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Return to the Land of the Head Hunters

Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka'wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema

By Brad Evans, Aaron Glass, Bill Holm

Photographer Edward Curtis’s 1914 orchestrally scored melodrama In the Land of the Head Hunters was one of the first US films to feature an Indigenous cast. This landmark of early silent cinema was an intercultural...

Proud Raven, Panting Wolf

Carving Alaska's New Deal Totem Parks

By Emily L. Moore

Among Southeast Alaska’s best-known tourist attractions are its totem parks, showcases for monumental wood sculptures by Tlingit and Haida artists. Although the art form is centuries old, the parks date back only to the waning...

School Photos in Liquid Time

Reframing Difference

By Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer

From clandestine images of Jewish children isolated in Nazi ghettos and Japanese American children incarcerated in camps to images of Native children removed to North American boarding schools, classroom photographs of schoolchildren are pervasive even...

Troubling Borders

An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora

By Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan Duong, Mariam B. Lam, Kathy L. Nguyen

Juxtaposing short stories, poetry, painting, and photographs, Troubling Borders showcases the creative work of women of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Thai, and Filipino ancestry. This thematically arranged collection interrupts borders of categorization and gender, in what...

The Chicano Studies Reader

An Anthology of Aztlán, 1970–2019

By Chon A. Noriega, Eric Avila, Karen Mary Davalos, Chela Sandoval, Rafael Pérez-Torres, Charlene Villaseñor Black

The Chicano Studies Reader, the best-selling anthology of articles from Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, has been newly expanded with a group of essays that focus on Chicana/o and Latina/o youth. This section, Generations...

La Raza

By Colin Gunckel, Luis C. Garza, Amy Scott

La Raza, launched in 1967 in the basement of an Eastside LA church, was conceived as a tool for community-based organizing during the early days of the Chicano movement. The all-volunteer staff of the newspaper—and...

Continuum

North American Native Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

By Gaylord Torrence

This landmark publication brings Indigenous art to the fore with the presentation of 280 objects from the Nelson-Atkins Museum’s rich collection. More than two-thirds of the volume’s featured masterworks—paintings, sculptures, drawings, regalia, ceramics, textiles, and...

Alaska

An American Colony

By Stephen W. Haycox

Alaska often looms large as a remote, wild place with endless resources and endlessly independent, resourceful people. Yet it has always been part of larger stories: the movement of Indigenous peoples from Asia into the...

Fifth Chinese Daughter

By Jade Snow Wong. Introduction by Leslie Bow. Illustrated by Kathryn Uhl

Jade Snow Wong’s autobiography portrays her coming-of-age in San Francisco's Chinatown, offering a rich depiction of her immigrant family and her strict upbringing, as well as her rebellion against family and societal expectations for a...

Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination

By Bertram D. Ashe, Ilka Saal

From Kara Walker’s hellscape antebellum silhouettes to Paul Beatty’s bizarre twist on slavery in The Sellout and from Colson Whitehead’s literal Underground Railroad to Jordan Peele’s body-snatching Get Out, this volume offers commentary on contemporary...

Sámi Media and Indigenous Agency in the Arctic North

By Coppélie Cocq and Thomas A. DuBois

Digital media–GIFs, films, TED Talks, tweets, and more–have become integral to daily life and, unsurprisingly, to Indigenous people’s strategies for addressing the historical and ongoing effects of colonization. In Sámi Media and Indigenous Agency in...

Quiet Odyssey

A Pioneer Korean Woman in America

By Mary Paik Lee. Edited with an Introduction by Sucheng Chan. Foreword by David K. Yoo

Mary Paik Lee left her native country in 1905, traveling with her parents as a political refugee after Japan imposed control over Korea. Her father worked in the sugar plantations of Hawaii briefly before taking...

Aiiieeeee!

An Anthology of Asian American Writers

By Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, Shawn Wong, Tara Fickle

In the eyes of mid-twentieth-century white America, “Aiiieeeee!” was the one-dimensional cry from Asian Americans, their singular expression of all emotions—it signified and perpetuated the idea of Asian Americans as inscrutable, foreign, self-hating, undesirable, and...

Outriders

Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West

By Rebecca Scofield

Rodeo is a dangerous and painful performance in which only the strongest and most skilled riders succeed. In the popular imagination, the western rodeo hero is often a stoic white man who embodies the toughness...

Smell Detectives

An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America

By Melanie A. Kiechle. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

What did nineteenth-century cities smell like? And how did odors matter in the formation of a modern environmental consciousness? Smell Detectives follows the nineteenth-century Americans who used their noses to make sense of the sanitary...

The Gift of Knowledge / Ttnúwit Átawish Nch'inch'imamí

Reflections on Sahaptin Ways

By Virginia R. Beavert and Janne L. Underriner

The Gift of Knowledge / Ttnuwit Atawish Nch’inch’imamí is a treasure trove of material for those interested in Native American culture. Author Virginia Beavert grew up in a traditional, Indian-speaking household. Both her parents and...

Shapes of Native Nonfiction

Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers

By Elissa Washuta, Theresa Warburton

Just as a basket’s purpose determines its materials, weave, and shape, so too is the purpose of the essay related to its material, weave, and shape. Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology...

Reclaiming the Reservation

Histories of Indian Sovereignty Suppressed and Renewed

By Alexandra Harmon

In the 1970s the Quinault and Suquamish, like dozens of Indigenous nations across the United States, asserted their sovereignty by applying their laws to everyone on their reservations. This included arresting non-Indians for minor offenses,...

The Nuosu Book of Origins

A Creation Epic from Southwest China

By Mark Bender, Qingchun Luo, Jjivot Zopqu

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295745701.s01

The Nuosu people, who were once overlords of vast tracts of farmland and forest in the uplands of southern Sichuan and neighboring provinces, are the largest division of the Yi ethnic group...

Working with the Ancestors

Mana and Place in the Marquesas Islands

By Emily C. Donaldson. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Throughout the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, forest spirits share space with ancestral ruins and active agricultural plots, affecting land use and heritage preservation. As Marquesans continue their efforts to establish UNESCO World Heritage status,...