A Cheyenne Voice
A Cheyenne Voice

Author: John Stands In Timber

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2013-10-08

Total Pages: 929

ISBN-13: 0806151064

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Rarely does a primary source become available that provides new and significant information about the history and culture of a famous American Indian tribe. With A Cheyenne Voice, readers now have access to a vast ethnographic and historical trove about the Cheyenne people—much of it previously unavailable. A Cheyenne Voice contains the complete transcribed interviews conducted by anthropologist Margot Liberty with Northern Cheyenne elder John Stands In Timber (1882–1967). Recorded by Liberty in 1956–1959 when she was a schoolteacher on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana, the interviews were the basis of the well-known 1967 book Cheyenne Memories. While that volume is a noteworthy edited version of the interviews, this volume presents them word for word, in their entirety, for the first time. Along with memorable candid photographs, it also features a unique set of maps depicting movements by soldiers and warriors at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Drawn by Stands In Timber himself, they are reproduced here in full color. The diverse topics that Stands In Timber addresses range from traditional stories to historical events, including the battles of Sand Creek, Rosebud, and Wounded Knee. Replete with absorbing, and sometimes even humorous, details about Cheyenne tradition, warfare, ceremony, interpersonal relations, and everyday life, the interviews enliven and enrich our understanding of the Cheyenne people and their distinct history.

A Cheyenne Voice
A Cheyenne Voice

Author: John Stands In Timber

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2013-10-08

Total Pages: 553

ISBN-13: 0806151048

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Rarely does a primary source become available that provides new and significant information about the history and culture of a famous American Indian tribe. With A Cheyenne Voice, readers now have access to a vast ethnographic and historical trove about the Cheyenne people—much of it previously unavailable. A Cheyenne Voice contains the complete transcribed interviews conducted by anthropologist Margot Liberty with Northern Cheyenne elder John Stands In Timber (1882–1967). Recorded by Liberty in 1956–1959 when she was a schoolteacher on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana, the interviews were the basis of the well-known 1967 book Cheyenne Memories. While that volume is a noteworthy edited version of the interviews, this volume presents them word for word, in their entirety, for the first time. Along with memorable candid photographs, it also features a unique set of maps depicting movements by soldiers and warriors at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Drawn by Stands In Timber himself, they are reproduced here in full color. The diverse topics that Stands In Timber addresses range from traditional stories to historical events, including the battles of Sand Creek, Rosebud, and Wounded Knee. Replete with absorbing, and sometimes even humorous, details about Cheyenne tradition, warfare, ceremony, interpersonal relations, and everyday life, the interviews enliven and enrich our understanding of the Cheyenne people and their distinct history.

Eyewitness to the Fetterman Fight
Eyewitness to the Fetterman Fight

Author: John H. Monnett

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2017-03-16

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0806158689

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The Fetterman Fight ranks among the most crushing defeats suffered by the U.S. Army in the nineteenth-century West. On December 21, 1866—during Red Cloud’s War (1866–1868)—a well-organized force of 1,500 to 2,000 Oglala Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors annihilated a detachment of seventy-nine infantry and cavalry soldiers—among them Captain William Judd Fetterman—and two civilian contractors. With no survivors on the U.S. side, the only eyewitness accounts of the battle came from Lakota and Cheyenne participants. In Eyewitness to the Fetterman Fight, award-winning historian John H. Monnett presents these Native views, drawn from previously published sources as well as newly discovered interviews with Oglala and Cheyenne warriors and leaders. Supplemented with archaeological evidence, these narratives flesh out historical understanding of Red Cloud’s War. Climate change in the mid-nineteenth century made the resource-rich Powder River Country in today’s Wyoming increasingly important to Plains Indians. At the same time, the discovery of gold in Montana encouraged prospectors to pass through the Powder River region on their way north, and so the U.S. Army began to construct new forts along the Bozeman Trail. In the resulting conflict, the Lakotas and Cheyennes defended their hunting ranges and trade routes. Traditional histories have laid the blame for Fetterman’s 1866 defeat and death on his incompetent leadership—and thus implied that the Indian alliance succeeded only because of Fetterman’s personal failings. Monnett’s sources paint another picture. Narratives like those of Miniconjou Lakota warrior White Bull suggest that Fetterman’s actions were not seen as rash or reprehensible until after the fact. Nor did his men flee the field in panic. Rather, they fought bravely to the end. The Indians, for their part, used their knowledge of the terrain to carefully plan and execute an ambush, ensuring them victory. Critical to understanding the nuances of Plains Indian strategy and tactics, the firsthand narratives in Eyewitness to the Fetterman Fight reveal the true nature of this Native victory against regular army forces.

January Moon
January Moon

Author: Jerome A. Greene

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2020-04-16

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0806166886

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Historian Jerome A. Greene is renowned for his memorable chronicles of egregious events involving American Indians and the U.S. military, including Sand Creek, Washita, and Wounded Knee. Now, in January Moon, Greene draws from extensive research and fieldwork to explore a signal—and appallingly brutal—event in American history: the desperate flight of Chief Dull Knife’s Northern Cheyenne Indians from imprisonment at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. In the wake of the Great Sioux War of 1876–77, the U.S. government expelled most Northern Cheyennes from their northern plains homeland to Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma. Following mounting hardships, many of those people, under Chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf, broke away, seeking to return north. While Little Wolf’s band managed initially to elude pursuing U.S. troops, Dull Knife’s people were captured in 1878 and ushered into a makeshift barrack prison at Camp (later Fort) Robinson, where they spent months waiting for government officials to decide their fate. It is here that Greene’s riveting narrative edges toward its climax. On the night of January 9, 1879, in a bloody struggle with troops, Dull Knife’s people staged a massive breakout from their barrack prison in a last-ditch bid for freedom. Greene paints a vivid picture of their frantic escape, which took place under an unusually brilliant moon that doomed many of those fleeing by silhouetting them against the snow. A climactic engagement at Antelope Creek proved especially devastating, and the helpless people were nearly annihilated. In gripping detail, Greene follows the survivors’ dreadful experiences into their aftermath, including creation of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Carrying the story to the present day, he describes Cheyenne tribal events commemorating the breakout—all designed to ensure that the injustices of nineteenth-century U.S. government policy will never be forgotten.

Empire's Tracks
Empire's Tracks

Author: Manu Karuka

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2019-01-29

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0520296648

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Empire’s Tracks boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American tribes, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path. In this meticulously researched book, Manu Karuka situates the railroad within the violent global histories of colonialism and capitalism. Through an examination of legislative, military, and business records, Karuka deftly explains the imperial foundations of U.S. political economy. Tracing the shared paths of Indigenous and Asian American histories, this multisited interdisciplinary study connects military occupation to exclusionary border policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of U.S. imperialism. This highly original and beautifully wrought book unveils how the transcontinental railroad laid the tracks of the U.S. Empire.

Horseback Schoolmarm
Horseback Schoolmarm

Author: Margot Liberty

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2016-07-21

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 0806156643

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In 1953, Margot Pringle, newly graduated from Cornell University, took a job as a teacher in a one-room school in rural eastern Montana, sixty miles southeast of Miles City. “Miss Margot,” as her students called her, would teach at the school for one year. This book is the memoir she wrote then, published here for the first time, under her married name. Filled with humor and affection for her students, Horseback Schoolmarm recounts Liberty’s coming of age as a teacher, as well as what she taught her students. Margot’s school was located on the SH Ranch, whose owner needed a way to retain his hired hands after their children reached school age. Few teachers wanted to work in such remote and primitive circumstances. Margot lived alone in a “teacherage,” hardly more than a closet at one end of the schoolhouse. It had electricity but no phone, plumbing, or running water. She drew water from a well outside. The nearest house was a half-mile away. Margot had a car, but she had to park it so far away, she kept her saddle horse, Orphan Annie, in the schoolyard. Miss Margot started with no experience and no supplies, but her spunk and inventiveness, along with that of her seven students, made the school a success. Evocative of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s school-teaching experiences some eighty years earlier, Horseback Schoolmarm gives readers a firsthand look at an almost forgotten—yet not so distant—way of life.

Brave Hearts
Brave Hearts

Author: Joseph Agonito

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-10-01

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1493019066

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Brave Hearts: Indian Women of the Plains tells the story of Plains Indian women through a series of fascinating vignettes. They are a remarkable group of women – some famous, some obscure. Some were hunters, some were warriors and, in a rare case, one was a chief; some lived extraordinary lives, while others lived more quietly in their lodges. Some were born into traditional families and knew their place in society while others were bi-racial who struggled to find their place in a world conflicted between Indian and white. Some never knew anything but the old, nomadic way of life while others lived-on to suffer through the reservation years. Others were born on the reservation but did their best in difficult times to keep to the old ways. Some never left the reservation while others ventured out into the larger world. All, in their own way, were Plains Indian women.

An Introduction to Native North America
An Introduction to Native North America

Author: Mark Q. Sutton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-03-10

Total Pages: 705

ISBN-13: 1000349160

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An Introduction to Native North America provides a basic introduction to the Native peoples of North America, covering what are now the United States, northern Mexico, and Canada. In this updated and revised new edition, Mark Q. Sutton has expanded and improved the existing text, adding to the case studies, updating the text with the latest research, increasing the number of images, providing more coverage of the Arctic regions, and including new perspectives, particularly those of Native peoples. The book addresses the history of research, the European invasion, and the impact of Europeans on Native societies. A final chapter introduces contemporary Native Americans, discussing issues that affect them, including religion, health, and politics. The book retains a wealth of pedological features to aid and reinforce learning. Featuring case studies of many Native American groups, as well as some eighty-four maps and images, An Introduction to Native North America is an indispensable tool to those studying the history of North America and its Native peoples.

Monsters of Contact
Monsters of Contact

Author: Mark van de Logt

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2018-06-21

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0806161094

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A murderous whirlwind, an evil child-abducting witch-woman, a masked cannibal, terrifying scalped men, a mysterious man-slaying flint creature: the oral tradition of the Caddoan Indians is alive with monsters. Whereas Western historical methods and interpretations relegate such beings to the realms of myth and fantasy, Mark van de Logt argues in Monsters of Contact that creatures found in the stories of the Caddos, Wichitas, Pawnees, and Arikaras actually embody specific historical events and the negative effects of European contact: invasion, war, death, disease, enslavement, starvation, and colonialism. Van de Logt examines specific sites of historical interaction between American Indians and Europeans, from the outbreaks and effect of smallpox epidemics on the Arikaras, to the violence and enslavement Caddos faced at the hands of Hernando de Soto’s expedition, and Wichita encounters with Spanish missionaries and French traders in Texas. In each case he explains how, through Indian metaphor, seemingly unrelated stories of supernatural beings and occurrences translate into real people and events that figure prominently in western U.S. history. The result is a peeling away of layers of cultural values that, for those invested in Western historical traditions, otherwise obscure the meaning of such tales and their “monsters.” Although Western historical methods have become the standard in much of the world, van de Logt demonstrates that indigenous forms of history are no less valuable, and that oral traditions and myths can be useful sources of historical information. A daring interpretation of Caddoan lore, Monsters of Contact puts oral traditions at the center of historical inquiry and, in so doing, asks us to reconsider what makes a monster.

We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between Us
We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between Us

Author: Justin Gage

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2020-10-08

Total Pages: 493

ISBN-13: 0806168366

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In the 1860s and 1870s, the United States government forced most western Native Americans to settle on reservations. These ever-shrinking pieces of land were meant to relocate, contain, and separate these Native peoples, isolating them from one another and from the white populations coursing through the plains. We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us tells the story of how Native Americans resisted this effort by building vast intertribal networks of communication, threaded together by letter writing and off-reservation visiting. Faced with the consequences of U.S. colonialism—the constraints, population loss, and destitution—Native Americans, far from passively accepting their fate, mobilized to control their own sources of information, spread and reinforce ideas, and collectively discuss and mount resistance against onerous government policies. Justin Gage traces these efforts, drawing on extensive new evidence, including more than one hundred letters written by nineteenth-century Native Americans. His work shows how Lakotas, Cheyennes, Utes, Shoshones, Kiowas, and dozens of other western tribal nations shrewdly used the U.S. government’s repressive education system and mechanisms of American settler colonialism, notably the railroads and the Postal Service, to achieve their own ends. Thus Natives used literacy, a primary tool of assimilation for U.S. policymakers, to decolonize their lives much earlier than historians have noted. Whereas previous histories have assumed that the Ghost Dance itself was responsible for the creation of brand-new networks among western tribes, this book suggests that the intertribal networks formed in the 1870s and 1880s actually facilitated the rapid dissemination of the Ghost Dance in 1889 and 1890. Documenting the evolution and operation of intertribal networking, Gage demonstrates its effectiveness—and recognizes for the first time how, through Native activism, long-distance, intercultural communication persisted in the colonized American West.