Chief Francisco Patencio recounts the stories and legends of his people in this slim, but, invaluable record of the Palm Springs Native Americans. Originally published in 1943 by the Palm Springs Desert Museum, the tales and traditions of the Cahuilla are kept alive in the new edition.

Palm Springs, long a desert hideaway for celebrities, has a history as unique and varied as its residents. From the original Cahuilla inhabitants of the area, to the settlers who were drawn to the therapeutic waters of the original hot springs, you will get to know the people and stories that made Palm Springs famous.

This is a revised and enlarged version of A Troubled Oasis: A Critical History of Palm Springs. The key chapter on the tragedy of the Section Fourteen so-called "urban holocaust," when minorities were evicted from the center of the city in the 1960s, has been dramatically updated in light of a tranche of new, revelatory documents published online by city officials in the spring of 2023. However, all of the chapters have been enriched by greater detail, new subjects, and deeper research, making this new edition practically a new book. A critical perspective has been maintained, eschewing the boosterism of traditional municipal histories. This comprehensive study should appeal to anyone who wants to know more about the history of Palm Springs, from the prehistoric times of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians to the present day.

“Sovereignty” is perhaps the most ubiquitous term in American Indian writing today—but its meaning and function are anything but universally understood. This is as it should be, David J. Carlson suggests, for a concept frequently at the center of various—and often competing—claims to authority. In Imagining Sovereignty, Carlson explores sovereignty as a discursive middle ground between tribal communities and the United States as a settler-colonial power. His work reveals the complementary ways in which legal and literary texts have generated politically significant representations of the world, which in turn have produced particular effects on readers and advanced the cause of tribal self-determination. Drawing on western legal historical sources and American Indian texts, Carlson traces a dual genealogy of sovereignty. Imagining Sovereignty identifies the concept as a marker, one that allows both the colonizing power of the United States and the resisting powers of various American Indian nations to organize themselves and their various claims to authority. In the process, sovereignty also functions as a point of exchange where these claims compete with and complicate one another. To this end, Carlson analyzes how several contemporary American Indian writers and critics have sought to fuse literary practices and legal structures into fully formed discourses of self-determination. After charting the development of the concept of sovereignty in natural law and its permutations in federal Indian policy, Carlson maps out the nature and function of sovereignty discourses in the work of contemporary Native scholars such as Russel Barsh, Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, D’Arcy McNickle, and Vine Deloria, and in the work of more expressly literary American Indian writers such as Craig Womack, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Gerald Vizenor, and Francisco Patencio. Often read in opposition, the writings of these indigenous authors emerge in Imagining Sovereignty as a coherent literary and political tradition—one whose varied discourse of sovereignty aptly reflects American Indian people’s diverse political contexts.

Why publish a Reader? Today, it is relatively easy and convenient to switch on your computer and download an academic paper. However, as many scholars have experienced, historic references are difficult to access. Moreover, some are now lost and are merely references in later papers. This can be frustrating.

Tracing the history of Southern California from the late 19th century through the late 20th century, this book reveals how this region did much more than just create lavish resorts like Santa Catalina Island and Palm Springs - it literally remade American attitudes towards leisure.