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The Cherokee are one of the largest Native American tribes in the United States, with more than 300,000 people across the country claiming tribal membership and nearly one million people internationally professing to have at least one Cherokee Indian ancestor. This book uncovers the origins of the Cherokee diaspora and explores how communities and individuals have negotiated their Cherokee identities, even when geographically removed from the Cherokee Nation headquartered in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the book transports the reader back in time to tell the poignant story of the Cherokee people migrating throughout North America, including their forced exile along the infamous Trail of Tears (1838–1839). The book tells a remarkable story of courage, cultural innovation, and resilience, exploring the importance of migration and removal, land and tradition, culture and language in defining what it has meant to be Cherokee for a widely scattered people.

This book is the first to focus on Indigenous women of the Southwest and Pacific Northwest and the ways they dealt with the challenges posed by the existing legal regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In most western states, it was difficult if not impossible for Native women to inherit property, raise mixed-race children, or take legal action in the event of rape or abuse. Through the experiences of six Indigenous women who fought for personal autonomy and the rights of their tribes, the book explores a long yet generally unacknowledged tradition of active critique of the U.S. legal system by female Native Americans.

This book reassesses the nature and meanings of King Philip’s War (1675-1678), a major Indigenous resistance movement and colonial conflict that pervasively reshaped the American Northeast and has reverberated among regional communities for centuries. It focuses on specific places that have been meaningful to Native American (Algonquian) peoples over long spans of time, as well as to colonial New England residents more recently, and how the waging and remembrance of violence at these locales has affected communities’ senses of past, place, and collective purpose. Its case studies reinterpret intercultural interactions and settler colonialism in early America, the importance of place and environment in the production of history, and the myriad ways in which memory has been mobilized to shape the present and future. It emphasizes that American history continues to be contested, in highly local and sometimes hard-to-perceive ways that require careful interdisciplinary methods to access, as well as in more prominent arenas.

With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Our Beloved Kin recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and resistance during the “First Indian War” (later named “King Philip’s War”) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. King Philip’s War (1675-1678) is often viewed as the quintessential moment of colonial conquest and Native resistance, but these stories reveal a historical landscape much more complex than its original Puritan narrators conveyed. Our Beloved Kin also draws readers beyond the locus of most narratives of the war, southern New England, into the northern front, the vast interior of Wabanaki, where the war continued long beyond the death of “King Philip.” Beginning and ending at Caskoak, a place of diplomacy, the book explores the movement of survivors seeking refuge, captives taken in war, and Indigenous leaders pursuing diplomacy in vast Indigenous networks across the northeast. Supplemented by thirteen maps and an interactive website, Our Beloved Kin takes readers into Indigenous geographies, braiding together research in historical archives, including little-known revelatory documents, interpretive frameworks drawn from Indigenous languages, and place-based history which arises from reading “the archive of the land” to offer a compelling new interpretation of “King Philip’s War.”

This book presents the previously untold story of how the ocean became a “frontier” between colonists and Indians. When the English and Dutch empires both tried to claim the same patch of coast between the Hudson River and Cape Cod, the sea itself became the arena of contact and conflict. During the violent European invasions, the region's Algonquian-speaking Natives were navigators, boatbuilders, fishermen, pirates, and merchants who became active players in the emergence of the Atlantic World. Drawing from a wide range of English, Dutch, and archeological sources, the text uncovers a new geography of Native America that incorporates seawater as well as soil. Looking past Europeans' arbitrary land boundaries, it reveals unseen links between local episodes and global events on distant shores.

For the Makahs, a tribal nation at the most northwestern point of the contiguous United States, a deep relationship with the sea is the locus of personal and group identity. Unlike most other indigenous tribes whose lives are tied to lands, the Makah people have long placed marine space at the center of their culture, finding in their own waters the physical and spiritual resources to support themselves. This book explores the history and identity of the Makahs from the arrival of maritime fur-traders in the eighteenth century through the intervening centuries and to the present day. This book discovers that the “People of the Cape” were far more involved in shaping the maritime economy of the Pacific Northwest than has been understood. It examines Makah attitudes toward borders and boundaries, their efforts to exercise control over their waters and resources as Europeans and Americans arrived, and their embrace of modern opportunities and technology to maintain autonomy and resist assimilation. The book also addresses current environmental debates relating to the tribe’s customary whaling and fishing rights and illuminates the efforts of the Makahs to regain control over marine space, preserve their marine-oriented identity, and articulate a traditional future.

This book shows how American Indians fulfilled the promise of Indian self-determination by reclaiming control over reservation resources. During America’s 1970s quest for energy independence, tribes possessing valuable minerals resisted massive mining projects threatening their indigenous communities. They also launched a national campaign to improve their tribal governments’ capacity to manage reservation land. Working with federal agencies tasked with increasing domestic energy production, these groups created the Council of Energy Resource Tribes to educate tribal leaders and broker deals that could provide energy to the nation and revenue for the tribes. Unfortunately, an antiquated legal structure hindered tribal efforts at development. Progressive-Era laws embedded with notions of Indian inferiority – namely, the 1938 Indian Mineral Leasing Act – denied tribes the right to control reservation mining, placing this authority instead with unprepared federal agents. By the early 1980s, however, increasingly sophisticated tribes demanded the legal authority to match their newfound capacity. Working with industry representatives, federal officials, and members of Congress, energy tribes thus constructed a new legal regime – anchored by the 1982 Indian Mineral Development Act – that recognized tribal, not federal, control over reservation development. But importantly, these efforts to restructure federal law also reshaped Indian Country. As tribes altered their governments to better manage resources, intense internal debates erupted over whether these new forms of governance were culturally “authentic.” In the end, efforts to increase tribal capacity and secure legal authority over reservation resources produced both expanded sovereignty and deeply divided communities.