A small, poverty-stricken California Indian Tribe, the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, successfully fought a long legal battle for the right to operate the business of their choice on their barren reservation—a gambling casino. This is their story, the authorized history of their epic struggle, climaxing with their victory in a 1987 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, the now-famous Cabazon Decision. Their defeated opponents included California's City of Indio and County of Riverside (called one of the most racist in the U.S. by a non-Indian resident) as well as California and 29 other states that joined California's appeal. This is also the fascinating story of the role played by a white family and its radical, socialist patriarch that helped create one of the world's most capital-intensive industries and triggered today's Indian Gaming Explosion throughout America. Hundreds of hours of taped interviews and years of documents, meeting records, and official correspondence are analyzed to give the reader a clear picture of the impact of this new massive capital on tribal life and the development of a possible future without gambling—as officials in league with Nevada and Atlantic City gambling interests continue their efforts to destroy Indian gaming. The Buffalo, literal and symbolic figure of earlier Indian financial independence, has returned in a new form—cash cow casinos.

A fictionalized account of the changing fortunes of the Hunkpapa and Oglala Sioux from the victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.

With a new epilogue Though the Plains have been in economic and population decline since the twenties, they are actually within closer reach of vibrant ecological sustainability than any other region of the country. This visionary book offers a constructive alternative to the decline of cattle ranching, depletion of underground water, and dependency on outside energy sources. It shows how bringing back the hardy, majestic bison and using the region's winds to generate power are keys to renewed economic and social health for Plains communities.

The Italians in the towns and villages liberated by the buffalo soldiers during World War II called them Giganti Buoni, the Good Giants. They did not know that these giants would return to a country where they were still second-class citizens. In 2012, Ivan J. Houston, one of those remaining buffalo soldiers, was invited to return to Italy by the owner of a villa his battalion captured. He and his family would be guests at the fifteenth-century Villa Orsini, now a bed and breakfast renamed the Villa La Dogana. His return to Tuscany almost seventy years after the war had ended was filled with emotion. In this book, he describes how he went back to a place where African American buffalo soldiers are considered heroes and liberators. He visits battlefields where more than three thousand African American buffalo soldiers were killed or wounded as they battled Nazi and Fascist soldiers. The author and his family returned to Italy for five consecutive years, visiting the battle sites and celebrating ancient victories that will never be forgotten.

From the host of the Travel Channel’s “The Wild Within.” A hunt for the American buffalo—an adventurous, fascinating examination of an animal that has haunted the American imagination. In 2005, Steven Rinella won a lottery permit to hunt for a wild buffalo, or American bison, in the Alaskan wilderness. Despite the odds—there’s only a 2 percent chance of drawing the permit, and fewer than 20 percent of those hunters are successful—Rinella managed to kill a buffalo on a snow-covered mountainside and then raft the meat back to civilization while being trailed by grizzly bears and suffering from hypothermia. Throughout these adventures, Rinella found himself contemplating his own place among the 14,000 years’ worth of buffalo hunters in North America, as well as the buffalo’s place in the American experience. At the time of the Revolutionary War, North America was home to approximately 40 million buffalo, the largest herd of big mammals on the planet, but by the mid-1890s only a few hundred remained. Now that the buffalo is on the verge of a dramatic ecological recovery across the West, Americans are faced with the challenge of how, and if, we can dare to share our land with a beast that is the embodiment of the American wilderness. American Buffalo is a narrative tale of Rinella’s hunt. But beyond that, it is the story of the many ways in which the buffalo has shaped our national identity. Rinella takes us across the continent in search of the buffalo’s past, present, and future: to the Bering Land Bridge, where scientists search for buffalo bones amid artifacts of the New World’s earliest human inhabitants; to buffalo jumps where Native Americans once ran buffalo over cliffs by the thousands; to the Detroit Carbon works, a “bone charcoal” plant that made fortunes in the late 1800s by turning millions of tons of buffalo bones into bone meal, black dye, and fine china; and even to an abattoir turned fashion mecca in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, where a depressed buffalo named Black Diamond met his fate after serving as the model for the American nickel. Rinella’s erudition and exuberance, combined with his gift for storytelling, make him the perfect guide for a book that combines outdoor adventure with a quirky blend of facts and observations about history, biology, and the natural world. Both a captivating narrative and a book of environmental and historical significance, American Buffalo tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos.

The Way of the Buffalo is a spiritual journey, not a handbook on how to do it, but rather lessons learned by two small time entrepreneurs over a three decade experience about the business of business. This collection of essays shares a unique perspective on the spirit of the entrepreneur, the will to sell, and the art of providing products and services to the public.