Indigenous Land

A Time Must-Read Book of 2025 An NPR Books We Love Most pick A Tribal College Best Native Studies Book of 2025 From award-winning journalist Joseph Lee, a sweeping, personal exploration of Indigenous identity and the challenges facing Indigenous people around the world. Before Martha’s...

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. Ousamequin 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.

Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining thousands of acres of their homeland in what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and US development in the Old Northwest. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates, the credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves.

: "Echoes of the Sacred Land" is a captivating exploration of the intricate tapestry of Native American tribal religions and rituals. Immerse yourself in the worldviews, beliefs, and practices that have bound indigenous communities to their environments, ancestors, and the spiritual realm for generations. This illuminating journey takes readers beyond the surface, delving into the heart of Native American spirituality, where the rhythms of the earth and the whispers of ancient spirits intertwine. From the Lakota Sioux's Sun Dance to the Hopi's reverence for Katsinam, this book offers a ...

An award-winning political scientist shows that a society’s path to prosperity, sustainability, and equality depends on who owns the land For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Power...

Rooted in Indigenous wisdom and a four-element framework, this book invites readers to rediscover and re-embody the truth that caring for ourselves and caring for the living Earth are one and the same. Global knowledge, personal stories, and natural science for repairing environmental harm...

In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Joshua Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls "biostory"—beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. Through this narrative perspective, Making Love with the Land recasts mental health struggles and our complex emotional landscapes from a nefarious parasite on his (and our) well-being to kin, even a relation, no matter what difficulties they present to us.

American Indians remain familiar as icons, yet poorly understood as historical agents. In this ambitious book that ranges across Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and eastern California (a region known as the Great Basin), Ned Blackhawk places Native peoples squarely at the center of a dynamic and complex story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that profoundly shaped the American West.

On September 26, 2020, Michael was in a great mood. He’d recently returned home to Oklahoma after years in the military. He’d bought a house and had a job teaching and coaching basketball at the local high school. But that night, Michael’s life would turn upside down. Around two o’clock in the morning, he heard people banging on the doors and windows of his home. He called 911 for help. This is the story of what happened next, and why. To understand it, we have to go back to the Trail of Tears that the Five Tribes were forced to walk.

A note is left on a car windshield, an old dog dies, and Kent Nerburn finds himself back on the Lakota reservation where he traveled more than a decade before with a tribal elder named Dan. The touching, funny, and haunting journey that ensues goes deep into reservation boarding-school mysteries, the dark confines of sweat lodges, and isolated Native homesteads far back in the Dakota hills in search of ghosts that have haunted Dan since childhood.

DAVID J. WEBER BOOK PRIZE FINALIST: The true—and unsolved—story of unabashedly greedy men, their exploitation of Muscogee land, and the hunt for the ghost of a boy who may never have existed For readers of David Grann’s award-winning Killers of the Flower Moon In the early 1900s, at the...

“Rebecca Nagle gives a clear and compelling narration of her look into how a small-town murder in the Muscogee Nation led to a significant 2020 Supreme Court case—and the largest restoration of Native tribal land in American history. . . . An illuminating listen.” — AudioFile...

Until now, the standard narrative of American religious history has begun with English settlers in Jamestown or Plymouth and remained predominantly Protestant and Atlantic. Driven by his strong sense of the historical and moral shortcomings of the usual story, Thomas A. Tweed offers a very different narrative in this ambitious new history.

Most books about “magic” promise power. This one promises understanding—and delivers something far rarer. An Introduction to Hawaiian Magic opens a door into a spiritual tradition rooted not in fantasy or spectacle, but in relationship: relationship to land, to ancestry, and to the responsibilities that come with sacred knowledge. It is written for readers who are curious, respectful, and ready to move beyond stereotypes into something real, grounded, and enduring. This book shows you that Hawaiian magic is not about bending reality to your will. It is about learning how to live in ...

The Conquest of Texas is the story of the struggle between Anglos and Indians for land. Anderson tells how Scotch-Irish settlers clashed with farming tribes and then challenged the Comanches and Kiowas for their hunting grounds. Next, the decade-long conflict with Mexico merged with war against Indians. For fifty years Texas remained in a virtual state of war. Piercing the very heart of Lone Star mythology, Anderson tells how the Texas government encouraged the Texas Rangers to annihilate Indian villages, including women and children. This policy of terror succeeded.

This thoughtful, in-depth account of Native struggles against environmental and cultural degradation features chapters on the Seminoles, the Anishinaabeg, the Innu, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Mohawks, among others. Filled with inspiring testimonies of struggles for survival, each page of this volume speaks forcefully for self-determination and community.

What if the Jewish state had been founded not in Palestine—but on African soil? The African Nakba is a daring, imaginative, and deeply researched investigation into one of the most extraordinary and overlooked “what if” moments in modern history: the 1903 British offer to establish a Jewish homeland in East Africa, now known as the Uganda Proposal. In this powerful work, Yemi Adesina unearths the buried story of how Zionist leaders, desperate for refuge from European antisemitism, nearly accepted British East Africa—modern-day Kenya—as an alternative to Palestine. But this ...

At the end of the American Revolution, Britain and the United States imagined a future for each of their nations that stretched across a continent. They signed treaties with one another dividing lands neither country could map, much less control. A century and a half later, Canada and the United States had largely fulfilled those earlier ambitions. Both countries had built nations that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and had made an expansive international border that restricted movement.

When Europeans first arrived in North America, between five and eight million Indigenous people were already living there. But how did they come to be here? What were their agricultural, spiritual, and hunting practices? How did their societies evolve, and what challenges do they face today? Eminent historians Theda Perdue and Michael Green begin by describing how nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers followed the bison and woolly mammoth over the Bering land mass between Asia and what is now Alaska between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago, settling throughout North America.

A slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers romance rooted in Indigenous traditions and small-town heart. She thrives in the fast-paced world of New York business. He fights to protect the Wendat heritage rooted deep in his ancestral land. They couldn’t be more different… and yet. To earn a long-awaited promotion, June accepts a high-stakes mission far from her comfort zone: restoring her company’s image in a remote corner of Michigan. But the moment she arrives, she realizes nothing will go as planned. Caleb runs a ranch and an animal sanctuary. Proud of his Indigenous roots and fiercely attached...