Who is a Native American? And who gets to decide? From genealogists searching online for their ancestors to fortune hunters hoping for a slice of casino profits from wealthy tribes, the answers to these seemingly straightforward questions have profound ramifications. The rise of DNA testing has further complicated the issues and raised the stakes. In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing is a powerful—and problematic—scientific process that is useful in determining close biological relatives. But tribal membership is a legal category that has developed in dependence on certain social understandings and historical contexts, a set of concepts that entangles genetic information in a web of family relations, reservation histories, tribal rules, and government regulations. At a larger level, TallBear asserts, the “markers” that are identified and applied to specific groups such as Native American tribes bear the imprints of the cultural, racial, ethnic, national, and even tribal misinterpretations of the humans who study them. TallBear notes that ideas about racial science, which informed white definitions of tribes in the nineteenth century, are unfortunately being revived in twenty-first-century laboratories. Because today’s science seems so compelling, increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to believe their own metaphors: “in our blood” is giving way to “in our DNA.” This rhetorical drift, she argues, has significant consequences, and ultimately she shows how Native American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have taken generations to ratify may be seriously—and permanently—undermined.

For many people, Native American architecture calls to mind the wigwam, tipi, iglu, and pueblo. Yet the richly diverse building traditions of Native Americans encompass much more, including specific structures for sleeping, working, worshipping, meditating, playing, dancing, lounging, giving birth, decision-making, cleansing, storing and preparing food, caring for animals, and honoring the dead. In effect, the architecture covers all facets of Indian life. The collaboration between an architect and an anthropologist, Native American Architecture presents the first book-length, fully illustrated exploration of North American Indian architecture to appear in over a century. Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton together examine the building traditions of the major tribes in nine regional areas of the continent from the huge plank-house villages of the Northwest Coast to the moundbuilder towns and temples of the Southeast, to the Navajo hogans and adobe pueblos of the Southwest. Going beyond a traditional survey of buildings, the book offers a broad, clear view into the Native American world, revealing a new perspective on the interaction between their buildings and culture. Looking at Native American architecture as more than buildings, villages, and camps, Nabokov and Easton also focus on their use of space, their environment, their social mores, and their religious beliefs. Each chapter concludes with an account of traditional Indian building practices undergoing a revival or in danger today. The volume also includes a wealth of historical photographs and drawings (including sixteen pages of color illustrations), architectural renderings, and specially prepared interpretive diagrams which decode the sacred cosmology of the principal house types.

Native American Rhetoric is the first book to explore rhetorical traditions from within individual Native communities and Native languages. The essays set a new standard for how rhetoric is talked about, written about, and taught. The contributors argue that Native rhetorical practices have their own interior logic, which is grounded in the morality and religion of their given traditions. Once we understand the ways in which Native rhetorical practices are rooted in culture and tradition, the phenomenological expression of the speech patterns becomes clear. The value of Native communities and their languages is underlined throughout the essays. Lawrence W. Gross and the contributors successfully represent several, but not all, Native communities across the United States and Mexico, including the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Choctaw, Nahua, Chickasaw and Chicana, Tohono O'odham, Navajo, Apache, Hupa, Lower Coast Salish, Koyukon, Tlingit, and Nez Perce. Native American Rhetoric will be an essential resource for continued discussions of Native American rhetorical practices in and beyond the discipline of rhetoric.

"The White Man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative process. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped rock and soil." The words of Lakota writer Luther Standing Bear foretold the current debate on the value of Native American studies in higher education. Studying Native America addresses for the first time in a comprehensive way the place of this critical discipline in the university curriculum. Leading scholars in anthropology, demography, English and literature, history, law, social work, linguistics, public health, psychology, and sociology have come together to explore what Native American studies has been, what it is, and what it may be in the future. The book's thirteen contributors and editor Russell Thornton, stress the frequent incompatibility of traditional academic teaching methods with the social and cultural concerns that gave rise to the field of Native American studies. Beginning with the intellectual and institutional history of Native American studies, the book examines its literature, language, historical narratives, and anthropology. The volume discusses the effects on Native American studies of law and constitutionalism; cosmology, epistemology, and religion; identity; demography; colonialism and post-colonialism; science and technology; and repatriation of human remains and cultural objects. Contributors to Studying Native America include Raymond J. DeMallie, Bonnie Duran, Eduardo Duran, Raymond D. Fogelson, Clara Sue Kidwell, Kerwin Lee Klein, Melissa L. Meyer, John H. Moore, Peter Nabokov, Katheryn Shanley, C. Matthew Snipp, Rennard Strickland, Russell Thornton, J. Randolph Valentine, Robert Allen Warrior, Richard White, and Maria Yellowhorse-Braveheart. The book is sponsored in part by the Social Science Research Council.

Native American Studies covers key issues such as the intimate relationship of culture to land; the nature of cultural exchange and conflict in the period after European contact; the unique relationship of Native communities with the United States government; the significance of language; the vitality of contemporary cultures; and the variety of Native artistic styles, from literature and poetry to painting and sculpture to performance arts.

This landmark book combines the voices of Native Americans and non-Indians, anthropologists and others, in an exploration of gender and sexuality issues as they relate to lesbian, gay, transgendered, and other "marked" Native Americans. Focusing on the concept of two-spirit people--individuals not necessarily gay or lesbian, transvestite or bisexual, but whose behaviors or beliefs may sometimes be interpreted by others as uncharacteristic of their sex--this book is the first to provide an intimate look at how many two-spirit people feel about themselves, how other Native Americans treat them, and how anthropologists and other scholars interpret them and their cultures. 1997 Winner of the Ruth Benedict Prize for an edited book given by the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists.

Winner of the 2020 Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal A 2020 American Indian Youth Literature Picture Book Honor Winner “A wonderful and sweet book . . . Lovely stuff.” —The New York Times Book Review Told in lively and powerful verse by debut author Kevin Noble Maillard, Fry Bread is an evocative depiction of a modern Native American family, vibrantly illustrated by Pura Belpre Award winner and Caldecott Honoree Juana Martinez-Neal. Fry bread is food. It is warm and delicious, piled high on a plate. Fry bread is time. It brings families together for meals and new memories. Fry bread is nation. It is shared by many, from coast to coast and beyond. Fry bread is us. It is a celebration of old and new, traditional and modern, similarity and difference. A 2020 Charlotte Huck Recommended Book A Publishers Weekly Best Picture Book of 2019 A Kirkus Reviews Best Picture Book of 2019 A School Library Journal Best Picture Book of 2019 A Booklist 2019 Editor's Choice A Shelf Awareness Best Children's Book of 2019 A Goodreads Choice Award 2019 Semifinalist A Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Book of 2019 A National Public Radio (NPR) Best Book of 2019 An NCTE Notable Poetry Book A 2020 NCSS Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People A 2020 ALA Notable Children's Book A 2020 ILA Notable Book for a Global Society 2020 Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Books of the Year List One of NPR's 100 Favorite Books for Young Readers Nominee, Pennsylvania Young Readers Choice Award 2022-2022 Nominee, Illinois Monarch Award 2022