in 1877, Ostler concisely defines treaty terms or violations that gave legal traction to Lakota litigation. That got going in the 1920s, though slowly: the case wended through the judiciary for 20 years until it was dismissed by the Supreme Court. In 1980, however, the tribunal reversed itself, acknowledging treaty violations and ruling in favor of monetary compensation. Refused by a people wanting the land, not the lucre, the settlement remains in limbo. An evenhanded scholar, Ostler offers a case study that illuminates Native American claims for redress of history.
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico
In August 1680 the Pueblo Indians of northern New Mexico arose in fury to slay their Spanish colonial overlords and drive any survivors from the land. Andrew Knaut explores eight decades of New Mexican history leading up to the revolt, explaining how the newcomers had disrupted Pueblo life in far-reaching ways - they commandeered the Indians’ food stores, exposed the Pueblos to new diseases, interrupted long-established trading relationships, and sparked increasing raids by surrounding Athapaskan nomads. The Pueblo Indians’ violent success stemmed from an almost unprecedented unity of disparate factions and sophistication of planning in secrecy. When Spanish forces retook the colony in the 1690s, freedom proved short-lived. But the revolt stands as a vitally important yet neglected historical landmark: the only significant reversal of European expansion by Native American people in the New World.
