Indigenous History & Perspectives

This is by no means an exhaustive or definitive list of resources. Rather, it is meant to simply act as a “jumping-off point” for those interested in learning more about anti-racist work and supporting the Black, Indigenous, and people of color in our community.

Books:

Note: To best support the authors and as a part of the fight against systemic racism, please consider purchasing these books directly from the author, the publisher, or from an independent bookstore.

Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians but Were Afraid to Ask by Anton Treuer
Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians but Were Afraid to Ask cuts through the emotion and builds a foundation for true understanding and positive action.

All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life by Winona LaDuke
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 born from long years of experience, and her analysis is deepened with inspiring testimonies by local Native activists sharing the struggle for survival.

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer
“An informed, moving, and kaleidoscopic portrait… Treuer’s powerful book suggests the need for soul-searching about the meanings of American history and the stories we tell ourselves about this nation’s past..” – New York Times Book Review, front page

Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life by David Treuer
With authoritative research and reportage, Treuer illuminates misunderstood contemporary issues of sovereignty, treaty rights, and natural-resource conservation. He traces the waves of public policy that have disenfranchised and exploited Native Americans, exposing the tension that has marked the historical relationship between the United States government and the Native American population. Through the eyes of students, teachers, government administrators, lawyers, and tribal court judges, he shows how casinos, tribal government, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have transformed the landscape of Native American life.

Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog
Lakota Woman was a national bestseller and winner of the American Book Award. It is a unique document, unparalleled in American Indian literature, a story of death, of determination against all odds, of the cruelties perpetrated against American Indians, and of the Native American struggle for rights.

Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 by Brenda J. Child
A revealing look at the strong emotional history of Indian boarding school experiences in the first half of the twentieth century. At the heart of this book are the hundreds of letters written by parents, children, and school officials at Haskell Institute in Kansas and the Flandreau School in South Dakota. These revealing letters show how profoundly entire families were affected by their experiences. Children, who often attended schools at great distances from their communities, suffered from homesickness, and their parents from loneliness. Parents worried continually about the emotional and physical health and the academic progress of their children. Families clashed repeatedly with school officials over rampant illnesses and deplorable living conditions and devised strategies to circumvent severely limiting visitation rules. Family intimacy was threatened by the school’s suppression of traditional languages and Native cultural practices. Although boarding schools were a threat to family life, profound changes occurred in the boarding school experiences as families turned to these institutions for relief during the Depression, when poverty and the loss of traditional seasonal economics proved a greater threat. Boarding School Seasons provides a multifaceted look at the aspirations and struggles of real people. Brenda J. Child is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota.

Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community by Brenda J. Child
This work from Brenda J Child gives Native American women their due, detailing the many ways in which they have shaped Native American life. She illuminates the lives of women such as Madeleine Cadotte, who became a powerful mediator between her people and European fur traders, and Gertrude Buckanaga, whose postwar community activism in Minneapolis helped bring many Indian families out of poverty. Moving from the early days of trade with Europeans through the reservation era and beyond, Child offers a powerful tribute to the courageous women who sustained Native American communities through the darkest challenges of the past three centuries.

Night Flying Woman by Ignatia Broker
With the art of a practiced storyteller, Ignatia Broker recounts the life of her great-great-grandmother, Night Flying Woman, who was born in the mid-19th century and lived during a chaotic time of enormous change, uprootings, and loss for the Minnesota Ojibway. But this story also tells of her people’s great strength and continuity.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown
Immediately recognized as a revelatory and enormously controversial book since its first publication in 1971, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is universally recognized as one of those rare books that forever changes the way its subject is perceived. Now repackaged with a new introduction from bestselling author Hampton Sides to coincide with a major HBO dramatic film of the book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown’s classic, eloquent, meticulously documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century. A national bestseller in hardcover for more than a year after its initial publication, it has sold over four million copies in multiple editions and has been translated into seventeen languages.

Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the series of battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them and their people demoralized and decimated. A unique and disturbing narrative told with force and clarity, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee changed forever our vision of how the West was won, and lost. It tells a story that should not be forgotten, and so must be retold from time to time.

Being Dakota: Tales and Traditions of the Sisseton and Wahpeton by Amos Oneroad and Alanson B. Skinner
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a few members of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota community in northeastern South Dakota, while living in the white world, quietly worked to preserve the customs and stories of their ancestors in the face of federal government suppression and the opposition of organized religion.

Amos E. Oneroad, a son of one of those families, was educated in the traditional ways and then sent east to obtain a college education, eventually becoming a Presbyterian minister. For most of his life, he moved in two worlds. By fortunate coincidence he met Alanson B. Skinner, a student of anthropology and kindred soul, in New York City. The two men formed a bond both personal and professional, collaborating on anthropological studies in various parts of the United States. The project closest to Oneroad’s heart was the collection and preservation of the stories and traditions of the Sisseton and Wahpeton. Oneroad wrote down the stories and gave them to Skinner. The men intended to polish the resulting manuscript and publish it, but Skinner’s untimely death in 1925 thwarted their plans.

Oneroad and Skinner collected descriptions of everyday life, including tribal organization, ceremonies that marked the individual’s passage from birth to death, and material culture. Several of the folk tales included relate the exploits of Iktomi, the trickster, while others tell of adventures of such figures as the Child of Love, Star Born, and the Mysterious Turtle.

Toolkits:

Understanding and Confronting Racial Injustice from University of Minnesota Extension