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Anakú Iwachá

Yakama Legends and Stories

By Virginia R. Beavert, Michelle M. Jacob, Joana W. Jansen

Central to the Yakama oral tradition, storytelling enables Tribal Elders to share lessons, values, and customs with younger generations across the Columbia River plateau and the Pacific Northwest. Drawn from a time before the coming...

Painful Beauty

Tlingit Women, Beadwork, and the Art of Resilience

By Megan A. Smetzer

For over 150 years, Tlingit women artists have beaded colorful, intricately beautiful designs on moccasins, dolls, octopus bags, tunics, and other garments. Painful Beauty suggests that at a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively...

Art of the Northwest Coast

By Aldona Jonaitis

Originally published in 2006, Art of the Northwest Coast offers an expansive history of this great tradition, from the earliest known works to those made at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although non-Natives often...

Reppin'

Pacific Islander Youth and Native Justice

By Keith L. Camacho

From hip-hop artists in the Marshall Islands to innovative multimedia producers in Vanuatu to racial justice writers in Utah, Pacific Islander youth are using radical expression to transform their communities. Exploring multiple perspectives about Pacific...

The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence

Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874

By Robert T. Boyd

In the late 1700s when European colonizers arrived on the Northwest Coast, they reported the presence of vigorous, diverse cultures—Tlingit, Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka), Coast Salish, and Chinookan—with a population conservatively estimated at more...

Herring and People of the North Pacific

Sustaining a Keystone Species

By Thomas F. Thornton and Madonna L. Moss

Herring are vital to the productivity and health of marine systems, and socio-ecologically Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) is one of the most important fish species in the Northern Hemisphere. Human dependence on herring has evolved...

Totem Pole Carving

Norman Tait, Bringing a Log to Life

By Vickie Jensen

In 1985, photographer and writer Vickie Jensen spent three months with Nisga’a artist Norman Tait and his crew of young carvers as they transformed a raw cedar log into a forty-two-foot totem pole for the...

Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast

By Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, Aldona Jonaitis

Inseparable from its communities, Northwest Coast art functions aesthetically and performatively beyond the scope of non-Indigenous scholarship, from demonstrating kinship connections to manifesting spiritual power. Contributors to this volume foreground Indigenous understandings in recognition of...

The River That Made Seattle

A Human and Natural History of the Duwamish

By BJ Cummings

With bountiful salmon and fertile plains, the Duwamish River has drawn people to its shores over the centuries for trading, transport, and sustenance. Chief Se’alth and his allies fished and lived in villages here and...

Haboo

Native American Stories from Puget Sound

By Vi Hilbert, Jill La Pointe, Thom Hess

The stories and legends of the Lushootseed-speaking people of Puget Sound represent an important part of the oral tradition by which one generation hands down beliefs, values, and customs to another. Vi Hilbert grew up...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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,...

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...

The Nuosu Book of Origins

A Creation Epic from Southwest China

By Mark Bender, Aku Wuwu, Jjivot Zopqu

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 in southwest China....

Becoming Mary Sully

Toward an American Indian Abstract

By Philip J. Deloria

Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully was the great-granddaughter of respected nineteenth-century portraitist Thomas Sully, who captured the personalities of America’s first generation of celebrities (including the figure of Andrew Jackson immortalized on the twenty-dollar bill)....