I’ve been teaching, writing, and learning about Indian issues, past and present, for more than four decades. I taught for several years on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, and for years I was a correspondent for Indian Country Today and reported from reservations across the country and several Mexican states. I’ve written and published widely about rez issues including cultural repatriation, land use, Native corporations, language preservation, environmental dumping, and Indian law. I’ve spent a lot of time listening, watching, and reading before putting my own thoughts down on paper, and these are some of the books that have deeply moved me.
I wrote
Song of Dewey Beard: Last Survivor of the Little Bighorn
John (Fire) Lame Deer gets right to the heart of modern rez life: the crazy humor, the quest to preserve culture, the bumbling government policies, and the chronic problems that beset Native people. An outspoken Lakota medicine man, Lame Deer’s story is more than just his own—it’s a ‘community autobiography’ that breaks the mold of American memoir. Call it what you will: reverent or profane, amusing or grim, tender or feisty, Lame Deer calls into question many of the upbeat assumptions so common in American life stories. There are more rags than riches in this story, and that suits Lame Deer just fine.
Storyteller, rebel, medicine man, Lame Deer was born almost a century ago on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. A full-blooded Sioux, he was many things in the white man's world - rodeo clown, painter, prisoner. But, above all, he was a holy man of the Lakota tribe. The story he tells is one of harsh youth and reckless manhood, shotgun marriage and divorce, history and folklore as rich today as ever - and of his fierce struggle to keep pride alive, though living as a stranger in his own ancestral land.
An old cliché has it that nobody loves a rich Indian. As David Grann reveals in his account of 1920s Osage County, Oklahoma, outsiders stopped at nothing short of maiming and murdering Osage tribal people who found themselves sitting on large oil deposits and a windfall of cash. Even J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI are called west to try and solve the mysterious deaths of numerous tribal members in a scandal, long forgotten by many, that rocked the press in the era of Prohibition and The Roaring Twenties.
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. As the death toll climbed, the FBI took up the case. But the bureau badly bungled the investigation. In desperation, its young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. Together with the Osage he and his undercover…
This book is a literary historical novel. It is set in Britain immediately after World War II, when people – gay, straight, young, and old - are struggling to get back on track with their lives, including their love lives. Because of the turmoil of the times, the number of…
Buffalo Bill made a movie on the rez about Indians? Geronimo had a Cadillac? Indian rhythms are all over 20th-century classical music? Philip Deloria has a knack for showing us how Indian people usually defy what the media says they are—they turn up in funny places, do remarkable things, and achieve extraordinary results. Many of the Indians in this book aren’t found on the reservation, a reminder that Native people have traveled far and wide to do astonishing things when the spirit of adventure calls.
What is Geronimo doing sitting in a Cadillac? Why is an Indian woman in beaded buckskin sitting under a salon hairdryer? Such images startle and challenge our outdated visions of Native America. Philip Deloria's revealing accounts of Indians doing unexpected things - singing opera, driving cars, acting in Hollywood - explores this cultural discordance in ways that suggest new directions for American Indian history. Deloria chronicles how Indians came to represent themselves in Wild West shows, Hollywood films, sports, music, and even Indian people's use of the automobile - an ironic counterpoint to today's highways teeming with Dakota pickups and…
For more than eighty years, the Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg did a bit of just about everything. He joined a warrior society as a boy, fought against Custer and Crook in the Indian Wars, rode as an army scout, served as a tribal judge, converted to Christianity, and had to divorce one of his two wives (a heartrending scene!) before his new religion would accept him. His story is told by Thomas Marquis, a Cheyenne agency physician, who translated Wooden Leg’s story from sign language since they didn’t speak each other’s mother tongue. This is one of the best accounts of how Plains Indian men negotiated the challenge of transitioning from traditional ways to life on the reservation.
Told with vigor and insight, this is the memorable story of Wooden Leg (1858-1940), one of sixteen hundred warriors of the Northern Cheyennes who fought with the Lakotas against Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Wooden Leg remembers the world of the Cheyennes before they were forced onto reservations. He tells of growing up on the Great Plains and learning how to be a Cheyenne man. We hear from him about Cheyenne courtship, camp life, spirituality, and hunting; of skirmishes with Crows, Pawnees, and Shoshones; and of the Cheyennes' valiant but doomed resistance against the army of the…
The plan was insane. The trap seemed to snap shut on Bruce and Maggie Tate, an isolation forced on them by the pandemic and America's growing political factionalism. Something had to change.
Maggie's surprising answer: buy a boat, learn to pilot it, and embark on the Great Loop. With no…
Thankfully, not all Indian stories are written or recounted by men. Irene Stewart, born at the base of Canyon de Chelly in 1907, grew up in the shadow of her father, a medicine man who had her kidnapped and taken against her will to boarding school. She survived three of those schools, including Haskell Institute, where she learned to bob her hair, studied home economics, and later became a Presbyterian. But this is no simple tale of assimilation. Like many of her schoolmates, she remained attached to tribal ways and remained true to Navajo tradition even while transforming herself for the world beyond the rez.
This is the story of Irene Stewart, a Navajo woman, told in her own words. Born in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, she was raised by her grandmother after the death of her mother and the departure of her father. Yet her life has not been that of the traditional woman rug weaver of the sheep camp. From the moment when, at the age of nine, her father sent a Navajo policeman to kidnap his daughter from formal schooling, she was set on a path toward becoming a bilingual-bicultural Indian. She has learned to live in both Navajo and white American…
Most people have heard of Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull. But few know of Dewey Beard, a Lakota hero in his own right whose life spanned from the Civil War to the Cold War, a century of trauma and transformation for Indian people across the West. Beard (ca. 1862-1955) fought in the Battle of the Little Bighorn and survived the Wounded Knee Massacre—where he witnessed the murder of almost half his family—while leading a remarkable life that included touring with William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West show; working as a Hollywood Indian; ranching on a Pine Ridge allotment; and advocating in Washington for reparations due to his family and the Lakota people.
In the first century, Rome’s celebrated love poet Ovid finds himself in exile, courtesy of an irate Emperor, in the far-flung town of Tomis. Appalled at being banished to a barbarous region at the very edge of the Empire, Ovid soon discovers that he has a far more urgent -…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
