Just two years after losing her Danish father, Coast Salish mother, and metis sisters to an undocumented tragedy in 1877, Nora Jewell faced another tragic ordeal. The twelve-year-old cleared fields and mended fences for James Smith, a guardian appointed by the court to protect her body and estate until she reached eighteen or married. As Nora…

In this article the author starts from the premise that, although there were no renowned Indian poets at Carlisle and other Indian boarding schools in the United States, students in federal boarding schools read and wrote poetry. She argues that the rhetorically bold Carlisle poems--along with the letters and articles published in the Carlisle…

In the first three decades of the twentieth century, racial nativism wielded considerable direct and indirect influence on policies that affected broader American attitudes concerning Native American people. In this three-decade period, many factors caused the kinds of national insecurity and instability that make a cultural climate ripe for…

The Miller Brothers' 101 Ranch Real Wild West show ran from 1906 to 1931, outlasting the famous Buffalo Bill's Wild West show by more than a decade. From its beginnings in Oklahoma Territory, the Real Wild West show traveled national and international circuits and built a broad roster of performers, including more than 150 American Indians. During…

On Christmas Day 1975, Marcia Marie Summers was born to Charlene Summers, a member and resident of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation in North Dakota. A few months later, a white couple from Indiana approached the young mother and offered to care for her infant while Summers attended school. Summers realized that the couple intended to permanently…

The recent bicentennial of Lewis and Clark's "Corps of Discovery" created increased interest in commemorations of this event along the entire course of the expedition's travels. In advance of the bicentennial, a number of states established Lewis and Clark commemorative commissions, museums at both national and local levels planned…

This study addresses the ways in which Natives practiced self-silence in regard to public Civil War commemoration. Notwithstanding the incredible impact on Indian Territory and Indian lives, Oklahoma Indians themselves did not typically commemorate the Civil War. Therefore, Native American contribution to the Civil War was largely skewed in the…

The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, in celebration of the quadricentennial anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Americas, spread over six hundred acres of reclaimed marsh lands in Chicago's South Side. Fourteen great buildings and two hundred additional buildings stood on the fairgrounds, and if tourists had visited every exhibit, they…

In August 1676 Nathaniel Bacon brought his campaign to "ruin and extirpate all Indians in general" to the Green Dragon Swamp on the upper Pamunkey River. While there, he attacked and massacred nearly fifty Pamunkey Indians, who had been at peace with the government of Virginia for thirty years. Having once formed the backbone of the…

This essay is a short history of imitation "tithu," dolls representing "katsinam," the Hopi supernaturals. It is a study of "authenticity" in the marketplace and its perceived relation to "magic," "spirituality," and "antiquity," as the article follows early changes at Hopi through the…

For twenty-eight years, the Red Hot Chili Peppers have evolved beyond their beginnings as yet another 1980s alternative band giving voice to its generation's disaffected youth into a modern symbol (among others) of tribal identity for displaced Native Americans. These young Native people span communities both on and off reservations and reserves…

Indian orators have been saying good-bye for more than three hundred years. John Eliot's "Dying Speeches of Several Indians" (1685), as David Murray notes, inaugurates a long textual history in which "Indians... are most useful dying," or, as in a number of speeches, bidding the world farewell as they embrace an undesired but…

In the five hundred years of European and American globalization of the world, seldom have Indigenous peoples been invited to a constitutional convention and first legislature to express their perspectives and concerns. Rarely in the five-hundred-year history of the European and American colonization of the world were the rights of the Indigenous…

In this article, the authors juxtapose Allison Hedge Coke's poetry collection "Blood Run" (2006) with the larger context in which Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) operates in order to investigate how "Blood Run" exposes the limitations of repatriation legislation, most significantly, how NAGPRA's…

Plant species utilized by Cherokees have been documented by several authors. However, many of the traditional uses of plants were lost or forgotten in the generations following the Trail of Tears. The pressures of overcoming the physical and psychological impact of the removal, adapting to a new landscape, rebuilding a government, rebuilding…