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 her novel "Power," Linda Hogan provides readers with a close look at how separatism and syncretism, or exclusion and inclusion, are complex ideologies that lead to complex decisions. A close look at the novel reveals that the tensions and sharp dichotomies between the traditional world of the Taiga elders and the European American world,…

John Milton Oskison (1874-1947) was a Cherokee writer, journalist, and activist and the author of novels and biographies as well as numerous short stories, essays, and articles about a great variety of subjects. Oskison thought of himself as "an interpreter to the world, of the modern, progressive Indian." The kind of representation Oskison gave…

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…

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…

Scholars Kali Tal and Cathy Caruth express the importance of trauma literature as "the need to tell and retell the story of the traumatic experience, to make it "real" both to the victim and to the community," and to tell "a reality or truth that is not otherwise available." In "Solar Storms" Linda Hogan vividly recounts the consequences of…

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…

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…

In the summer of 1970, the Smithsonian's Festival of American Folklife, an annual event on the National Mall featuring tradition bearers from around the country, premiered a new American Indian program that combined presentations of Native traditions with panel discussions of contemporary social, political, and economic issues facing Native…

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…

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…

American Indian studies claimed a space to interrogate Western disciplinary epistemologies utilizing Indigenous ways of "knowing". This epistemological struggle has, not surprisingly, been that: a struggle. As the author writes in 2010, people understand that their continuing desire to bring Indigenous community-based ways of knowing into dialogue…

In the 1970s a group of American Indian junior high school students requested that their public school, located on the Yakama Reservation, provide them with opportunities to learn traditional Yakama and powwow-style dancing. They found an advocate in their school counselor, a Yakama woman who helped them form the Wapato Indian Club dance troupe, a…

Arming themselves with "manifest destiny" rhetoric, which claimed divine Anglo-Saxon superiority as justification for the conquest of Indigenous and Mexican peoples and the land they occupied, white settlers forcefully pushed into California territory. The two-year-long Mexican-American War resulted in the acquisition of the present-day…

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…