The Kinzua Dam has cast a long shadow on Seneca life since World War II. The project, formally dedicated in 1966, broke the Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794, flooded approximately 10,000 acres of Seneca lands in New York and Pennsylvania, and forced the relocation of hundreds of tribal members. Hauptman offers both a policy study, detailing how and why Washington, Harrisburg, and Albany came up with the idea to build the dam, and a community study of the Seneca Nation in the postwar era. Although the dam was presented to the Senecas as a flood control project, Hauptman persuasively argues that the primary reasons were the push for private hydroelectric development in Pennsylvania and state transportation and park development in New York. This important investigation, based on forty years of archival research as well as on numerous interviews with Senecas, shows that these historically resilient Native peoples adapted in the face of this disaster. Unlike previous studies, In the Shadow of Kinzua highlights the federated nature of Seneca Nation government, one held together in spite of great diversity of opinions and intense politics. In the Kinzua crisis and its aftermath, several Senecas stood out for their heroism and devotion to rebuilding their nation for tribal survival. They left legacies in many areas, including two community centers, a modern health delivery system, two libraries, and a museum. Money allocated in a “compensation bill” passed by Congress in 1964 produced a generation of college-educated Senecas, some of whom now work in tribal government, making major contributions to the Nation’s present and future. Facing impossible odds and hidden forces, they motivated a cadre of volunteers to help rebuild devastated lands. Although their strategies did not stop the dam’s construction, they laid the groundwork for a tribal governing structure and for managing other issues that followed from the 1980s to the present, including land claims litigation and casinos.

The disastrous Buffalo Creek Treaty of 1838 called for the Senecas’ removal to Kansas (then part of the Indian Territory). From this low point, the Seneca Nation of Indians, which today occupies three reservations in western New York, sought to rebound. Beginning with events leading to the Seneca Revolution in 1848, which transformed the nation’s government from a council of chiefs to an elected system, Laurence M. Hauptman traces Seneca history through the New Deal. Based on the author’s nearly fifty years of archival research, interviews, and applied work, Coming Full Circle shows that Seneca leaders in these years learned valuable lessons and adapted to change, thereby preparing the nation to meet the challenges it would face in the post–World War II era, including major land loss and threats of termination. Instead of emphasizing American Indian decline, Hauptman stresses that the Senecas were actors in their own history and demonstrated cultural and political resilience. Both Native belief, in the form of the Good Message of Handsome Lake, and Christianity were major forces in Seneca life; women continued to play important social and economic roles despite the demise of clan matrons’ right to nominate the chiefs; and Senecas became involved in national and international competition in long-distance running and in lacrosse. The Seneca Nation also achieved noteworthy political successes in this period. The Senecas resisted allotment, and thus saved their reservations from breakup and sale. They recruited powerful allies, including attorneys, congressmen, journalists, and religious leaders. They saved their Oil Spring Reservation, winning a U.S. Supreme Court case against New York State on the issue of taxation and won remuneration in their Kansas Claims case. These efforts laid the groundwork for the Senecas’ postwar endeavor to seek compensation before the Indian Claims Commission and pursuit of a series of land claims and tax lawsuits against New York State.

On June 11, 1950, the Cleveland Plain Dealer published an obituary under the bold headline “Chief Thunderwater, Famous in Cleveland 50 Years, Dies.” And there, it seems, the consensus on Thunderwater ends. Was he, as many say, a con artist and an imposter posing as an Indian who lead a political movement that was a cruel hoax? Or was he a Native activist who worked tirelessly and successfully to promote Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, sovereignty in Canada? The truth about this enigmatic figure, so long obscured by vying historical narratives, emerges clearly in Gerald F. Reid’s biography, Chief Thunderwater—the first full portrait of a central character in twentieth-century Iroquois history. Searching out Thunderwater’s true identity, Reid documents Thunderwater's life from his birth in 1865, as Oghema Niagara, through his turns as a performer of Indian identity and, alternately, as a dedicated advocate of Indian rights. After nearly a decade as an entertainer in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Thunderwater became progressively more engaged in Haudenosaunee political affairs—first in New York and then in Quebec and Ontario. As Reid shows, Thunderwater’s advocacy for Haudenosaunee sovereignty sparked alarm within Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs, which moved forcefully to discredit Thunderwater and dismantle his movement. Self-promoter, political activist, entrepreneur: Reid’s critical study reveals Thunderwater in all his contradictions and complexity—a complicated man whose story expands our understanding of Native life in the early modern era, and whose movement represents a key moment in the development of modern Haudenosaunee nationalism.

The first book-length biography of Richard Oakes, a Red Power activist of the 1960s who was a leader in the Alcatraz takeover and the Red Power Indigenous rights movement A revealing portrait of Richard Oakes, the brilliant, charismatic Native American leader who was instrumental in the takeovers of Alcatraz, Fort Lawton, and Pit River and whose assassination in 1972 galvanized the Trail of Broken Treaties march on Washington, DC. The life of this pivotal Akwesasne Mohawk activist is explored in an important new biography based on extensive archival research and key interviews with activists and family members. Historian Kent Blansett offers a transformative and new perspective on the Red Power movement of the turbulent 1960s and the dynamic figure who helped to organize and champion it, telling the full story of Oakes’s life, his fight for Native American self-determination, and his tragic, untimely death. This invaluable history chronicles the mid-twentieth century rise of Intertribalism, Indian Cities, and a national political awakening that continues to shape Indigenous politics and activism to this day.

“The single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States,” Vine Deloria Jr. called it. For the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara communities living on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, the construction of the Garrison Dam as part of the New Deal–era Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program meant the flooding of a third of their land, including their most fertile agricultural acreage, the loss of their homes, and wrenching relocation. In Damming the Reservation, Angela K. Parker, an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes, offers a deeply researched, unflinching history of the tribes’ fight to preserve and rebuild their culture, shared history, common stories, sense of place, and sovereignty. With the richly informed and deeply personal perspective of a historian and descendant of those who survived these events, Parker tracks the riverine communities from 1920 to 1960, in the years before, during, and after the Army Corps of Engineers did its devastating work. By studying the inextricable link between on-the-ground conditions and national policy, she builds a cohesive narrative for twentieth-century Native American history that hinges on the assertion of Indigenous sovereignties. These battles over land, water, and resources that constitute the “territory” required to maintain a working sovereign body are at the very heart of the Native American past, present, and future. The author shows how Indigenous resistance to the Garrison Dam created a new generation of activists, including Tillie Walker, the focus of the book’s epilogue. Damming the Reservation documents what can happen when a settler colonial nation tramples tribal rights while exerting control over rural hinterlands: in this case, the reservation community developed a praxis of self-determination and tribal sovereignty that trickled up to the national level so that tribal meanings came to saturate federal Indian policy. This is a history whose lessons echo through today’s most pressing environmental justice crises.

Centuries of colonization and other factors have disrupted indigenous communities’ ability to control their own food systems. This volume explores the meaning and importance of food sovereignty for Native peoples in the United States, and asks whether and how it might be achieved and sustained. Unprecedented in its focus and scope, this collection addresses nearly every aspect of indigenous food sovereignty, from revitalizing ancestral gardens and traditional ways of hunting, gathering, and seed saving to the difficult realities of racism, treaty abrogation, tribal sociopolitical factionalism, and the entrenched beliefs that processed foods are superior to traditional tribal fare. The contributors include scholar-activists in the fields of ethnobotany, history, anthropology, nutrition, insect ecology, biology, marine environmentalism, and federal Indian law, as well as indigenous seed savers and keepers, cooks, farmers, spearfishers, and community activists. After identifying the challenges involved in revitalizing and maintaining traditional food systems, these writers offer advice and encouragement to those concerned about tribal health, environmental destruction, loss of species habitat, and governmental food control.