Largely forgotten today, the National Council on Indian Opportunity (1968–1974) was the federal government’s establishment of self-determination as a way to move Indians into the mainstream of American life. By endorsing the principle that Indians possessed the right to make choices about their own lives, envision their own futures, and speak and advocate for themselves, federal policy makers sought to ensure that Native Americans possessed the same economic, political, and cultural opportunities afforded other Americans. In this book, the first study of the NCIO, historian Thomas A. Britten traces the workings of the council along with its enduring impact on the lives of indigenous people.
Largely forgotten today, the National Council on Indian Opportunity (1968-1974) was the federal government's establishment of self-determination as a way to move Indians into the mainstream of American life. By endorsing the principle that Indians possessed the right to make choices about their own lives, envision their own futures, and speak and advocate for themselves, federal policy makers sought to ensure that Native Americans possessed the same economic, political, and cultural opportunities afforded other Americans. In this book, the first study of the NCIO, historian Thomas A. Britten traces the workings of the council along with its enduring impact on the lives of indigenous people.
In a groundbreaking new book, Kotlowski offers a surprising study of an administration that redirected the course of civil rights in America. Kotlowski examines such issues as school desegregation, fair housing, voting rights, affirmative action, and minority businesses as well as Native American and women's rights. He details Nixon's role, revealing a president who favored deeds over rhetoric and who constantly weighed political expediency and principles in crafting civil rights policy.
Winner of the 2021 Bancroft Prize and the 2021 Ridenhour Book Prize Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction Named a Top Ten Best Book of 2020 by the Washington Post and Publishers Weekly and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2020 A masterful and unsettling history of “Indian Removal,” the forced migration of Native Americans across the Mississippi River in the 1830s and the state-sponsored theft of their lands. In May 1830, the United States launched an unprecedented campaign to expel 80,000 Native Americans from their eastern homelands to territories west of the Mississippi River. In a firestorm of fraud and violence, thousands of Native Americans lost their lives, and thousands more lost their farms and possessions. The operation soon devolved into an unofficial policy of extermination, enabled by US officials, southern planters, and northern speculators. Hailed for its searing insight, Unworthy Republic transforms our understanding of this pivotal period in American history.
Reproduced documents from the Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards in the custody of the National Archives. The records document federal government policy toward Indians and the lives of reservation and nonreservation Indians in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Reproduced documents from the Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards in the custody of the National Archives. The records document federal government policy toward Indians and the lives of reservation and nonreservation Indians in the late 1960s and 1970s.
A prominent Navajo educator once told historian Peter Iverson that “the five major sports on the Navajo Nation are basketball, basketball, basketball, basketball, and rodeo.” The Native American passion for basketball extends far beyond the Navajo, whether on reservations or in cities, among the young and the old. Why basketball—a relatively new sport—should hold such a place in Native culture is the question Wade Davies takes up in Native Hoops. Indian basketball was born of hard times and hard places, its evolution traceable back to the boarding schools—or “Indian schools”—of the early twentieth century. Davies describes the ways in which the sport, plied as a tool of social control and cultural integration, was adopted and transformed by Native students for their own purposes, ultimately becoming the “Rez ball” that embodies Native American experience, identity, and community. Native Hoops travels the continent, from Alaska to North Carolina, tying the rise of basketball—and Native sports history—to sweeping educational, economic, social, and demographic trends through the course of the twentieth century. Along the way, the book highlights the toils and triumphs of well-known athletes, like Jim Thorpe and the 1904 Fort Shaw girl’s team, even as it brings to light the remarkable accomplishments of those whom history has, until now, left behind. The first comprehensive history of American Indian basketball, Native Hoops tells a story of hope, achievement, and celebration—a story that reveals the redemptive power of sport and the transcendent spirit of Native culture.
