Books in the Studies in North American Indian History series

An acclaimed book and widely acknowledged classic, The Middle Ground steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations - stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called pays d'en haut. Here the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien and exotic. First published in 1991, the 20th anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author examining the impact and legacy of this study.

Allan Greer examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in Mexico, New England, and French Canada. The book's geographic scope, comparative dimension, and placement of indigenous people on an equal plane with Europeans makes it unlike any previous study of early colonization in the Americas.

This history of the Crow Indians links their 19th-century nomadic life and their modern existence. The book demonstrates that contact with outsiders drew the Crows together and tested their ability to adapt their traditions to new conditions. The narrative emphasizes political life, but also details changes in social relations, economic activities and religion.

The first social history of American Indians' role in the making of American law which sheds new light on Native American struggles for sovereignty and justice in nineteenth-century America.

The book, first published in 2004, provides an overview of the relations between the Plains Sioux Indians and the United States from 1804 to 1890 (the Wounded Knee massacre). The main purpose of the book is to show how various Sioux communities and leaders responded to the growing power of the United States.

As the Creek Indians amassed a fortune in cattle and slaves, new property fostered a new possessiveness, and government by coercion bred confrontation. A New Order of Things was the first book to chronicle this decisive transformation which left deep divisions between the wealthy and poor, powerful and powerless.

This study presents a broad coverage of Indian experiences in the American Revolution rather than Indian participation as allies or enemies. Calloway shows how Native Americans pursued different strategies, endured a variety of experiences, but were bequeathed a common legacy as result of the Revolution.

Exiles and Pioneers focuses on the experiences of Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, and Potawatomi Indians from the late 1700s to the 1860s. The book uses this multi-tribal perspective to argue that these Indian communities both benefited and suffered from the ineffective policies of the federal government in the relentless western expansion.

It was indeed possible for Indians and Europeans to live peacefully in early America and for Indians to survive as distinct communities. Faith and Boundaries uses the story of Martha's Vineyard Wampanoags to examine how. On an island marked by centralized English authority, missionary commitment, and an Indian majority, the Wampanoags' adaptation to English culture, especially Christianity, checked violence while safeguarding their land, community, and ironically, even customs. Yet the colonists' exploitation of Indian land and labor exposed the limits of Christian fellowship and thus hardened racial division. The Wampanoags learned about race through this rising bar of civilization - every time they met demands to reform, colonists moved the bar higher until it rested on biological difference. Under the right circumstances, like those on Martha's Vineyard, religion could bridge wide difference between the peoples of early America, but its transcendent power was limited by the divisiveness of race.

The Wendat-Tionontate, or the Huron-Petun, occupied southern Ontario, Canada, when they were contacted by the French in the early seventeenth century. This book provides the first population history of a Native American group from their recognizable origins to their first contact with Europeans.

Most histories of interactions between different peoples/nations in Oceania tend to focus on relationships between Islanders and empires. This important new study instead unpacks the history of the connections between different groups of Pacific Islanders, focusing on Hawai'i both before and after annexation by the United States.

From the 1880s and into the 1930s, Native people participated in debates regarding how to determine and define the boundaries of Indian ethnic identity and tribal citizenship. Indigenous Intellectuals traces the narrative discourses created by four influential American Indian intellectuals and discussions about citizenship, race, and modernity in the United States.

Aimed at scholars of American Indians, early North America, and colonial Mexico, this book explores how Apache groups negotiated peace and adapted to Spanish and Mexican colonialism. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, it combines Spanish documents from archives in Spain, Mexico, and the US, with anthropology, archaeology, and Nde (Apache) oral history.

This book is for readers interested in Indigenous responses to European and American colonialism. The study illuminates Hawaiian cultural change - in Native religion, medicine, and gender - amid the incursion of Western diseases and their side effects, including infertility, infant mortality, and chronic ill health.