This essay examines the depiction of Native Americans by the US Information Agency (USIA), the bureau charged with explaining American politics to the international public during the Cold War. In the 1950s and 1960s, the USIA broadcast the message that Americans had begun to acknowledge their nation's history of conquest and were working to…

In this article, the author shares his comments on the past, present, and future of the American Indian Studies Center (AISC). He discusses how AISC was established and describes how American Indian studies have come a long way from the neglect and disparagement of Native Americans in the way American history is written and taught. He also…

In this article, the author aims to "discover" the actual Sacajawea. She intends to produce work that critiques colonialism in history and museums and to return the focus of the colonial gaze back to the colonizer. In this article, she talks about how colonial narratives of Sacajawea in popular culture justify conquest, heteropatriarchy, and the…

In this article, the author talks about native Americans, the national parks and the concept of historical inevitability. The notion of historical inevitability, always a victor's argument, is as old as the stories of the ancient conquerors. It has permeated the history of Indian America, as told by white historians, and people are still today…

In an art world dominated by non-Indian curators and experts, being "Indian" was confined to an ethnographic fiction of storytellers, dancers, and medicine men attired in traditional clothing and regalia, in which the colonization of indigenous lands and peoples is left to the margins like an Edward S. Curtis portrait. These are the…

Interest in North American Indian code talkers continues to increase. In addition to numerous works about the Navajo code talkers, several publications on other groups of Native American code talkers--including the Choctaw, Comanche, Hopi, Meskwaki, Canadian Cree--and about code talkers in general have appeared. This article chronicles recent…

As of December 2010, the US Congress had enacted more than twenty major community-specific Native water-rights settlements, and the state of Arizona had more of these settlements (eight) than any other US state. This unique situation has invited voluminous studies on Arizona's Native water-rights settlements. Although these studies have clarified…

In this article, the author talks about schooling and the development of literacy within Algonquian communities in eighteenth-century southern New England. With the founding of Moor's Indian Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut, in 1754, congregational minister Eleazar Wheelock launched an educational regimen that aimed to Christianize and…

The fragmentation of large nineteenth-century reservations resulted in the creation of American Indian allotment geographies in the United States. Federal Indian policy, namely the General Allotment Act of 1887, allowed the US government to break up large reservations, allot land to individual Indians, and sell the surplus to non-Indian settlers.…

Much has been written of the Navajo Long Walk period when the Navajo people, following what appears to be a fairly short resistance, surrendered in droves to the US military, collected at Fort Defiance and other designated sites, then moved in a series of "long walks" to Fort Sumner (Hweeldi) on the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico.…

Conflictual relations between the owners of Foxwoods Casino and Resort, who are American Indians, and the white residents of Ledyard and nearby Preston and North Stonington townships in southeastern Connecticut are long-standing. They have flared up on numerous occasions and especially since 1982 when the Mashantucket Pequots considered building a…

The 1772 execution of the Mohegan sailor Moses Paul served as the occasion for Samson Occom's popular "Sermon," reprinted in numerous editions. Recent work by Ava Chamberlain seeks to recover Paul's version of events from contemporary court records. This article argues that Paul's "firsthand" account of the case and autobiographical narrative…

This article seeks to explain the nature of the arguments the Iroquois presented to the US government in trying to prevent their removal. In the letters they wrote to the federal government from the 1830s to the 1850s they emphasized their own law as well as that of the United States. They drew on whatever perception of law they deemed was best…

Caddo Indian villages occupied a region along an extensive trade network that stretched well into the North American South and West. Before the Spanish began to clamp down on French traders in their second attempt to establish a presence in East Texas in the 1750's, the Indians of the region had already enjoyed extensive trade relations with the…

The centering processes of geographic information system (GIS) development at the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was an extension of past cartographic encounters with American Indians through the central control of geospatial technologies, uneven development of geographic information resources, and extension of technically dependent…