American Indian Collections at the University of Minnesota Libraries

David Wilkins, faculty in the Department of American Indian Studies, was recently featured in a story on This American Life. The story, Part one of an episode titled Tribes, is about a tribe in California called the Chukchansi who are fighting over enrollment.

Books by David Wilkins

The hank adams reader : An exemplary native activist and the unleashing of indigenous sovereignty(2011). . Golden, Colo.: Golden, Colo. : Fulcrum Pub.

Deloria, V. (2011). The legal universe : Observations on the foundations of american law. Golden, Colo.: Golden, Colo. : Fulcrum.

Documents of native american political development : 1500s to 1933(2009). Oxford ; New York: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press.

Wilkins, D. E. (. E., 1954-. (2007). American indian politics and the american political system. Lanham, Md.: Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield.

Cohen, F. S., 1907-1953. (2006). In Robertson L. G. (Ed.), On the drafting of tribal constitutions. Norman: Norman : University of Oklahoma Press.

Native voices : American indian identity and resistance(2003). In Grounds R. A., Tinker G. E. (Eds.), . Lawrence: Lawrence : University Press of Kansas.

Wilkins, D. E. (. E., 1954-. (2003). The navajo political experience. Lanham, Md.: Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littefield.

Wilkins, D. E. (. E., 1954-. (2001). Uneven ground : American indian sovereignty and federal law. Norman; Norman Okla.]: Norman : University of Oklahoma Press.

Deloria, V. (1999). Tribes, treaties, and constitutional tribulations. Austin: Austin : University of Texas Press.

Wilkins, D. E. (. E., 1954-. (1997). In ebrary I. (Ed.), American indian sovereignty and the U.S. supreme court the masking of justice. Austin: Austin : University of Texas Press.

Harvard Digitizes American Indian Portraits

2013-03-29T02:29:22Z

Harvard University's Tozzer Library recently digitized Photographs of North American Indians. ca. 1850-1879.

http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL:8403858

More information on this collection can be found here:

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/03/portraits-of-vanished-indian-life/

Jean M. O'Brien to Speak at Inaugural Wilbert H. Ahern Distinguished Lecture

2013-03-01T17:10:57Z

Jean M. O'Brien to Speak at Inaugural Wilbert H. Ahern Distinguished Lecture
University of Minnesota, Morris campus

The lecture will be streamed online

Event Date/Time: Monday, Mar. 4, 2013 7:30 pm
Location: HFA Recital Hall

Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. O'Brien, Jean, University of Minnesota Press, Author, 2010.

Jean O'Brien, PhD, University of Minnesota

Other works by Jean O'Brien

Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790. O'Brien, Jean, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

"Why Here? Scholarly Locations for American Indian Studies". O'Brien, Jean, American Quarterly, 2003.

"'Vanishing' Indians in Nineteenth-Century New England: Local Historians' Erasure of Still-Present Indian People". O'Brien, Jean, Sergei Kan and Pauline Turner Stong, eds., New Perspectives on Native North America, 2006.

"O'Brien, Jean. "'Our Old and Valuable Liberty': A Natick Indian Petition in Defense of Their Fishing Rights, 1748." Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology. N.p.: University of Massachussetts, 2008.

O'Brien, J. (1995). Divorced from the Land: Accommodation Strategies of Indian Women in Eighteenth-Century New England. In Gender, kinship, power: an interdisciplinary and comparative history (pp. pp. 319-333). New York, N.Y.: Routledge.

Event Announcement: Fall Round Dance

2012-11-29T12:00:00Z

The American Indian Student Cultural Center will be hosting their final event for Native American Heritage Month on November 30, 2012.

Fall Round Dance

Friday, 30 November at 4:30 pm
Northstar Ballroom
Saint Paul Student Center
2017 Buford Avenue
Falcon Heights, MN 55108

Collections Spotlight: Mascots

2012-11-28T16:32:17Z

The Native American mascot controversy : a handbook

Sports mascots have been a tradition for decades. Along with the usual lions and tigers, many schools are represented by Native American images. Once considered a benign practice, numerous studies have proved just the opposite: that the use of Native American mascots in educational institutions has perpetuated a shameful history of racial insensitivity. The Native American Mascot Controversy provides an overview of the issues that have been associated with this topic for the past 40 years. The book provides a comprehensive and critical account of the issues surrounding the controversy, explicating the importance of anti-Indian racism in education and how it might be challenged. A collection of important primary documents and an extensive list of resources for further study are also included. Expounding the dangers and damages associated with their continued use, The Native American Mascot Controversy is a useful guide for anyone with an interest in race relations.

Google Books

The Ojibwe People's Dictionary

2012-11-26T15:31:51Z

The Ojibwe People's Dictionary is an online Ojibwe-English dictionary with the goal of revitalizing the Ojibwe language. This dictionary includes audio from native speakers along with vidoes, images, and references to relevant documents in Ojibwe where applicable.

The dictionary, which was initiated in 2010, is a constantly expanding resource that grows as content is added each week.

Revitalizing and Preserving Indigenous Language and Knowledge

2012-11-19T16:02:18Z

The Dakota and Ojibwe Language Programs of the Department of American Indian Studies are designed to preserve and revitalize knowledge and understanding that is contained and transmitted in Minnesota's Indigenous Languages. The effort is part of a global indigenous movement to revitalize indigenous languages and cultures with the understanding that all language present a valuable perspective and knowledge of the world.

Both programs provide scholarships for students who have shown a commitment to learning and teaching the language.

Collections Spotlight: University of Minnesota Publications

2012-11-15T21:37:23Z

Never one nation : freaks, savages, and whiteness in U.S. popular culture, 1850-1877

In Never One Nation, Linda Frost argues that during the eventful decades surrounding the Civil War, American identity was constructed not only nationally but also locally. Depictions of race, class, and sexuality seen in P. T. Barnum's museums, in the image of the Circassian Beauty, and in popular periodicals like Harper's Weekly, the Southern Illustrated News, and the San Francisco Golden Era further illustrated who was - and who was not - an American. Local coverage of Native Americans and Chinese in the West, African Americans and recent Irish immigrants in New York, and slaves and Yankees in the South played a major role in conflating Americanness with whiteness. These ideas were shaped by reactions to events such as the 1863 Draft Riots and the Dakota uprising in Minnesota in 1862, and laid bare through the demonization of Northern whites in Confederate newspapers and anxieties expressed in California newspapers about the possibility of Chinese immigrants gaining U.S. citizenship. Through close readings of specific articles published in regional periodicals, mostly unexamined by literary scholars, Frost shows how Americanness came to be defined in the mid-nineteenth century by the mainstream popular culture. The era's many social upheavals - Emancipation, Reconstruction, the start of the Indian wars in the West, immigration, and the completion of the transcontinental railroad - sharpened the desire of Americans to feel part of a national community, even as they made this search for an American identity extremely contentious and necessarily fragmented. Never One Nation provocatively reframes the discourse on racial formation and reveals how local cultures and prejudices can recast the identity of a nation.
google books

Collections Spotlight: Of Uncommon Birth: Dakota Sons in Vietnam

2012-11-08T08:00:00Z

Of Uncommon Birth: Dakota Sons in Vietnam

A work of creative nonfiction inspired by the true story of two South Dakota teenagers, Mark St. Pierre's Of Uncommon Birthdraws upon extensive interviews and exhaustive research in military archives to present a harrowing story of two young men--one white, one Indian--caught in the vortex of the Vietnam War. Dale, a young middle-class white American from South Dakota, joins the army during the Vietnam War and dreams of serving his country. Frank, a young Lakota Indian, joins the army both in an effort to flee the seemingly inescapable circumstances of his life and to follow his people's warrior tradition. In Of Uncommon Birth, Mark St. Pierre intimately weaves together the lives of these two young men from very different worlds. Each in his own way struggles with issues of loyalty, responsibility, sacrifice, and personal identity through his experiences in Vietnam. Of Uncommon Birthpresents the ironic story of what it means for an American Indian soldier in Vietnam to let himself become stereotyped as the Native "good luck charm" for his unit as a way to find acceptance, approval, and identity within the majority culture, even if the Brave and Loyal Indian Scout stereotype carries with it the smell of death.

American Indian Heritage Month Events

2012-11-06T12:00:00Z

"Indian Converts" Collection

2012-11-05T14:52:41Z

From The Scout Report

http://cdm.reed.edu/cdm4/indianconverts/

First published in 1727, the remarkable book "Indian Converts, or Some account of the lives and dying speeches of a considerable number of the Christianized Indians of Martha's Vineyard" is now available in full online. Written by Experience Mayhew, the book provides remarkable insights into the lives and culture of four generations of Native Americans in colonial America. This digitized version was created at Reed College, and visitors can look through all four sections of the work, which include "Indian Ministers" and "Pious Children." Throughout the work, Mayhew details the books that different age groups were reading, provides insights into early New England pedagogy and childrearing practices, and also describes each individual in terms of their own genealogy and personal history. The truly fantastic thing about the site is that it also contains an archive with over 600 images and documents that further contextualize the work. Also, the site contains study guides designed for classroom use that cover artifact analysis, genealogy, and reading gravestones. [KMG]

Collections Spotlight: The Dakota Conflict

2012-11-01T07:00:00Z

Check out these great materials on the Dakota Conflict, which occurred 150 years ago this year.

Dakota Conflict (film)
Produced, and written by Kristian Berg. 1993
This documentary takes another look at the events of August 1862 and explores the attitudes and points of view of both the white settlers and the Dakota people.

The War in Words: reading the Dakota Conflict Through the Captivity Literature
Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle. 2009

Native American Heritage Month 2012

2012-10-30T07:00:00Z

This year,we will be celebrating Native American Heritage Month by showcasing items in University Library Collections and other resources from around the University of Minnesota campus twice a week throughout the month of November.

Indian Territory Records Digitized and Searchable

2012-10-01T13:48:22Z

From Indian Country Today Media Network

"To make searching for historical documents easier the Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS) and the Oklahoma Secretary of State's Office partnered to digitize and index Oklahoma and Indian Territories incorporation records."

This database includes "transactions for churches and lodges and private business as well as the larger banks and coals and, of course, oil companies" and could be a valuable tool for researchers studying a wide variety of subjects including American Indian History. The article linked to above provides an example of using this database to track down a researcher's relatives.

"If you had people pre-statehood Oklahoma, take a look. You might find information on a church or a lodge they were a member-or, if you're related to a mover and shaker, perhaps even the incorporation papers for their oil and/or gas company." (Debra Spindle, Oklahoma Historical Society Research Librarian)

Search the Oklahoma and Indian Territory incorporation records.

Writer: Devyn Goetsch