Lewis and Clark and the Indian Country
The Native American Perspective
Edited by Frederick E. Hoxie and Jay T. Nelson
Published for The Newberry Library
Incorporating multiple perspectives on the Lewis and Clark expedition and its aftermath
Lewis and Clark and the Indian Country broadens the scope of conventional study of the Lewis and Clark expedition to include Native American perspectives. Frederick E. Hoxie and Jay T. Nelson present the expedition's long-term impact on the "Indian Country" and its residents through compelling interviews conducted with Native Americans over the past two centuries, secondary literature, Lewis and Clark travel journals, and other primary sources from the Newberry Library's exhibit Lewis and Clark and the Indian Country. Rich stories of Native Americans, travelers, ranchers, Columbia River fur traders, teachers, and missionaries-often in conflict with each other--illustrate complex interactions between settlers and tribal people. In widening the reader's interpretive lens to include many perspectives, this collection reaches beyond individual achievement to appreciate America's plural past.
Frederick E. Hoxie is Swanlund Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the author and editor of many books, including Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era. Jay T. Nelson is a program assistant at the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History, the Newberry Library.
"Frederick Hoxie and Jay Nelson's edited collection provides an indispensable guide and handbook into the many layered meanings of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Neither glorifying nor villifying the Corps of Discovery, the valuable essays, documents, and interviews found in this book deepen our collective assessments of the American past, inviting us to reconsider commonly held assumptions about this most famous of American explorations. Historically grounded as well as conscious about the contemporary challenges confronting western Indian nations, Lewis and Clark and the Indian Country represents both essential and collaborative scholarship. A rare achievement."--Ned Blackhawk, author of Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West
"After years of commemoration, is there anything left to be said about Lewis and Clark? Absolutely, and as this book demonstrates so well, the most important lessons--concerning the reach of complexity and consequence across time and culture--have largely been left unsaid. Placing the expedition in the context of long environmental, social, and political histories, Lewis and Clark and the Indian Country models creative, respectful, collaborative scholarship that retells the familiar stories in light of Indian experiences and survivals. This compelling and important collection marks not only an apt closure to the Lewis and Clark bicentennial, but a coming round full circle to the Indian people who greeted the explorers' foray into 'new' land."--Philip J. Deloria, author of Playing Indian and Indians in Unexpected Places
"This book provides a broad spectrum of perspectives (both past and present) on Lewis and Clark and the tribal people who encountered their expedition. The selections are rich in both historical and ethnographic content and reflect the changes that have occurred in these tribal societies during the past two centuries."--R. David Edmunds, Watson Professor of American History, University of Texas, DallasJANUARY 2008
312 pages. 6 x 9 inches. 12 photographs.
Cloth, ISBN 0-252-03266-7. $70.00
Paper, ISBN 0-252-07485-8. $24.95
History, American: 19th C. / Indians of the Americas / Native American Studies / Anthropology
Native American Place Names of Indiana
Michael McCafferty
A linguistic history of Native American place names in Indiana
In tracing the roots of Indiana place names, Michael McCafferty focuses on those created and used by local Native Americans. Drawing from exciting new sources that include three Illinois dictionaries from the eighteenth century, the author documents the language used to describe landmarks essential to fur traders in Les Pays d'en Haut and settlers of the Old Northwest territory. Impeccably researched, this study details who created each name, as well as when, where, how and why they were used. The result is a detailed linguistic history of lakes, streams, cities, counties, and other Indiana names. Each entry includes native language forms, translations, and pronunciation guides, offering fresh historical insight into the state of Indiana.
Michael McCafferty is an Algonquian and Uto-Aztecan linguist on the faculty of the department of second language studies at Indiana University.
"This book is an outstanding contribution that is useful and enjoyable to anyone interested in Indiana place names. It is by far the most detailed historical study of its topic, and the only linguistic study. The scholarship is extremely meticulous, and much archival data is published here for the first time."--William Bright, author of Native American Placenames of the United StatesJANUARY 2008
304 pages. 6 x 9 inches. 2 line drawings.
Cloth, ISBN 0-252-03268-3. $50.00
Native American Studies / Language & Linguistics / Reference & Bibliography / Midwest Regional / History, American: 19th C.
Don't Give Up the Ship!
Myths of the War of 1812
Donald R. Hickey
Foreword by Donald E. Graves
Clearing the fog from the War of 1812.
In this entertaining and meticulously researched book by a leading authority on the War of 1812, Donald R. Hickey dispels the many misconceptions that distort our view of America's second war with Great Britain. Embracing military, naval, political, economic, and diplomatic analyses, Hickey looks carefully at how the war was fought and how it was remembered thereafter. Was the original declaration of war a bluff? What were the real roles of Canadian traitor Joseph Willcocks, Mohawk leader John Norton, pirate Jean Laffite, and American naval hero Lucy Baker? Who killed the Shawnee chief Tecumseh and who shot the British general Isaac Brock? Who actually won the war, and what is its lasting legacy? Hickey peels away fantasies and embellishments to explore why certain myths gained currency and how they contributed to the way that the United States and Canada view themselves and each other.
Donald R. Hickey is a professor of history at Wayne State College in Wayne, Nebraska. His books include The War of 1812: The Forgotten Conflict, which won the National Historical Society Book Prize and the American Military Institute Best Book Award.
"War making and mythmaking go hand in hand in Hickey's analysis of the misconceptions, embellishments and falsehoods that continue to shape Americans' views of the War of 1812. . . . This richly textured model of historical revisionism . . . confirms Hickey's status as a leading scholar of the early national period."--Publishers Weekly
"Hickey's book deserves a wide popular readership. It also succeeds in broadening the scope of what academic historians should be looking at in the War of 1812."--Journal of Military History
"Don't Give Up the Ship! belongs on the shelf of everyone deeply interested in, or who writes about, the War of 1812."--Naval History
August 2007464 pages. 6 x 9 inches. 10 photographs.
Cloth, ISBN 0-252-03179-2. $34.95
Paper, ISBN 0-252-07494-7. $24.95
History, Military / History, American: 19th C.
Stealing Indian Women
Native Slavery in the Illinois Country
Carl J. Ekberg
The first history of Indian slavery in the Mississippi Valley during the colonial era
Based almost entirely on original source documents from the United States, France, and Spain, Carl J. Ekberg's Stealing Indian Women provides a novel overview of Indian slavery in the Mississippi Valley. His detailed study of a fascinating and convoluted criminal case involving various slave women and a métis (mixed-blood) woodsman named Céladon illuminates race and gender relations, Creole culture, and the lives of Indian slaves--particularly women--in ways never before possible.
Carl J. Ekberg is professor emeritus of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of many books, including the award-winning Colonial Ste. Genevieve and French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times.
"Stealing Indian Women possesses all the qualities that have become synonymous with Ekberg's work: groundbreaking and meticulous research, engaging prose, and a unique ability to capture a sense of place and time. His richly textured account reveals practices at odds with long-held suppositions about Indian slavery in the Illinois country and, most important of all, he succeeds in attaching human faces to an institution that has been little noticed and even less understood."
--William E. Foley, author of Wilderness Journey: The Life of William Clark
AUGUST 2007
240 pages. 6 x 9 inches. 6 photographs, 8 line drawings.
Cloth, ISBN 0-252-03208-X. $38.00The American Discovery of Europe
Jack D. Forbes
An independent and indigenous revision of established history
“Forbes makes an unusual and fascinating contribution to the story of the New and Old Worlds and the links between them, questioning in a welcome way the truth and ideological sway of orthodox history. He leads his reader along paths rarely, if ever, trodden, ultimately in search of a fairer account of native America and its role in planetary experience. This is a quest that Forbes’s own ancestry and--not least--keen sense of language well equip him to undertake. He eminently succeeds.”
-- Gordon Brotherston, author of Image of the New World: The American Continent Portrayed in Native Texts
The American Discovery of Europe investigates the voyages of America’s Native peoples to the European continent before Columbus’s 1492 arrival in the “New World.” The product of over twenty years of exhaustive research in libraries throughout Europe and the United States, Jack D. Forbes employs a vast number of primary and secondary sources to paint a clear picture of the diverse and complex societies that comprised the Americas before 1492 and reveals the surprising Native American involvements in maritime trade and exploration.
Starting with an encounter by Columbus himself with mysterious people who had apparently been carried across the Atlantic on favorable currents, Forbes proceeds to a detailed discussion of ocean currents and then to exploring the seagoing expertise of early Americans in the Caribbean, on the coasts of Greenland, and beyond. He also discusses theories of ancient migrations, the evidence for human origins in the Americas, and other early visitors coming from Europe to America, including the Norse. The book closes with a discussion of Native travelers to Europe after 1493, when they came mostly as slaves. The provocative, extensively docu-mented, and heartfelt conclusions of The American Discovery of Europe present an open challenge to received historical wisdom. This book will be of lasting importance to Native peoples and will redefine the way future scholarship views American history.
JACK D. FORBES is the professor emeritus of Native American studies and anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He is the author or editor of seventeen books, including Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples.
February 2007248 pages. 6 x 9 inches. 24 photographs.
Cloth, ISBN 0-252-03152-0. $34.95
Sovereign Selves
American Indian Autobiography and the Law
David J. Carlson
The surprising engagements of American Indian autobiographers with colonial discourses
This book is an exploration of how American Indian autobiographers' approaches to writing about their own lives have been impacted by American legal systems from the Revolutionary War until the 1920s. Historically, Native American autobiographers have written in the shadow of "Indian law," a nuanced form of natural law discourse with its own set of related institutions and forms (the reservation, the treaty, etc.). In Sovereign Selves, David J. Carlson develops a rigorously historicized argument about the relationship between the specific colonial model of "Indian" identity that was developed and disseminated through U.S. legal institutions, and the acts of autobiographical self-definition by the "colonized" Indians expected to fit that model.
Carlson argues that by drawing on the conventions of early colonial treaty-making, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian autobiographers sought to adapt and redefine the terms of Indian law as a way to assert specific property-based and civil rights. Focusing primarily on the autobiographical careers of two major writers (William Apess and Charles Eastman), Sovereign Selves traces the way that their sustained engagement with colonial legal institutions gradually enabled them to produce a new rhetoric of "Indianness."
DAVID CARLSON is an assistant professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino.
December 2005248 pages. 6 x 9 inches.
Paper, ISBN 0-252-07266-9. $30.00
Law / Literature, American / Native American Studies
July 23, 2007