History of the relationship between the US Government--and Indians of the US.

A history of American Indians, discussing events that characterized the struggles of Native Americans to survive and maintain their homes and traditions in each of six distinct time periods, from 1890 to 1997.

In 1972, the Bureau of Indian Affairs terminated its twenty-year-old Voluntary Relocation Program, which encouraged the mass migration of roughly 100,000 Native American people from rural to urban areas. At the time the program ended, many groups--from government leaders to Red Power activists--had already classified it as a failure, and scholars have subsequently positioned the program as evidence of America's enduring settler-colonial project. But Douglas K. Miller here argues that a richer story should be told--one that recognizes Indigenous mobility in terms of its benefits and not merely its costs. In their collective refusal to accept marginality and destitution on reservations, Native Americans used the urban relocation program to take greater control of their socioeconomic circumstances. Indigenous migrants also used the financial, educational, and cultural resources they found in cities to feed new expressions of Indigenous sovereignty both off and on the reservation. The dynamic histories of everyday people at the heart of this book shed new light on the adaptability of mobile Native American communities. In the end, this is a story of shared experience across tribal lines, through which Indigenous people incorporated urban life into their ideas for Indigenous futures.

Artists and filmmakers in the early twentieth century reshaped our vision of the American West. In particular, the Taos Society of Artists and the California-based artist Maynard Dixon departed from the legendary depiction of the “Wild West” and fostered new images, or brands, for western art. This volume, illustrated with more than 150 images, examines select paintings and films to demonstrate how these artists both enhanced and contradicted earlier representations of the West. Prior to this period, American art tended to portray the West as a wild frontier with untamed lands and peoples. Renowned artists such as Henry Farny and Frederic Remington set their work in the past, invoking an environment immersed in conflict and violence. This trademark perspective began to change, however, when artists enamored with the Southwest stamped a new imprint on their paintings. The contributors to this volume illuminate the complex ways in which early-twentieth-century artists, as well as filmmakers, evoked a southwestern environment not just suspended in time but also permanent rather than transient. Yet, as the authors also reveal, these artists were not entirely immune to the siren call of the vanishing West, and their portrayal of peaceful yet “exotic” Native Americans was an expansion rather than a dismissal of earlier tropes. Both brands cast a romantic spell on the West, and both have been seared into public consciousness. Branding the American West is published in association with the Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah, and the Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas.

Chronicles the history of the American West during the twentieth century, tracing economical, political, social, and cultural developments in the region from 1900 to the turn of the twenty-first century, in an updated edition that includes new sections that explore the roles of ethnic groups in the new West, urban developments, western women, and events since the mid-1980s. Original.

In the face of a new lightly romanticized view of Native Americans, Killing the White Man's Indian bravely confronts the current myths and often contradictory realities of tribal life today. Following two centuries of broken treaties and virtual government extermination of the "savage redmen," Americans today 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 our last, best hope of salvaging our natural environment and ennobling our souls. The truth, however, is neither as grim , nor as blindly idealistic, as many would expect. The fact is that a virtual revolution is underway in Indian Country, an upheaval of epic proportions. For the first time in generations, Indians are shaping their own destinies, largely beyond the control of whites, reinventing Indian education and justice, exploiting the principle of tribal sovereignty in ways that empower tribal governments far beyond most American's imaginations. While new found power has enriched tribal life and prospects, and has made Native Americans fuller participants in the American dream, it has brought tribal governments into direct conflict with local economics and the federal government. Based on three years of research on the Native American reservations, and written without a hidden conservative bias or politically correct agenda, Killing the White Man's Indian takes on Native American politics and policies today in all their contradictory--and controversial-guises."