Folsom Library Collection Highlights

This book argues that two principal factors are inhibiting Native students from transitioning from school to college and from succeeding in their post-secondary studies. It presents models and examples of pathways to success that align with Native American students' aspirations and cultural values. Many attend schools that are poorly resourced where they are often discouraged from aspiring to college. Many are alienated from the educational system by a lack of culturally appropriate and meaningful environment or support systems that reflect Indigenous values of community, sharing, honoring extended family, giving-back to one's community, and respect for creation. The contributors to this book highlight Indigenized college access programs, meaning programs developed by, not just for, the Indigenous community, and are adapted, or developed, for the unique Indigenous populations they serve.

From the midcentury metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakhóta people to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the tale of three extraordinary women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried. Sissy, born 1961: Sissy's relationship with her beautiful and volatile mother is difficult -- even dangerous -- but her life is also filled with lovely things, including a new Christmas present: a doll called Ethel. Ethel whispers advice and kindness in Sissy's ear, and in one especially terrifying moment, maybe even saves Sissy's life. Lillian, born 1925: Raised in her tribe's reservation in a time of terrible change, Lillian clings to her sister Blanche and her doll, Mae. When the sisters are forced to attend an Indian boarding school far from their home, Blanche refuses to be cowed by the school's abusive nuns. But when tragedy strikes the sisters, Mae finds her way to defend the girls. Cora, born 1888: Born just after the genocidal "Indian Wars," Cora still isn't afraid of the white men who take her away to be "civilized." When teachers burn her beloved buckskin doll Winona, Cora discovers that the spirit of Winona may not be entirely lost. A modern masterpiece, A Council of Dolls is gorgeous, quietly devastating, and ultimately hopeful. With stunning prose, Mona Susan Power weaves a spell of love and healing that comes alive on the page.

The stories and legends of the Lushootseed-speaking people of Puget Sound were an important part of the oral tradition by which beliefs, values, and customs were handed from one generation to another. Vi Hilbert, a Skagit Indian, grew up at a time when many of the old social patterns survived and when everyone still spoke the ancestral language. As an adult, when she realized that native language and culture were being forgotten, she began to work with linguists and anthropologists in recording and translating as much of the Lushootseed oral tradition as possible.

Tracing one tribe's fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite its history, this book takes readers into the heart of debates over who owns and who has the right to tell Native American history and stories. The author tells the story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and its Historical Committee, showing how their work is exemplary of how tribal archives can strategically shift how Native history is accessed, represented, written, and, most importantly, controlled.

Popular music compels, it entertains, and it has the power to attract and move audiences. With that in mind, the editors of Indigenous Pop showcase the contributions of American Indian musicians to popular forms of music, including jazz, blues, country-western, rock and roll, reggae, punk, and hip hop. From Joe Shunatona and the United States Indian Reservation Orchestra to Jim Pepper, from Buffy Saint-Marie to Robbie Robertson, from Joy Harjo to Lila Downs, Indigenous Pop vividly addresses the importance of Native musicians and popular musical genres, establishing their origins and discussing what they represent. Arranged both chronologically and according to popular generic forms, the book gives Indigenous pop a broad new meaning. In addition to examining the transitive influences of popular music on Indigenous expressive forms, the contributors also show ways that various genres have been shaped by what some have called the "Red Roots" of American-originated musical styles. This recognition of mutual influence extends into the ways of understanding how music provides methodologies for living and survival.

Native Foodways is the first scholarly collection of essays devoted exclusively to the interplay of Indigenous religious traditions and foodways in North America. Drawing on diverse methodologies, the essays discuss significant confluences in selected examples of these religious traditions and foodways, providing rich individual case studies informed by relevant historical, ethnographic, and comparative data. Many of the essays demonstrate how narrative and active elements of selected Indigenous North American religious traditions have provided templates for interactive relationships with particular animals and plants, rooted in detailed information about their local environments. In return, these animals and plants have provided these Native American communities with sustenance. Other essays provide analyses of additional contemporary and historical North American Indigenous foodways while also addressing issues of tradition and cultural change.

A prominent Navajo educator once told historian Peter Iverson that "the five major sports on the Navajo Nation are basketball, basketball, basketball, basketball, and rodeo." The Navajo are far from alone in their passion for the game. Whether on reservations or in cities, Native Americans of all ages tend to congregate around basketball courts. But why is this? Basketball is a relatively new sport, unconnected to older indigenous sporting traditions. It's not a sport that many Native Americans have played professionally, and most non-Natives have no idea that basketball is so widely popular in Indian Country. In Native Hoops, Wade Davies explores this central question of how and why basketball gained such importance among Native Americans. Davies argues that basketball, first introduced in Indian schools as part of an assimilationist agenda, was adopted and adapted by Native students who connected it with older tribal athletic traditions and used it as a way to build community and participate in the rise of mainstream American sports.

Native Students at Work tells the stories of Native people from around the American Southwest who participated in labor programs at Sherman Institute, a federal Indian boarding school in Riverside, California. The school placed young Native men and women in and around Los Angeles as domestic workers, farmhands, and factory laborers. For the first time, historian Kevin Whalen reveals the challenges these students faced as they left their homes for boarding schools and then endured an "outing program" that aimed to strip them of their identities and cultures by sending them to live and work among non-Native people. Tracing their journeys, Whalen shows how male students faced low pay and grueling conditions on industrial farms near the edge of the city, yet still made more money than they could near their reservations. Similarly, many young women serving as domestic workers in Los Angeles made the best of their situations by tapping into the city's Indigenous social networks and even enrolling in its public schools. As Whalen reveals, despite cruel working conditions and poor treatment, Native people used the outing program to their advantage whenever they could, forming urban Indigenous communities and sharing money and knowledge gained in the city with those back home.

The Lenape (or Delaware) people were pushed out of the New Jersey region in colonial times, embarking on a two-hundred year odyssey that eventually brought them to Indian Territory, soon to be the State of Oklahoma. On the Turtle's Back: Stories the Lenape Told Their Grandchildren presents the stories that they decided to write down in the early 1900s, when their language was still fully vibrant, but they were beginning to fear for the future. Two Delaware families, Charles and Susan Elkhair and Julius and Minnie Fouts, together with their children, invited an anthropologist into their living rooms, and they began to talk. These families told stories of creation, of great heroes, and of people who needed to learn a lesson or two. In doing this, they allowed future generations into their imaginative and metaphorical story world, elements of which had existed for centuries. The book they hoped for wasn't published in their time, but their efforts to preserve their culture were nevertheless fruitful: they made this book possible. The second part of this volume includes interviews with elders at the end of the twentieth century, people who had been children when the stories were told. They still remembered the old Lenape story world, as do the Delaware of today.

Standing at the intersection of Native history, labor, and representation, Picturing Indians presents a vivid portrait of the complicated experiences of Native actors on the sets of midcentury Hollywood Westerns. This behind-the-scenes look at costuming, makeup, contract negotiations, and union disparities uncovers an all-too-familiar narrative of racism and further complicates filmmakers' choices to follow mainstream representations of "Indianness." Liza Black offers a rare and overlooked perspective on American cinema history by giving voice to creators of movie Indians--the stylists, public relations workers, and the actors themselves. In exploring the inherent racism in sensationalizing Native culture for profit, Black also chronicles the little-known attempts of studios to generate cultural authenticity and historical accuracy in their films. She discusses the studios' need for actual Indians to participate in, legitimate, and populate such filmic narratives. But studios also told stories that made Indians sound less than Indian because of their skin color, clothing, and inability to do functions and tasks considered authentically Indian by non-Indians. In the ongoing territorial dispossession of Native America, Native people worked in film as an economic strategy toward survival.

Ahead of the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, a new look at the Plymouth colony's founding events, told for the first time with Wampanoag people at the heart of the story. In March 1621, when Plymouth's survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth's governor, John Carver, declared their people's friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousmaequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the 'First Thanksgiving.' The treaty remained operative until King Philip's War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end. 400 years after that famous meal, historian David J. Silverman sheds profound new light on the events that led to the creation, and bloody dissolution, of this alliance. Focusing on the Wampanoag Indians, Silverman deepens the narrative to consider tensions that developed well before 1620 and lasted long after the devastating war-tracing the Wampanoags' ongoing struggle for self-determination up to this very day. This unsettling history reveals why some modern Native people hold a Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving, a holiday which celebrates a myth of colonialism and white proprietorship of the United States. This Land is Their Land shows that it is time to rethink how we, as a pluralistic nation, tell the history of Thanksgiving.

Alaska Native Son illuminates the life of the remarkable Irish-Athabascan man who was the first person to summit Mount Denali, North America's tallest mountain. Born in 1893, Walter Harper was the youngest child of Jenny Albert and the legendary gold prospector Arthur Harper. His parents separated shortly after his birth, and his mother raised Walter in the Athabascan tradition, speaking her Koyukon-Athabascan language. When Walter was seventeen years old, Episcopal archdeacon Hudson Stuck hired the skilled and charismatic youth as his riverboat pilot and winter trail guide. During the following years, as the two traveled among Interior Alaska's Episcopal missions, they developed a father-son-like bond and summited Denali together in 1913. Walter's strong Athabascan identity allowed him to remain grounded in his birth culture as his Western education expanded, and he became a leader and a bridge between Alaska Native peoples and Westerners in the Alaska territory.