To browse by tribe or nation, click Tribe Index in the Browse Resources box on the upper right, then select your group. Each page will have a section of primary sources in addition to other content.
This database provides biographies on war leaders, warriors, soldiers, spiritual and religious leaders, and activists plus timelines, maps, graphs, videos and slideshows with links to many primary sources such as treaties, key court cases, landmark legislation and legends.
Search using the name of your nation, or browse by scrolling down on the home page and clicking the Native Americans heading to see if your group has a Topic Page. Primary sources like treaties and speeches may be available.
This site places an emphasis on images and video with access to more than 5,000 primary source documents as well as reference materials such as the Dictionary of American Biography, the Dictionary of American History, Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America, U*X*L Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History and U*X*L Encyclopedia of U.S. History. It contains full-text articles drawn from top periodicals and newspapers and audio selections from NPR, The History Channel and Associated Press.
A multidisciplinary, scholarly database containing digitized back issues of academic journals, books, primary sources, and current issues of journals.
It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals on a variety of subjects including history, science, literature, music, philosophy, world culture and business.
This database contains information from historical and government documents including the entire Congressional Record, Federal Register, and Code of Federal Regulations, complete coverage of the U.S. Reports back to 1754, and entire databases dedicated to treaties, constitutions, case law, world trials, classic treatises, international trade, foreign relations, U.S. Presidents, and much more.
HeinOnline is a premier online database containing more than 160 million pages and 200,000 titles of historical and government documents in a fully searchable, image-based format. HeinOnline bridges an important research gap by providing comprehensive coverage from inception of more than 2,600 law-related periodicals.
An image database with images from some of the world’s leading museums, photo archives, scholars and artists including many rare and important collections. (Please be aware Artstor will be retired on August 1, 2024. All content will be moved to JSTOR.)
All images have comprehensive metadata and all content is rights-cleared for educational use. Images can be found for topics such as anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art history, fashion & costume, literature, religion, theater, and world history.
Streaming video databases
You may be able to find oral histories or other firsthand accounts by searching for your nation in these databases.
A streaming video collection containing more than 62,000 videos on issues in various subject areas including anthropology, art & design, business, criminal justice, film, health sciences, music and performing arts.
The collection includes multiple formats such as documentaries, interviews, performances, news programs and newsreels, field recordings, commercials, and raw footage with transcripts available. Learn more about what AVON can do for you!
This InfoBase database provides instant access to a selection of educational videos.
Subjects such as anthropology, political science, sociology, art, architecture, biology, business and economics, career exploration, health and medicine, education, literature and communication, sociology, psychology, environmental science, philosophy and religion are covered. The content is from top producers and includes Oscar, Emmy and Peabody award-winning documentaries. The films are segmented for easy searching within one title and transcripts are available for some selections. Excellent source for faculty to expand a lesson or for students who are looking to augment a presentation or learn best from video.
RVCC is currently licensing several streaming movies from Swank Digital Campus which is for classroom and individual use. One of these films is "Smoke Signals," based on short stories by Sherman Alexie.
Library books
You can also search the Books, eBooks & Media Catalog on your own! Perform a broad search, such as your nation's name, since books are longer and therefore cover broader topics.
Jennifer Adese explores the origins, meaning, and usage of the term "Aboriginal" and its displacement by the word "Indigenous." In the Constitution Act, 1982, the term's express purpose was to speak to the "aboriginal rights" acknowledged in Section 35(1). Yet in the wake of the Constitution's passage, Aboriginal, in its capitalized form, became far more closely aligned with Section 35(2)'s interpretation of which specific groups held those rights, and was increasingly used to describe and categorize people. More than simple legal and political vernacular, the term Aboriginal (capitalized or not) has had real-world Reflecting on the term's abrupt exit from public discourse and the recent turn toward Indigenous, Indigeneity, and Indigenization, Aboriginal offers insight into Indigenous-Canada relations, reconciliation efforts, and current discussions of Indigenous identity, authenticity, and agency.
The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home." Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer.
"Circle of Life" presents, in written form, traditional oral Native American sacred teachings involving spirituality, ceremonies, visions, healings, everyday life, and the warrior's way from the Iroquois, Lakota and other traditions. The author has been receiving these teachings orally from elders since he was a youth. The wisdom includes Native American views on cosmology, ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, sociology, psychology, healing, dream interpretation and vision quests.
Combining traditional historical sources with new insights from ethnography, archaeology, Indian oral tradition, and years of his original research, James Wilson weaves a historical narrative that puts Native Americans at the center of their struggle for survival against the tide of invading European peoples and cultures. The Earth Shall Weep charts the collision course between Euro-Americans and the indigenous people of the continent, from the early interactions at English settlements on the Atlantic coast, through successive centuries of encroachment and outright warfare, to the new political force of the Native American activists of today.
Here, Now: Indigenous Arts of North America at the Denver Art Museum features two hundred of the Denver Art Museum's most notable Indigenous artworks. Aimed at both longtime fans of Indigenous arts and those coming to them for the first time, this expansive book reinterprets the collection and offers new insights into the historic and contemporary work of Indigenous artists. The artworks--covering a range of media, artistic traditions, and time periods--are organized geographically and invite readers to make connections between the artworks and the places they were produced. The book also includes contributions by Indigenous authors reflecting on the collection and the current issues that affect contemporary Indigenous communities.
Ann Axtmann examines powwows as practiced primarily along the Atlantic coastline, from New Jersey to New England. She offers an introduction to the many complexities of the tradition and explores the history of powwow performance, the variety of their setups, the dances themselves, and the phenomenon of "playing Indian." Ultimately, Axtmann seeks to understand how the dancers express and embody power through their moving bodies and what the dances signify for the communities in which they are performed.
This volume offers a broad overview of topics pertaining to gender-related health, violence, and healing. Employing a strength-based approach (as opposed to a deficit model), the chapters address the resiliency of Indigenous women and two-spirit people in the face of colonial violence and structural racism. The book centers the concept of "rematriation"--the concerted effort to place power, peace, and decision making back into the female space, land, body, and sovereignty--as a decolonial practice to combat injustice.
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. New evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, Indian captives, and Anglo colonists, sheds light too on Indian enslavement of other Indians -- as what started as a European business passed into the hands of indigenous operators and spread like wildfire across vast tracts of the American Southwest.
More than half of all Native Americans live in cities, yet urban Indians have not received the same attention as "traditional" Indians who dwell on reservations. This groundbreaking anthropological investigation shatters stereotypes of what it means to be an Indian in America, arguing that the transition to an urban lifestyle requires a reshaping and reconceptualizing of self-identity. Our Elders Lived It is the result of extensive fieldwork in an Upper Great Lakes midsized city, where life has been complicated by economic misfortune and social deprivation. Informed but not dominated by identity theory, Jackson's sensitive interviews and personal narratives allow the Indian community to speak for itself and to present its own vision of the challenges facing urban Native Americans.
Illuminating largely untold stories of hate crimes committed against Native Americans in the Four Corners region of the United States, this work places these stories within a larger history, connecting historical violence in the United States to present-day hate crimes. Bennett contends that hate crimes committed against Native Americans have persisted as an extension of an "Indian hating" ideology that has existed since colonization, exposing how the justice system has failed Native American victims and families.
The essays in Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision spring from an International Summer Institute held in 1996 on the cultural restoration of oppressed Indigenous peoples. The contributors, primarily Indigenous, unravel the processes of colonization that enfolded modern society and resulted in the oppression of Indigenous peoples.
The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, as a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century.
The early twentieth-century roots of modern American Indian protest and activism are examined in We Are Not a Vanishing People. It tells the history of Native intellectuals and activists joining together to establish the Society of American Indians, a group of Indigenous men and women united in the struggle for Indian self-determination.
"Our names - Atiqput - are very meaningful. They are our identification. They are our Spirits. We are named after what's in the sky for strength, what's in the water... the land, body parts. Every name is attached to every part of our body and mind. Yes, every name is alive. Every name has a meaning. Much of our names have been misspelled and many of them have lost their meanings forever. Our Project Naming has been about identifying Inuit, who became nameless over the years, just "unidentified eskimos..." With Project Naming, we have put Inuit meanings back in the pictures, back to life." Piita Irniq
The culmination of forty years of research, The Language of the Inuit maps the geographical distribution and linguistic differences between the Eskaleut and Inuit languages and dialects. Providing details about aspects of comparative phonology, grammar, and lexicon as well as Inuit prehistory and historical evolution, Louis-Jacques Dorais shows the effects of bilingualism, literacy, and formal education on Inuit language and considers its present status and future.
A grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter take us on a remarkable journey in which the cycles of life - childhood, adolescence, marriage, birthing and child rearing - are presented against the contrasting experiences of three successive generations. Their memories and reflections give us poignant insight into the history of the people of the new territory of Nunavut.
Being Legendary presents a new-and never before published-body of work by the revered and internationally renowned Cree artist Kent Monkman, guided by an Indigenous worldview, historical narratives, and the artist's playful imagination. Known for his thought-provoking and groundbreaking paintings, in Being Legendary Monkman focuses on the cultural world's most urgent topic: What does the museum mean in the twenty-first century?
After a vision in which he beheld himself as a leader in the revitalization of native medicine and culture, medicine man Russell WIllier began to share his healing practices and world view with three anthropologists. In this volume they describe how WIllier treats chronic, stress-related condition and physiological dysfunctions with herbal remedies, sweat-lodge therapy, religious ceremony, and other techniques. Cry of the Eagle also discusses the process by which the anthropologists experienced the medicine man's work. That process required change in both Willier and his observers.
Littlechild draws on his Plains Cree background in this presentation of 17 of his full-color paintings that focus on Native American history in this children's book.
Upholding Indigenous Economic Relationships draws on the knowledge systems of the Nehiyawak (Plains Cree people) to make two central arguments. The first is that economic exploitation was the initial and most enduring relationship between newcomers and Indigenous peoples. The second is that Indigenous economic relationships are constitutive: connections to the land, water, and other human and nonhuman beings form us as individuals and as peoples. This groundbreaking study employs previously overlooked Indigenous economic theories and relationships, and provides contemporary examples of Nehiyawak renewing these relationships in resurgent ways. In the process, Upholding Indigenous Economic Relationships offers tools that enable us to reimagine how we can aspire to the good life with all our relations.
Early in this century, the Florida Seminoles struggled to survive in an environment altered by the drainage of the Everglades and a dwindling demand for animal hides. This revised and expanded edition is the only book available on the cultural tourism activities of an Indian tribe. Often told in the words of the many Seminoles interviewed for this book, this is a tale of unbelievable success against all odds as the Seminoles went from abject poverty to striking the first major international deal by a tribe with the purchase of the Hard Rock Cafe in 2006.
Through first-person accounts, Long Journey Home presents the stories of the Lenape, also known as the Delaware Tribe. These oral histories, which span the post-Civil War era to the present, are gathered into four sections and tell of personal and tribal events as they unfold over time and place. The history of the Lenape is one of forced displacement, from their original tribal home along the eastern seaboard into Pennsylvania, continuing with a series of displacements in Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, and the Indian Territory. For the group of Lenape interviewed for this book, home is now the area around Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
Born and raised in a nearly secret part of New Jersey that remains Native ancestral land, Marion "Strong Medicine" Gould is an eighty-five-year-old Elder in her Lenni-Lenape tribe and community. Taking turns with the author as the two women alternate voices throughout this moving book, Strong Medicine tells of her ancestry, tracing it back to the first Native peoples to encounter the Europeans in 1524, through the strife and bloodshed of America's early years, up to the twentieth century and her own lifetime, decades colored by oppression and terror yet still lifted up by the strength of an enduring collective spirit. This genuine and delightful telling gives voice to a powerful female Elder whose dry wit and charming humor will provide wisdom and inspiration to readers from every background.
Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg (who include the Ojibway) resisted removal, retaining thousands of acres of their homeland in what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves. Outnumbering white settlers well into the nineteenth century, they leveraged their political savvy to advance a dual citizenship that enabled mixed-race tribal members to lay claim to a place in U.S. civil society. Telling the stories of mixed-race traders and missionaries, tribal leaders and territorial governors, Witgen challenges our assumptions about the inevitability of U.S. expansion.
The Siouan family comprises some twenty languages, historically spoken across a broad swath of the central North American plains and woodlands, as well as in parts of the southeastern United States. In spite of its geographical extent and diversity, and the size and importance of several Siouan-speaking tribes, this family has received relatively little attention in the linguistic literature and many of the individual Siouan languages are severely understudied. This volume aims to make work on Siouan languages more broadly available and to encourage deeper investigation of the myriad typological, theoretical, descriptive, and pedagogical issues they raise.
A Concise Dictionary of Nakoda (Assiniboine) brings to life the hopes and dreams of Nakoda (Assiniboine) elders. The Nakoda language--also known as Assiniboine, an Ojibwe ethnonym meaning "Stone Enemy"--is an endangered Siouan language of the Mississippi Valley branch spoken in southern Saskatchewan and northern Montana. Nakoda belongs to the Dakotan dialectal continuum, which includes Dakota, Lakota, and Stoney. The dictionary contains more than 6,000 Nakoda-to-English translations, more than 3,000 English-to-Nakoda translations, and more than 1,500 sentences that will be extremely helpful for those interested in mastering the different usages of words and the various sentence patterns of the language. This dictionary of Nakoda can be used by anyone interested in learning or would like to refresh their knowledge of the language.
Mary Brave Bird grew up fatherless in a one-room cabin, without running water or electricity, on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Rebelling against the aimless drinking, punishing missionary school, narrow strictures for women, and violence and hopeless of reservation life, she joined the new movement of tribal pride sweeping Native American communities in the sixties and seventies. Mary eventually married Leonard Crow Dog, the American Indian Movement's chief medicine man, who revived the sacred but outlawed Ghost Dance. Originally published in 1990, Lakota Woman was a national best seller and winner of the American Book Award.
Russell Means was the most controversial American Indian leader of our time. Where White Men Fear to Tread is the well-detailed, first-hand story of his life, in which he did everything possible to dramatize and justify the American Indian aim of self-determination, such as storming Mount Rushmore, seizing Plymouth Rock, running for President in 1988, and--most notoriously--leading a 71-day takeover of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973.
Grandmother's Grandchild is the remarkable story of Alma Hogan Snell (1923-2008), a Crow woman brought up by her grandmother, the famous medicine woman Pretty Shield. Snell grew up during the 1920s and 1930s, part of the second generation of Crows to be born into reservation life. Like many of her contemporaries, she experienced poverty, personal hardships, and prejudice and left home to attend federal Indian schools. The complex reservation world of Crow women - harsh yet joyous, impoverished yet rich in meaning - unfolds for readers. Snell's experiences range from the forging of an unforgettable bond between grandchild and grandmother to the flowering of an extraordinary love story that has lasted more than five decades.
The oldest living Crow at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Lillian Bullshows Hogan (1905-2003) grew up on the Crow reservation in rural Montana. In The Woman Who Loved Mankind she enthralls readers with her own long and remarkable life and the stories of her parents, part of the last generation of Crow born to nomadic ways.
In the summer of 1912 Hopi runner Louis Tewanima won silver in the 10,000-meter race at the Stockholm Olympics. In that same year Tewanima and another champion Hopi runner, Philip Zeyouma, were soundly defeated by two Hopi elders in a race hosted by members of the tribe. Long before Hopis won trophy cups or received acclaim in American newspapers, Hopi clan runners competed against each other on and below their mesas--and when they won footraces, they received rain. Hopi Runners provides a window into this venerable tradition at a time of great consequence for Hopi culture.
What is at stake when our young people attempt to belong to a college environment that reflects a world that does not want them for who they are? In this compelling book, Navajo scholar Amanda Tachine takes a personal look at 10 Navajo teenagers, following their experiences during their last year in high school and into their first year in college. It is common to think of this life transition as a time for creating new connections to a campus community, but what if there are systemic mechanisms lurking in that community that hurt Native students' chances of earning a degree?
A New Deal for Navajo Weaving provides a detailed history of early to mid-twentieth-century Diné weaving projects by non-Natives who sought to improve the quality and marketability of Navajo weaving but in so doing failed to understand the cultural significance of weaving and its role in the lives of Diné women.
In the remote regions of the Los Padres National Forest, thousand year old art galleries hide in sandstone caves and overhangs. The rock art ranges from simple geometric designs--lines, circles, cross-hatching-- to elaborate, sometimes bizzare anthropomorphic creatures. Archaeologists think shamans created the paintings for ceremonial purposes, to represent supernatural beings or forces. Many of the paintings clearly represent animals and events that the Chumash encountered in their everyday lives.
This book examines the problem of linearization from a new perspective: that of the linearization of affixes. The author's driving proposition is that affixation provides a means of satisfying the universal requirement to linearize linguistic outputs. This proposition is tested using original data from Nuu-chah-nulth ("Nootka"; Wakashan family), an endangered Amerindian language that is remarkable for its complex morphology.