The U.S. Library of Congress presents an online exhibit of the published photogravure images from the volumes of "The North American Indian" by American photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952). Curtis portrayed the traditional customs and lifestyles of eighty Indian tribes.
Drawing on anthropology and ethnohistory as well as the ‘new military history’ Indian Wars of Mexico, Canada and the United States, 1812-1900 interprets and compares the way Indians and European Americans waged wars in Canada, Mexico, the USA and Yucatán during the nineteenth century. Fully illustrated with sixteen maps, detailing key Indian settlements and crucial battles, Bruce Vandervort rescues the New World Indian Wars from their exclusion from mainstream military history, and reveals how they are an integral part of global history. Indian Wars of Mexico, Canada and the United States: * provides a thorough examination of the strategies and tactics of resistance employed by Indian peoples of the USA which contrasts practices of warfare with the Métis (the French Canadian-Indian peoples), their Canadian-Indian allies, and the Yaqui and Mayan Indians of Mexico and Yucatán * presents a comparison of the experience of Indian tribes with concurrent resistance movements against European expansion in Africa, exposing how aspects of resistance that seem unique to the New World differ from those with broader implications * draws upon concepts used in recent rewritings of the history of imperial warfare in Africa and Asia, Vandervort also analyzes the conduct of the US Army in comparison with military practices and tactics adopted by colonialist conquests worldwide. This unique and fascinating study is a vital contribution to the study of military history but is also a valuable addition to the understanding of colonialism and attempts to resist it.
Images of Canadianness offers backgrounds and explanations for a series of relevant--if relatively new--features of Canada, from political, cultural, and economic angles. Each of its four sections contains articles written by Canadian and European experts that offer original perspectives on a variety of issues: voting patterns in English-speaking Canada and Quebec; the vitality of French-language communities outside Quebec; the Belgian and Dutch immigration waves to Canada and the resulting Dutch-language immigrant press; major transitions taking place in Nunavut; the media as a tool for self-government for Canada's First Peoples; attempts by Canadian Indians to negotiate their position in society; the Canada-US relationship; Canada's trade with the EU; and Canada's cultural policy in the light of the information highway.
Indian Treaty-Making Policy in the United States and Canada, 1867?1877 is a comparison of United States and Canadian Indian policies with emphasis on the reasons these governments embarked on treaty-making ventures in the 1860s and 1870s, how they conducted those negotiations, and their results. Jill St. Germain challenges assertions made by the Canadian government in 1877 of the superiority and distinctiveness of Canada?s Indian policy compared to that of the United States. ø Indian treaties were the primary instruments of Indian relations in both British North America and the United States starting in the eighteenth century. At Medicine Lodge Creek in 1867 and at Fort Laramie in 1868, the United States concluded a series of important treaties with the Sioux, Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Comanches, while Canada negotiated the seven Numbered Treaties between 1871 and 1877 with the Crees, Ojibwas, and Blackfoot. ø St. Germain explores the common roots of Indian policy in the two nations and charts the divergences in the application of the reserve and ?civilization? policies that both governments embedded in treaties as a way to address the ?Indian problem? in the West. Though Canadian Indian policies are often cited as a model that the United States should have followed, St. Germain shows that these policies have sometimes been as dismal and fraught with misunderstanding as those enacted by the United States.
A thoughtful analysis of how our world's borders came to be and why we may be emerging from a lengthy period of "cartographical stasis" What is a country? While certain basic criteria--borders, a government, and recognition from other countries--seem obvious, journalist Joshua Keating's book explores exceptions to these rules, including self-proclaimed countries such as Abkhazia, Kurdistan, and Somaliland, a Mohawk reservation straddling the U.S.-Canada border, and an island nation whose very existence is threatened by climate change. Through stories about these would-be countries' efforts at self-determination, as well as their respective challenges, Keating shows that there is no universal legal authority determining what a country is. He argues that although our current world map appears fairly static, economic, cultural, and environmental forces in the places he describes may spark change. Keating ably ties history to incisive and sympathetic observations drawn from his travels and personal interviews with residents, political leaders, and scholars in each of these "invisible countries."
In The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King offers a deeply knowing, darkly funny, unabashedly opinionated, and utterly unconventional account of Indian–White relations in North America since initial contact. Ranging freely across the centuries and the Canada–U.S. border, King debunks fabricated stories of Indian savagery and White heroism, takes an oblique look at Indians (and cowboys) in film and popular culture, wrestles with the history of Native American resistance and his own experiences as a Native rights activist, and articulates a profound, revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands. Suffused with wit, anger, perception, and wisdom, The Inconvenient Indian is at once an engaging chronicle and a devastating subversion of history, insightfully distilling what it means to be “Indian” in North America. It is a critical and personal meditation that sees Native American history not as a straight line but rather as a circle in which the same absurd, tragic dynamics are played out over and over again. At the heart of the dysfunctional relationship between Indians and Whites, King writes, is land: “The issue has always been land.” With that insight, the history inflicted on the indigenous peoples of North America—broken treaties, forced removals, genocidal violence, and racist stereotypes—sharpens into focus. Both timeless and timely, The Inconvenient Indian ultimately rejects the pessimism and cynicism with which Natives and Whites regard one another to chart a new and just way forward for Indians and non-Indians alike.
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2017 At the end of the nineteenth century, Indigenous boarding schools were touted as the means for solving the "Indian problem" in both the United States and Canada. With the goal of permanently transforming Indigenous young people into Europeanized colonial subjects, the schools were ultimately a means for eliminating Indigenous communities as obstacles to land acquisition, resource extraction, and nation-building. Andrew Woolford analyzes the formulation of the "Indian problem" as a policy concern in the United States and Canada and examines how the "solution" of Indigenous boarding schools was implemented in Manitoba and New Mexico through complex chains that included multiple government offices with a variety of staffs, Indigenous peoples, and even nonhuman actors such as poverty, disease, and space. The genocidal project inherent in these boarding schools, however, did not unfold in either nation without diversion, resistance, and unintended consequences. Inspired by the signing of the 2007 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement in Canada, which provided a truth and reconciliation commission and compensation for survivors of residential schools, This Benevolent Experiment offers a multilayered, comparative analysis of Indigenous boarding schools in the United States and Canada. Because of differing historical, political, and structural influences, the two countries have arrived at two very different responses to the harm caused by assimilative education.
In the fall of 1877, Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) Indians were desperately fleeing U.S. Army troops. After a 1,700-mile journey across Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, the Nez Perces headed for the Canadian border, hoping to find refuge in the land of the White Mother, Queen Victoria. But the army caught up with them at the Bear’s Paw Mountains in northern Montana, and following a devastating battle, Chief Joseph and most of his people surrendered. The wrenching tale of Chief Joseph and his followers is now legendary, but Bear’s Paw is not the entire story. In fact, nearly three hundred Nez Perces escaped the U.S. Army and fled into Canada. Beyond Bear’s Paw is the first book to explore the fate of these “nontreaty” Indians. Drawing on hitherto unexplored Canadian and U.S. sources, including reminiscences of Nez Perce participants, Jerome A. Greene presents an epic story of human endurance under duress. Greene vividly describes the tortuous journey of the small band who managed to elude Colonel Nelson A. Miles’s command. After the escapees crossed the “Medicine Line” into the British Possessions, they found only new trauma. Within a few years, most of them stole back to their homelands in Idaho Territory. Those who remained north of the line faced a difficult and uncertain future. In recent years, Nimiipuu descendants from the United States and Canada have revisited their common past and sought reconciliation. Beyond Bear’s Paw offers new perspectives on the Nez Perces’ struggle for freedom, their hapless rejection, and their ultimate cultural renewal.