What 'indigenous' books have you reviewed?

Have you reviewed books about indigenous people for LibraryThing?

If you have, tell us which ones.

If you haven’t, why not get started?

I reviewed Dennis C. Pope's Sitting Bull, Prisoner of War recently. Wonderful work.. VERY specific to a particular 5 year period of Sitting Bull's life.

This is the only work of indigenous peoples' history that I have had the opportunity to review. I hope more come my way, but publishing houses that do scholarly history usually use academic journals as sources for reviewers.

Daniel

This looks like being an interesting group! Forgive me if I've got the wrong end of the stick and you are only talking about non-fiction but I'm a great fan of folk tales/fairytales/legends from all over the world. I'm in the middle of a Masters in English Lit right now that has a fair bit of emphasis on both pre- and post-colonial writings and as soon as I get my current assignment out of the way am about to start reading a book called Specimens of Bushman Folklore. As my current bedside "dipping in and out" book is Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales which contains fairy stories and folk tales from all over the world I think the comparison's going to be fascinating.

>2 JFCooper:
I'm glad an Indian history book did get on the Early Reviewers list. Hope it happens again. Also glad that Sitting Bull's life is receiving more detailed attention. If Garry Wills, e.g., can write a whole book on Lincoln's short trip to Gettysburg to give a short speech (and I'm not knocking it; Lincoln at Gettysburg is an excellent book) — then I guess there's nothing wrong with devoting a book to Sitting Bull's captivity.

>3 Booksloth:
I'm very partial to history, personally, but the group is open to any kind of book relating to indigenous people. Comparing stories from different cultures seems good to me.

A book that is not often mentioned is Native Universe: Voices of Indian America (Native American Tribal Leaders.

Well worth the effort to read, along with many others.

Of course 1491 would also be very helpful to anyone joining this group.

Ur.

I have just started reading,

Media and Power on the Margins of Europe: Public Negotiation of the Breton Language and Cultural Identity

I will report back when I finish it!

Mike

I have written a review of Spirit of the Rainforest, the biography of a Yonomamö shaman, and also a reply to some anthropological studies. One of my favorite books.

3/Booksloth: You might enjoy Bear Daughter, which is loosely based on Native American mythology.

>6 MGE:

There's no touchstone (yet) for your title, so here are some links for those interested in Media and Power on the Margins of Europe (ISBN 978-1572739192), about the Breton language and culture:

http://www.hamptonpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=...

The official description: “This text explores the links between the expression of local language and traditions in a globally connected world. The Breton people are like many other cultural gorups in Europe whose cultural markers can only be found through a web of national and international media connections. Though no longer actively discourged by policy at the organizational levels, the Breton language is still under siege from indifference by the powers that control media outlets. This book traces the ways that the Breton people have manged to express their language and cultural values through developing their own media, and through navigating the government and corporate institutions that control access to information.”

I've just happened upon a story collection from 1902 by a Dakota woman, Zitkala-Ša. It will definitely be worth a review.

Added: I've now reviewed Old Indian Legends.

These reviews might be of interest. Most of them are short.

* The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America by James Axtell
* Massacres in the Jungle: Ixcán, Guatemala, 1975-1982 by Ricardo Falla
* The Mohicans of Stockbridge by Patrick Frazier
* Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures by Frederic Gleach
* Dictionary of the American Indian by John Stoutenburgh

These deal specifically with the history of Indians in what is now the southeastern United States:

* Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815 by Kathryn H. Braund
* Indian Traders of the Southeastern Spanish Borderlands by William S. Coker and Thomas D. Watson
* The Devil's Backbone: The Story of the Natchez Trace (1962) by Jonathan Daniels
* Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation by John Ehle
* The Creek War of 1813 and 1814 (1895) by Henry S. Halbert and Thomas H. Ball
* Myths of the Cherokee and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees by James Mooney
* Behind the Mounds by Lona Mae Wilson

That last review is probably too long, unless you are specifically interested in the Moundville archaeological site in Alabama.

Some books and brief comments on them:

Chris Hedges: Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
An excellent book that deals only in part with Indians and life on the reservation. This is a must read book.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians but Were Afraid to Ask
by Anton Treuer.

An excellent book that answers tough questions in a comprehensive and clear way. Anton Treuer is definitely someone to follow

Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir by One of the Original Navajo Code Talke by Chester Nez
I gave this book 4 stars.

It covers the author's life growing up on the Reservation plus WWII history in the Pacific plus what it is like to be a real Warrior in battle. It is excellent.

Indian Nations of North America by National Geographic.

A book to buy, read, and keep for reference on one's own book shelf.

The Assassination of Hole in the Day by Anton Treuer

Anything by this author is well worth the time.

Living Our Language by Anton Treuer.

A contemporary and brilliant writer presents stories of the Anishinaabe elders and offers a history of that people.

Ur.
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A new book of possible interest to folks...........

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan (Oct 9, 2012)

How a lone man’s epic obsession led to one of America’s greatest cultural treasures: Prizewinning writer Timothy Egan tells the riveting, cinematic story behind the most famous photographs in Native American history — and the driven, brilliant man who made them.

Edward Curtis was charismatic, handsome, a passionate mountaineer, and a famous photographer, the Annie Leibovitz of his time. He moved in rarefied circles, a friend to presidents, vaudeville stars, leading thinkers. And he was thirty-two years old in 1900 when he gave it all up to pursue his Great Idea: to capture on film the continent’s original inhabitants before the old ways disappeared.

An Indiana Jones with a camera, Curtis spent the next three decades traveling from the Havasupai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the Acoma on a high mesa in New Mexico to the Salish in the rugged Northwest rain forest, documenting the stories and rituals of more than eighty tribes. It took tremendous perseverance — ten years alone to persuade the Hopi to allow him into their Snake Dance ceremony. And the undertaking changed him profoundly, from detached observer to outraged advocate. Eventually Curtis took more than 40,000 photographs, preserved 10,000 audio recordings, and is credited with making the first narrative documentary film. In the process, the charming rogue with the grade school education created the most definitive archive of the American Indian.

His most powerful backer was Theodore Roosevelt, and his patron was J. P. Morgan. Despite the friends in high places, he was always broke and often disparaged as an upstart in pursuit of an impossible dream. He completed his masterwork in 1930, when he published the last of the twenty volumes. A nation in the grips of the Depression ignored it. But today rare Curtis photogravures bring high prices at auction, and he is hailed as a visionary. In the end he fulfilled his promise: He made the Indians live forever.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
In the summer of 1900, Edward Curtis gave up a successful photography career to pursue a quixotic plan: to photograph all the Indian communities in North America. He quickly learned that his subjects were dying off fast, so he’d need to hurry if he was “to capture the essence of their lives before that essence disappeared.” A mountaineer, explorer, intrepid photojournalist, and amateur anthropologist, Curtis was Ansel Adams crossed with Annie Leibovitz, a willful and passionate chronicler of a people he came to love. “I want to make them live forever,” Curtis said in the early days of his decades-long mission. As Egan’s thrilling story attests, he succeeded, even though he died penniless and alone. --Neal Thompson

Review
"In this hauntingly beautiful book, Egan brings Curtis to life as vividly and with as much depth, heart and understanding as Curtis himself put into his timeless portraits. This is a story for the ages."
--Candice Millard, author of The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic
"Short Nights is not only the marvelous and rollicking account of life of one of America's extraordinary photographers. It is also a book about the extreme personal cost of outsized ambition. Edward Curtis undertook one of the most epic cultural projects in American history--photographing and documenting the vanishing ways of life of some eighty American Indian tribes. It cost him almost everything he once was. And still he persisted, turning out some of the greatest photographic and ethnological work ever done. Egan has found yet another great subject, and has crafted yet another great narrative around it."

-- S.C. Gwynne, author of Empire of the Summer Moon
Edward Curtis’s hauntingly beautiful photographs have graced gallery walls and coffee tables for generations—and his work remains essential to our conception of the American West. Now, in this extraordinary biography, Tim Egan has deftly captured the man behind the images, revealing a great American adventurer who lived at the fragile, fertile intersection of history, anthropology, and art.
--Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder

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I've reviewed Keith Basso's Wisdom Sits In Places, one of my favourite books ever. I love the glimpse it gives me of a different way of thinking (of the world, of people), and of a society. Basso persuades me he comes by his understanding of the Western Apache authentically, though I admit I can't really know if his take on Apache epistemology is accurate.