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This is a folder to discuss Native Americans and the fabric of their histories. There are many different tribes which have varied histories in the United States. We would like to celebrate the culture and the stamina of the Native American tribes in the United States.

This folder will discuss their histories. Within the civil rights segment, we will discuss their trials with the various governmental entities and some of the suffering and hardships they have faced and bravely endured.

Please feel free to suggest various threads for this folder.

Folks, the following is a representative survey of conflicts between Native Americans and Europeans over three centuries.

We will set up threads for each one of these conflicts:



The table explains each of the conflicts, the dates of the conflict, the location and the summary of the conflict itself with an alignment to the century it took place in.

Not only did American Indians fight the Europeans, they fought each other, sometimes within the same tribe. A good example of this is Red Fox: Stand Watie and the Confederate Indian Nations During the Civil War Years in Indian Territory by Wilfred Knight.

The U.S. government was responsible for at least some of the divisions within the Cherokee nation, but not all of them. Stand Watie abandoned his principles and the tribe and was generously compensated by the government with rich farmland. Principle Chief John Ross stood on his principles and the tribe, and was rewarded with the "Trail of Tears." Once the two branches were reunited in Indian Territory, a civil war ensued, a conflict that continues to provoke grudges today.

Well they probably still look poorly on Watie's choice.

Many Cherokee still feel Watie was a sell-out. He gave tribal land to the U.S. government even though he had no authority to sell land that belonged to no one person. A continuing source of embarrassment for the Cherokee is that Sequoyah (Se-quo-ya) accompanied Watie to Indian Territory, instead of staying behind with John Ross.

I grew up in Muscogee (Creek) tribal lands (I am not an Indian, although I have remote Cherokee ancestors). The Muscogee and Cherokee were bitter enemies; I never heard anything good about the Cherokee from my Muscogee friends. I had no dog in that fight.

My only personal animosity toward Watie is the result of his service to slave-owners as a Confederate general in the Civil War. All of the so-called "civilized tribes" owned slaves, both African and Indian. But only the Cherokee actively served the South.

Thank you for the information Vheissu.

Rufus Sage is an interesting character whose 1854 account may interest readers on this thread.

Rufus B. Sage

Sage was a largely self-educated New England journalist who traveled west for the purpose of "relieving a palpable ignorance of interesting particulars and alleviating in some measure the wide vacuum of general information regarding the American west."

He spent a lot of time with Plains Indians mid-1800s and writes colorfully of his experiences, often with compassion and keen insight. He was especially concerned about the liquor problem, as in the following quote from the chapter "Strange Problems in Morality":

"Seating himself by the fire, Medicine Soldier looked dejected and melancholy, and his face bore indubitable evidence of a personal encounter with someone. On inquiring the cause of this, we learned that he had left his father’s lodge by reason of a quarrel with his eldest brother, the latter having struck him with a firebrand and burnt his body in several places during a drunken spree. He was now on his way to the White River, there to await the suitable time for revenge, when he should kill his brother.

"We told him this would not be right, it was liquor that had done him the wrong, and not his brother. Liquor was bad! He seemed to acknowledge the truth of our suggestions and asked, “Why the pale-faces brought the fire-water to do the red man so much harm?�� Our trader replied, “The whites want robes, and can get them for liquor when nothing else will do it.�� The answer evidently perplexed him, while he sat gazing silently into the fire as if striving to work out to his own satisfaction this strange problem in morality."

Here are some other great chapter titles:

Scenes of Bloodshed and Horror; Wonderful Feats of Jugglery; Another Drunken Spree; Desperate Encounter with a Grizzly Bear and An Extraordinary Instance of Suffering; Gambling Among Squaws and Games Played; The Extraordinary Daring of Wolves; the Exemplary Benevolence of an Indian Chief; Ludicrous Barbarity, Bravery, Etc.

That does sound interesting. Thanks for the recommendation, Melissa.

Vheissu wrote: "That does sound interesting. Thanks for the recommendation, Melissa."

It's interesting and fun. And thank you -- I've pulled so many books from your shelves I don't know where to begin. I look forward to more of your input on this and other threads.

Peter Pitchlynn: Chief of the Choctaws by W. David Baird is a fascinating story of a Choctaw Chief and how he and his tribe dealt with the devastating effects of the forced relocation from their lands of their ancestors in Mississippi to the then territory of Oklahoma via what came to be known as The Trail of Tears.

As a side note, one of the district Choctaw Chiefs at this time was George W. Harkins, who was my great, great grandfather.

Gerald, thanks for the add, sounds like an interesting book. When you cite a book and author please remember to use the add book/author feature and post the book cover, author photo (when available) and author link in accordance with our guidelines. It allows the goodreads software to populate the site to discussions of the book. Your post would look like this:
Peter Pitchlynn: Chief of the Choctaws (no cover photo) by W. David Baird

Unusual for a book not to have a cover photo, so I added the 'no photo' designation in parens, and also added the author link.

Interesting fact about your family linkage as well! Thanks again for sharing.

Alisa, I owned a copy of Peter Pitchlynn: Chief of the Choctaws (no cover photo), which obviously has a cover. Is there a mechanism for adding covers to the GoodReads system via scanning and e-mail?

Gerald wrote: "Alisa, I owned a copy of Peter Pitchlynn: Chief of the Choctaws (no cover photo), which obviously has a cover. Is there a mechanism for adding covers to the GoodReads system via scan..."

Seems like there ought to be. You might try dropping a note to the goodreads staff using their help or 'ctonact us' feature. They should have it on hand and add it if you can make it available somehow.

Thanks, I'll try that.

If you had a scanner and could then e-mail the Jpeg file to one of the libarians here they could upload the cover for you as well.

Thanks Aussie Rick, I'll try that.

Gerald wrote: "Alisa, I owned a copy of Peter Pitchlynn: Chief of the Choctaws (no cover photo), which obviously has a cover. Is there a mechanism for adding covers to the GoodReads system via scan..."

Gerald - in the case of this book which had no book cover; you have to add then the link which you did and the author's link every time you mention it:

Peter Pitchlynn: Chief of the Choctaws by W. David Baird

Gerald, the next time a book or author is added incorrectly; I will delete your post and send you a copy of the post and ask you to do it again, I will help as much as is necessary but you are ignoring what folks are telling you and selectively responding to those posts from the assisting moderators that you want to while not fixing your posts.

The citation rules are not optional and we will help you out but you do not seem to be acknowledging that we are pointing these things out to you or the fact that you intend to try to add them correctly.

Bentley

Sorry Bentley. I'll do better.

If you're interested in a more academic treatment of the Comanches I'd highly recommend Pekka Hämäläinen. Hämäläinen is an asst professor of history at UC Santa Barbara.

Hämäläinen's primary hypothesis is that the Comanches themselves created and exploited a prosperous, complex, dynamic and expansion-oriented socio-political and economic empire among various western tribes and non-Native outposts. Their presence dominated the Southwestern US for a century (1750-1850) and proved to be an effective deterrent against Spanish, French, Mexican, and US encroachment during that time.

"In this book, in contrast, I show how a single Native American power, the Comanches, achieved broad-spectrum dominance-military, political, economic, commercial, social, as well as cultural-within its expanding sphere of influence that came to include several European colonial outposts." (p. 366 - Kindle ed.)

I picked up this book a month or so ago (will also post in the History of Latin America thread)

Stolen Continents: 500 Years of Conquest and Resistance in the Americas

by Ronald Wright

Synopsis
Powerful and passionate, Stolen Continents is a history of the Americas unlike any other. This incisive single-volume report tells the stories of the conquest and survival of five great American cultures �� Aztec, Maya, Inca, Cherokee, and Iroquois. Through their eloquent words, we relive their strange, tragic experiences �� including, in a new epilogue, incidents that bring us up to the twenty-first century.

After Custer: Loss and Transformation in Sioux Country

Paul L. Hedren

Synopsis

Between 1876 and 1877, the U.S. Army battled Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne Indians in a series of vicious conflicts known today as the Great Sioux War. After the defeat of Custer at the Little Big Horn in June 1876, the army responded to its stunning loss by pouring fresh troops and resources into the war effort. In the end, the U.S. Army prevailed, but at a significant cost. In this unique contribution to
American western history, Paul L. Hedren examines the war’s effects on the culture, environment, and geography of the northern Great Plains, their Native inhabitants, and the Anglo-American invaders.

As Hedren explains, U.S. military control of the northern plains following the Great Sioux War permitted the Northern Pacific Railroad to extend westward from the Missouri River. The new transcontinental line brought hide hunters who targeted the great northern buffalo herds and ultimately destroyed them. A de-buffaloed prairie lured cattlemen, who in turn spawned their own culture. Through forced surrender
of their lands and lifeways, Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes now experienced even more stress and calamity than they had endured during the war itself. The victors, meanwhile, faced a different set of challenges, among them providing security for the railroad crews, hide hunters, and cattlemen.

Hedren is the first scholar to examine the events of 1876��77 and their aftermath as a whole, taking into account relationships among military leaders, the building of forts, and the army’s efforts to memorialize the war and its victims. Woven into his narrative are the voices of those who witnessed such events as the burial of Custer, the laying of railroad track, or the sudden surround of a buffalo herd. Their personal testimonies lend both vibrancy and pathos to this story of irreversible change in Sioux Country.

I really have quite a lot of books about Native Americans but my most recent acquisitions are Indians in Unexpected Places & Playing Indian both by Philip Deloria (son of Vine Deloria) out of the University of Michigan. I heard him at the Charlottesville VA Festival of the Book in March of this year. Fascinating.

Both books are concerned with Indian stereotypes - Indians in Unexpected Places shows how Natives have historically resisted those stereotypes in many ways. Playing Indian looks at the way non-Indian people have taken Indian traditions and "ways" for their own use. Very enlightening.

& by Philip J. Deloria

& by Vine Deloria

I also have the award-winning War of a Thousand Deserts here which came highly recommended and looks incredibly good - (I mean great!) so I really want to get to it, but time ...

In the early 1830s, after decades of relative peace, northern Mexicans and the Indians whom they called “the barbarians�� descended into a terrifying cycle of violence. For the next fifteen years, owing in part to changes unleashed by American expansion, Indian warriors launched devastating attacks across ten Mexican states. Raids and counter-raids claimed thousands of lives, ruined much of northern Mexico’s economy, depopulated its countryside, and left man-made “deserts�� in place of thriving settlements. Just as important, this vast interethnic war informed and emboldened U.S. arguments in favor of seizing Mexican territory while leaving northern Mexicans too divided, exhausted, and distracted to resist the American invasion and subsequent occupation.

Exploring Mexican, American, and Indian sources ranging from diplomatic correspondence and congressional debates to captivity narratives and plains Indians�� pictorial calendars, War of a Thousand Deserts recovers the surprising and previously unrecognized ways in which economic, cultural, and political developments within native communities affected nineteenth-century nation-states. In the process this ambitious book offers a rich and often harrowing new narrative of the era when the United States seized half of Mexico’s national territory.


by Brian Delay

Russell Mean, Native American activist passed away today, October 22, 2012. Taksa akhe.

Russell Charles Means (November 10, 1939 �� October 22, 2012) was an Oglala Sioux activist for the rights of Native American people and libertarian political activist. He became a prominent member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) after joining the organization in 1968, and helped organize notable events that attracted national and international media coverage. The organization split in 1993, in part over the 1975 murder of Anna Mae Aquash, the leading woman activist in AIM.

Means was active in international issues of indigenous peoples, including working with groups in Central and South America, and with the United Nations for recognition of their rights. He was active in politics at his native Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and at the state and national level.

That's sad news Jill, I remember first reading about Russell Means in the book; In the Spirit of Crazy Horse and I liked his role in the movie Last of the Mohicans.

by Peter Matthiessen

He was a controversial man but one that was committed to his people. I still have my t-shirt that I got when participating in The Walk Across America for AIM.

That's pretty cool about the T-shirt! I remember in the book he was very controversial and a hard-line activist but I think he mellowed with time and as such I think he did more good in his later years than before.

This looks interesting:


This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made

by Frederick E. Hoxie

Synopsis
Frederick E. Hoxie, one of our most prominent and celebrated academic historians of Native American history, has for years asked his undergraduate students at the beginning of each semester to write down the names of three American Indians. Almost without exception, year after year, the names are Geronimo, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The general conclusion is inescapable: Most Americans instinctively view Indians as people of the past who occupy a position outside the central narrative of American history. These three individuals were warriors, men who fought violently against American expansion, lost, and died. It’s taken as given that Native history has no particular relationship to what is conventionally presented as the story of America. Indians had a history too; but theirs was short and sad, and it ended a long time ago.

In This Indian Country, Hoxie has created a bold and sweeping counter-narrative to our conventional understanding. Native American history, he argues, is also a story of political activism, its victories hard-won in courts and campaigns rather than on the battlefield. For more than two hundred years, Indian activists—some famous, many unknown beyond their own communities—have sought to bridge the distance between indigenous cultures and the republican democracy of the United States through legal and political debate. Over time their struggle defined a new language of “Indian rights�� and created a vision of American Indian identity. In the process, they entered a dialogue with other activist movements, from African American civil rights to women’s rights and other progressive organizations.

Hoxie weaves a powerful narrative that connects the individual to the tribe, the tribe to the nation, and the nation to broader historical processes. He asks readers to think deeply about how a country based on the values of liberty and equality managed to adapt to the complex cultural and political demands of people who refused to be overrun or ignored. As we grapple with contemporary challenges to national institutions, from inside and outside our borders, and as we reflect on the array of shifting national and cultural identities across the globe, This Indian Country provides a context and a language for understanding our present dilemmas.

This looks interesting:

The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815
by Richard White

Synopsis
A mutually comprehensible world was established by Europeans and Indians in 1650 in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called the Pays d'en haut. This account reveals how a middle ground for sharing values thrived for 165 years.

We just picked this one up:

by Anton Treuer

Question and answer format, dealing with the social and cultural aspects of Indian life, both historical and modern day.

DonnaR, thanks for the addition.

John G. Neihardt.

Firsthand account though translated of the life of Black Elk. Some things included are Custer's Last Stand, the killing of Crazy Horse, and the Wounded knee Massacre. Interesting day to day account of the Lakota culture and happenings during this time.

Thanks Autumn, looks interesting.

by Gary B. Nash

Autumn wrote: "Firsthand account though translated of the life of Black Elk..."

The book certainly has gotten many great reviews.


by John G. Neihardt

A very in-depth and insightful book.

Geronimo

by Alexander B. Adams

Synopsis
In the Apaches�� final campaign, Geronimo led 19 warriors against 5,000 U.S. troops. No Apaches were killed, and the U.S. suffered heavy casualties. For the Apaches could travel seventy miles a day on foot, lay a deadly ambush in country so open a white man could not find a hiding place, and elude pursuit by scattering in every direction, only to reassemble as soon as the force was gone. Probably the greatest foot soldiers ever known, they held the U.S. Army at bay for forty years. This book tells the stories of Geronimo, his Apache warriors, and his American enemies with vigor and verve. Unequaled in depth and scope, this definitive biography is an engrossing, dramatic, colorful, historically accurate account of a long-misunderstood figure.

Mark wrote: "Autumn wrote: "Firsthand account though translated of the life of Black Elk..."

The book certainly has gotten many great reviews.


John G. Neihardt

It is fascinating because it is the testimony of Black Elk--and he lived through all of that. It is worth reading. Great timeline of that time (though no specific dates though months are given) a reader can see how everything transpired from other events and feelings of the time. The reviews are right :)(imo)... Great read.

Interestingly there is another book on Geronimo

by Angie Debo
(I am not trying to complete - I read this several years ago and found it highly readable!)

Synopsis:

On September 5, 1886, the entire nation rejoiced as the news flashed from the Southwest that the Apache war leader Geronimo had surrendered to Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles. With Geronimo, at the time of his surrender, were Chief Naiche (the son of the great Cochise), sixteen other warriors, fourteen women, and six children. It had taken a force of 5,000 regular army troops and a series of false promises to "capture" the band.

Yet the surrender that day was not the end of the story of the Apaches associated with Geronimo. Besides his small band, 394 of his tribesmen, including his wife and children, were rounded up, loaded into railroad cars, and shipped to Florida. For more than twenty years Geronimo’s people were kept in captivity at Fort Pickens, Florida; Mount Vernon Barracks, Alabama; and finally Fort Sill, Oklahoma. They never gave up hope of returning to their mountain home in Arizona and New Mexico, even as their numbers were reduced by starvation and disease and their children were taken from them to be sent to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

Thanks Mikey for the input and proper posting. “Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place�� is a great complement to other books in the Native American collection. There’s no such thing as competition in the History Club.

by Angie Debo

Is this thread limited to the USA, or can we discuss First nation tribes in Canada and native tribes in Spanish America?

R.M.F wrote: "Is this thread limited to the USA, or can we discuss First nation tribes in Canada and native tribes in Spanish America?"

I believe Bentley set this up for U.S. tribes but we might be able to add a thread in this folder for other tribes.

I have almost finished reading an excellent biography of Edward S. Curtis the famous photographer of North American Indians in the early 1900's.

The book is by Timothy Egan


Many of his photos are absolutely iconic images. The biography gives us a view of his life and of his single-minded zealotry in pursuing his photographic cause. The book has some his famous photos and is a good accompaniment to those wonderful huge books of Curtis photos.
One such volume is by Edward S. Curtis

Great, Mikey, thanks for sharing and doing a great job on the citations.

Joseph M. Marshall III

Biography of Crazy Horse (defeated Custer, among others) from his beginnings so on. I liked this because it told of the man not just the legend.

Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America

Daniel K. Richter

Synopsis

In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers.

Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States.

Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the seventeenth century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic, and environmental forces the newcomers unleashed. Drawing upon their own traditions, Indian communities reinvented themselves and carved out a place in a world dominated by transatlantic European empires. In 1776, however, when some of Britain's colonists rebelled against that imperial world, they overturned the system that had made Euro-American and Native coexistence possible. Eastern North America only ceased to be an Indian country because the revolutionaries denied the continent's first peoples a place in the nation they were creating.

In rediscovering early America as Indian country, Richter employs the historian's craft to challenge cherished assumptions about times and places we thought we knew well, revealing Native American experiences at the core of the nation's birth and identity.

I think several of our members have read this book but it certainly is worth adding to this thread.

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

by S.C. Gwynne

Synopsis:

In the tradition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a stunningly vivid historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West, centering on Quanah, the greatest Comanche chief of them all.

S. C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches.

Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined just how and when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. So effective were the Comanches that they forced the creation of the Texas Rangers and account for the advent of the new weapon specifically designed to fight them: the six-gun.

The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. Gwynne’s exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads—a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being.

Against this backdrop Gwynne presents the compelling drama of Cynthia Ann Parker, a lovely nine-year-old girl with cornflower-blue eyes who was kidnapped by Comanches from the far Texas frontier in 1836. She grew to love her captors and became infamous as the "White Squaw" who refused to return until her tragic capture by Texas Rangers in 1860. More famous still was her son Quanah, a warrior who was never defeated and whose guerrilla wars in the Texas Panhandle made him a legend.

S. C. Gwynne’s account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told. Empire of the Summer Moon announces him as a major new writer of American history.

I agree, Alisa. It is a wonderful book!!

Second that Jill, a great story indeed!

In The Hands Of The Great Spirit: The 20,000 Year History Of American Indians

by Jake Page

Synopsis:

The story of the American Indians has, until now, been told as a 500-year tragedy, a story of violent and fatal encounters with Europeans and their diseases, followed by steady retreat, defeat, and diminishment. Yet the true story begins much earlier, and its final recent chapter adds a major twist. Jake Page, one of the Southwest's most distinguished writers and a longtime student of Indian history and culture, tells a radically new story, thanks to an explosion of recent archaeological findings, the latest scholarship, and an exploration of Indian legends. Covering no less than 20,000 years, "In the Hands of the Great Spirit" will forever change how we think about the oldest and earliest Americans.Page writes gracefully and sympathetically, without sentimentality. He explores every controversy, from the question of cannibalism among tribes, to the various theories of when and how humans first arrived on the continent, to what life was actually like for Indians before the Europeans came. Page dispels the popular image of a peaceful and idyllic Eden, and shows that Indian societies were fluid, constantly transformed by intertribal fighting, population growth, and shifting climates.

Page uses Indian legends and stories as tools to uncover tribal origins, cultural values, and the meaning of certain rituals and sacred lands. He tells the story of contact with Europeans, and the multipower conflicts of the Seven Years War, the Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812, from the Indians' point of view. He explains the complex and shifting role of the U.S. government as expressed through executive decisions and through the role of the courts. Finally, he tells the fascinating story ofthe late-twentieth-century upsurge in Indian population and resources, which began as a social movement and exploded once casinos came into fashion.

Author and editor of over a dozen books on American Indian life and culture, Page is a masterful teller of this incredible story. "In the Hands of the Great Spirit" will forever change the familiar story of recent centuries, replacing it with a far more sweeping and meaningful story of tribes and peoples who have suffered enormously yet endure and enrich the American experience.

looks like an interesting read

It certainly looks comprehensive, and interesting.