Indigenous Studies

Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude.

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science....

Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories....

Widely hailed as a spiritual classic, this inspirational and unfailingly powerful story reveals the life and visions of the Lakota healer Nicholas Black Elk....

The Cosmic Serpent reveals how startlingly different the world around us appears when we open our minds to it....

The most enduring feature of US history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants....

This collection of writings from revered Native Americans offers timeless, meaningful lessons on living and learning....

A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later.

A paradigm-shifting book in the vein of Sapiens that brings a crucial Indigenous perspective to historical and cultural issues of history, education, money, power, and sustainability - and offers a new template for living....

A groundbreaking and deeply personal exploration of Tribal enrollment, and what it means to be Native American in the United States.

A comprehensive guide to the foundations of Toltec wisdom, Beyond Fear is essential reading for fans of Don Miguel Ruiz’s New York Times best-selling book, The Four Agreements, which has sold over 8 million copies and has been translated into 46 languages worldwide....

Black Elk Speaks, the story of the Oglala Lakota visionary and healer Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950) and his people during momentous twilight years of the nineteenth century, offers listeners much more than a precious glimpse of a vanished time.

Indigenous worldviews, and the knowledge they confer, are critical for human survival and the wellbeing of future generations.

Compelling and profound, The Lakota Way gives a fresh outlook to those searching for a new perspective on spiritual and ethical living....

An Indigenous environmental scientist breaks down why western conservationism isn't working--and offers Indigenous models informed by case studies, personal stories, and family histories that center the voices of Latin American women and land protectors....

In the vein of the astonishing and eye-opening best sellers I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and The Line Becomes a River, this stunning work of investigative journalism follows a series of unsolved disappearances and murders of Indigenous women in rural British Columbia....

Historian David E. Stannard argues in this stunning new book, the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide....

An extraordinary compilation of legends and rituals about nature's ever-present signs. From the birds that soar above us to the insects beneath our feet, Native American healer Bobby Lake-Thom shows how the creatures of the earth can aid us in healing and self-knowledge....

First published in 1972, Vine Deloria Jr.'s God Is Red remains the seminal work on native religious views, asking new questions about our species and our ultimate fate. Celebrating five decades in publication with a special 50th-anniversary edition.

Joe Jackson provides the definitive biographical account of a figure whose dramatic life converged with some of the most momentous events in the history of the American West....

Long before the indigenous people of southeastern North America first encountered Europeans and Africans, they established communities with clear social and political hierarchies and rich cultural traditions....

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is an 1845 memoir and treatise on abolition written by famous orator and former slave Frederick Douglass...

A landmark history - the sweeping story of the enslavement of tens of thousands of Indians across America, from the time of the conquistadors up to the early 20th century....

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....

From the moment European settlers reached these shores, the American apocalypse began. But Native Americans did not vanish. Apocalypse did not fully destroy them, and it doesn't have to destroy us.

As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity.

Unflinchingly honest about the brutality of this nation’s founding and its legacy of settler-colonialism and genocide, the impact of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s 2014 book is profound. This classic is revisited with new material that takes an incisive look at the post-Obama era from the war in Afghanistan to Charlottesville’s white supremacy-fueled rallies, and from the onset of the pandemic to the election of President Biden.

This poetic guide from Indigenous scholar Yuria Celidwen is a first-of-its-kind book, offering a beautiful gathering of the wisdom, traditions, and practices that bridge Indigenous and Western sciences, knowledges, and ways to address our collective aspiration for health, wellness, justice, and equity for collective, sustainable flourishing.

Growing up in a remote corner of the world’s largest rainforest, Pio, Maria, and Oita witnessed the first highway pierced through the century-old trees, and they lost their families to terrible new weapons and diseases. Pushed by the government to assimilate, they struggled to figure out their new capitalist reality, discovering its wonders as well as its horrors. They forged an uneasy symbiosis with their white antagonists—until decades of suppressed trauma erupted into a massacre; an act of retribution that made headlines across the globe.

You probably know the story of the late Wilma Mankiller, the first woman to serve as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. You might not recognize the name of her husband, Charlie Soap, yet his role as a Native community organizer is no less significant. Last One Walking charts for the first time the life and work of this influential Cherokee.