Native America: A Brief Bibliography

Here are a few books and publications of interest; the list is by no means complete, and we'll add to it as we can.

General (in rough order from most general and introductory-- and most accessible-- to most comprehensive, complex, complete and demanding)

•   David Hurst Thomas et. al., The Native Americans: An Illustrated History. (New York: Turner Publications, 1995). Currently listed as out of print, this book is still readily available on the 'web. It's an excellent general anthology
• Carl Waldman and Molly Braun, Atlas of the North American Indian (New York: Facts on File, 2000). This is a solid history and cultural introduction with excellent maps that help to delineate the various tribes and show their patterns of movement.
• Alice B. Kehoe, North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1992). This is one of the standard textbooks for an introductory course in the history of Native America, and it was one of the first to take a chronological approach beginning with the earliest humans on the continent.
• Roger L. Nichols, American Indians in U.S. History (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004). This is Nichols's attempt to make a relatively brief (300 page) comprehensive history out of his numerous and far more exhaustive scholarly studies. By concentrating on Indian-European contact and conflict, Nichols makes a solid narrative that is perhaps willing to sacrifice chapters full of nuance in order that the reader survive the encounter intact.
• Colin Calloway, First People: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History (New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003). A dense and very useful selection of documents and materials.
• Albert Hurtado and Peter Iverson, Major Problems in American Indian History: Documents and Essays (New York:Houghton-Mifflin, 2000). Part of the larger "Major Problems in..." series, this is a book aimed at more advanced university students and their professors.

More Specific Topics: Tribes, Issues, etc.

• Peter Iverson, The Dine: A History of the Navajo (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002). Iverson is a truly authoritative voice and this is the best and most up-to-date history of the Navajo, very well illustrated with photographs.
• Raymond Friday Locke, The Book of the Navajo (Mankind Publishing Co., 2002). This is a sprawling work by a nonprofessional but until Iverson's book, it was the only broadly conceived history of the Navajo and is still a valuable resource.
• Ward Minge, Acoma: Pueblo in the Sky (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). This is the "officially sanctioned" history of Acoma, well-treated and useful for basing a teaching module.
• Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton, Native American Architecture (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1995). A very valuable resource; by looking at the housing, religious ceremonial locations, functional and social buildings of Native American tribes, Nabokov and Easton have provided an excellent way of extending and specifying our knowledge of tribes and peoples as they live their daily lives.
• Charles Alexander Eastman, The Soul of the Indian (New York: Dover Publications, 2003). Eastman was born and raised a Sioux, left the tribe to receive higher education including a medical degree, then returned to the reservation; he was the only doctor to treat the Indians at Wounded Knee in 1890. This is his "human" interpretation of Indian religious practices as he knew them. A deeply affecting work, full of complicated insights, but also deeply imbedded in the conceptions of Indianness at the turn of the century, including the romanticism of Curtis and the like. Any edition will do-- Dover is the cheapest.
• Edward Curtis, The North American Indian. This huge project, photographing as many tribes and as many individuals, events, rituals, activities, and materials of Indian culture is a setpiece of a sort of romanticized invention of The Indian. Published between 1907 and 1930, they are the model of the "white man's Indian." Still, these photographs are indispensable, in whatever form you might find them, from postcards to Dover reprints: just remember that any sentimental yearnings you might feel when you see them are a mark of your own prejudices and not an accurate description of the conditions of those people depicted in the pictures.
• Robert Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). Still in print, this is one of the classic cultural analyses of the ways identity was projected on Native Americans by Europeans and Americans. Indispensable.
• Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). This is the excellent extension of Berkhofer's book.
• Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Though often frustrating, this is still an important work on a very necessary subject, and a fitting introduction to any serious looking at movies in which Indians and Native Americans (both) appear.
• Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven ( New York: Harper Perennial, 1994). Almost anything by Sherman Alexie will entrance and captivate students; these are short stories about adolescent Indians on the rez' and they are as revelatory of the interior life of the child-adult as they are of contemporary Native American life. From these characters came Alexie's charming and deeply moving film, Smoke Signals, which makes a wonderful audiovisual addition to the curriculum. While you're at it, though, have the more advanced English-language students read Reservation Blues, Alexie's novel about the same characters when they form an all-Indian rock band.