Staff Picks: Recommendations from the OIT Library

In 1908 easterners Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed accepted appointments as field matrons in Karuk tribal communities in the Klamath and Salmon River country of northern California. In doing so, they joined a handful of white women in a rugged region that retained the frontier mentality of the gold rush some fifty years earlier. Hired to promote the federal government's assimilation of American Indians, Arnold and Reed instead found themselves adapting to the world they entered, a complex and contentious territory of Anglo miners and Karuk families.
In the Land of the Grasshopper Song, Arnold and Reed's account of their experiences, shows their irreverence towards Victorian ideals of womanhood, recounts their respect toward and friendship with Karuks, and offers a rare portrait of women's western experiences in this era. Writing with self-deprecating humor, the women recall their misadventures as women in a white man's country and as whites in Indian country. A story about crossing cultural divides, In the Land of the Grasshopper Song also documents Karuk resilience despite seemingly insurmountable odds.

In 1991, the Oregon Council for the Humanities published The First Oregonians, the only single-volume, comprehensive history of Oregon’s Native Americans. A regional bestseller, this collaborative project between the council, Oregon tribes, and scholars served as an invaluable reference for teachers, scholars, and general-interest readers before it went out of print in 1996. Now revised and expanded for a new generation of Oregonians, The First Oregonians provides a comprehensive view of Oregon’s native peoples from the past to the present. In this remarkable volume, Oregon Indians tell their own stories, with more than half of the book’s chapters written by members of Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes. Chapters on each tribe examine lifeways—from the traditional to the present day. Using oral histories and personal recollections, these chapters vividly depict not only a history of decimation and decline, but also a contemporary view of cultural revitalization, renewal, and continuity. The First Oregonians also includes essays exploring geography, federal-Indian relations, language, and art written by prominent Northwest scholars. And, as with the first edition, this new edition is richly illustrated with almost two hundred photographs, maps, and drawings. No other book offers as wide a variety of views and stories about the historical and contemporary experience of Oregon Indians. The First Oregonians is the definitive volume for all Oregonians interested in the fascinating story of Oregon’s first peoples.

Before Columbus came to America, the population of Native Americans - the first, aboriginal peopes - was about 5 million. By 1890, it was 250,000. During the same period the white population in the U.S. increased from o to 75 million. As it did so, it usurped the ancestral lands of the Indians who had inhabited the continent for centuries and destroyed both the delicate balance of their economy and an age-old way of life. Pivotal events such as the removal, in the 1830s, of the Southeastern tribes to whatwas called Indian Territory, the Long March of the Navajo to imprisonmentat Fort Sumner in 1864, and the tragedy at Wounded Knee in 1890 marked the advance of a new culture that, by the end of the century, had savagely replaced a much older one.

"On a cold, rainy dawn in late November 1872, Lieutenant Frazier Boutelle and a Modoc Indian nicknamed Scarface Charley leveled firearms at each other. Their duel triggered a war that capped a decades-long genocidal attack that was emblematic of the United States' conquest of Native America's peoples and lands. Robert Aquinas McNally tells the wrenching story of the Modoc War of 1872-73, one of the nation's costliest campaigns against North American Indigenous peoples, in which the army placed nearly one thousand soldiers in the field against some fifty-five Modoc fighters. Although little known today, the Modoc War dominated national headlines for an entire year. Fought in south-central Oregon and northeastern California, the war settled into a siege in the desolate Lava Beds and climaxed the decades-long effort to dispossess and destroy the Modocs. The war did not end with the last shot fired, however. For the first and only time in U.S. history, Native fighters were tried and hanged for war crimes. The surviving Modocs were packed into cattle cars and shipped from Fort Klamath to the corrupt, disease-ridden Quapaw reservation in Oklahoma, where they found peace even more lethal than war. The Modoc War tells the forgotten story of a violent and bloody Gilded Age campaign at a time when the federal government boasted officially of a "peace policy" toward Indigenous nations. This compelling history illuminates a dark corner in our country's past."--Publisher's description.

A guide to visiting Native American reservations and ancestral lands in the Northwest, showing how and where to attend a powwow, buy traditional art, and eat Native cuisine, and how to plan adventures such as rafting and hiking on tribal land. Arranged in sections on southeast Alaska, British Columbia, western Washington, western Oregon and Northern California, Columbia River Gorge and Basin, and Idaho and western Montana. Includes maps, but no photos. c. Book News Inc.

"In the face of the current, highly romanticized view of Native Americans, Killing the White Man's Indian bravely confronts our myths and misconceptions to reveal the realities of tribal life today. Following two centuries of broken treaties and virtual extermination of the "savage red man," Americans have recast Native Americans into another equally stereotyped role, that of eternal victims, politically powerless and weakened by poverty and alcoholism, yet whose spiritual ties with the natural world form the last, best hope of salvaging our natural environment and ennobling our souls." "What will surprise many Americans, however, is that a virtual revolution is under way in Indian Country, from New England to Florida, and from New York to the Pacific Northwest. It is an upheaval of epic proportions: for the first time in generations, Indians are shaping their own destinies largely outside the control of whites, reinventing Indian education and justice, and exploiting the principle of tribal sovereignty in ways that empower tribal government far beyond most Americans' imaginations - posing profound challenges to regional economies, and both state and local governments." "Based on four years of research on tribal reservations, and written without a hidden political bias or agenda, Killing the White Man's Indian takes on Native American politics and policies today in all their contradictory - and controversial - guises."--Jacket

"This Land Was Theirs examines the traditional and contemporary lifeways of twelve North American Indian tribes. Ranging from the Netsilik hunters who straddle the Arctic Circle to the Natchez farmers of the lower Mississippi River area, the tribes represent each culture area and various levels of socioeconomic complexity among Native Americans. Each chapter focuses on a specific group and culture area, providing students with a detailed portrait of the geographical and cultural adaptations of that region." "This Land Was Theirs, Eighth Edition, incorporates more than 150 photographs and illustrations, and each chapter opener offers pertinent text about the subject matter covered in that chapter. Abundant pedagogical aids include maps of each region discussed, a glossary, a pronunciation guide, and two appendixes: a guide to the various artifact types discussed in the text and an extensive list of additional resources for learning about Native Americans."--Jacket.