New Books by Dartmouth Authors: Native American Studies

American Indian tribes have long been recognized as "domestic, dependent nations" within the United States with powers of self-government that operate within the tribes' sovereign territories. Yet, over the years, the Congress, and more recently, the US Supreme Court, have steadily erodedthese tribal powers. In some respects, the erosion of tribal powers reflects the legacy of an imperialist impulse within the nation that operates to constrain or eliminate any political power that may compete with it. These developments have served to move the nation away from its formativecommitments to a legally plural society, or in other words, the idea that multiple nations and their legal systems could co-exist peacefully in shared territories.This book argues for redirecting the trajectory of tribal-federal relations to better reflect the formative ethos of legal pluralism that operated in the nation's earliest years. Such efforts will require that we confront and redress a number of ideological, constitutional and institutionalchallenges that may otherwise impede the important work of revitalizing tribal systems of self-government. From an ideological standpoint, this means that we must reexamine our long-held commitments to legal centralism, the view that the nation-state and its institutions are the only legitimatesources of law, as well as our commitments to liberalism, the dominant political philosophy that undergirds our democratic structures and situates the individual, not the group or a collective, as the bedrock moral unit of society. From a constitutional standpoint, establishing more robustexpressions of tribal sovereignty will require that we take seriously the concerns of citizens, tribal and non-tribal alike, who will demand that tribal governments operate consistent with constitutional values. Finally, from an institutional standpoint, these efforts will require a new, flexibleand adaptable institutional architecture that is better suited to accommodating these competing interests.

During the years of the Early Republic, prominent Native leaders regularly traveled to American cities - Albany, Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, Montreal, Quebec, New York, and New Orleans - primarily on diplomatic or trade business, but also from curiosity and adventurousness. They werefrequently referred to as "the Chiefs now in this city" during their visits, which were sometimes for extended periods of time. Indian people spent a lot of time in town. Colin Calloway, National Book Award finalist and one of the foremost chroniclers of Native American history, has gatheredtogether the accounts of these visits and from them created a new narrative of the country's formative years, redefining what has been understood as the "frontier."Calloway's book captures what Native peoples observed as they walked the streets, sat in pews, attended plays, drank in taverns, and slept in hotels and lodging houses. In the Eastern cities they experienced an urban frontier, one in which the Indigenous world met the Atlantic world. Calloway's bookreveals not just what Indians saw but how they were seen. Crowds gathered to see them, sometimes to gawk; people attended the theatre to watch "the Chiefs now in this city" watch a play.Their experience enriches and redefines standard narratives of contact between the First Americans and inhabitants of the American Republic, reminding us that Indian people dealt with non-Indians in multiple ways and in multiple places. The story of the country's beginnings was not only one ofviolent confrontation and betrayal, but one in which the nation's identity was being forged by interaction between and among cultures and traditions.

Indian peoples made some four hundred treaties with the United States between the American Revolution and 1871, when Congress prohibited them. They signed nine treaties with the Confederacy, as well as countless others over the centuries with Spain, France, Britain, Mexico, the Republic ofTexas, Canada, and even Russia, not to mention individual colonies and states. In retrospect, the treaties seem like well-ordered steps on the path of dispossession and empire. The reality was far more complicated.In Pen and Ink Witchcraft, eminent Native American historian Colin G. Calloway narrates the history of diplomacy between North American Indians and their imperial adversaries, particularly the United States. Treaties were cultural encounters and human dramas, each with its cast of characters andconflicting agendas. Many treaties, he notes, involved not land, but trade, friendship, and the resolution of disputes. Far from all being one-sided, they were negotiated on the Indians' cultural and geographical terrain.When the Mohawks welcomed Dutch traders in the early 1600s, they sealed a treaty of friendship with a wampum belt with parallel rows of purple beads, representing the parties traveling side-by-side, as equals, on the same river. But the American republic increasingly turned treaty-making into a toolof encroachment on Indian territory. Calloway traces this process by focusing on the treaties of Fort Stanwix (1768), New Echota (1835), and Medicine Lodge (1867), in addition to such events as the Peace of Montreal in 1701 and the treaties of Fort Laramie (1851 and 1868). His analysis demonstratesthat native leaders were hardly dupes. The records of negotiations, he writes, show that "Indians frequently matched their colonizing counterparts in diplomatic savvy and tried, literally, to hold their ground."Each treaty has its own story, Calloway writes, but together they tell a rich and complicated tale of moments in American history when civilizations collided.

The largest known collection of ledger art ever acquired by one individual is Mark Lansburgh's diverse assemblage of more than 140 drawings, now held by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and catalogued in this important book. The Cheyennes, Crows, Kiowas, Lakotas, and other Plains peoples created the genre known as ledger art in the mid-nineteenth century. Before that time, these Indians had chronicled the heroic achievements of their warriors and chiefs on rock, buffalo robes, and tipi covers. As they came into increasing contact with American traders, the artists recorded their experiences in pencil and crayon drawings on paper bound in ledger or account books. The drawings became known as ledger art. This volume presents in full color the Lansburgh collection in its entirety. The drawings are narratives depicting Plains lifeways through Plains eyes. They include landscapes and scenes of battle, hunting, courting, ceremony, incarceration, and travel by foot, horse, train, and boat. Ledger art also served to prompt memories of horse raids and heroic exploits in battle. In addition to showcasing the Lansburgh collection, Ledger Narratives augments the growing literature on this art form by providing seven new essays that suggest some of the many stories the drawings contain and that look at them from innovative perspectives. The authors--scholars of art history, anthropology, history, and Native American studies--touch on such themes as gender, social status, sovereignty, tribal and intertribal politics, economic exchange, and confinement and space in a changing world. The Lansburgh collection includes some of the most arresting examples of Plains Indian art, and the essays in this volume help us see and hear the multiple narratives these drawings relate.

This book is a rich record of life in small-town southeastern Alaska in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It is the first book to showcase the photographs of Vincent Soboleff, an amateur Russian American photographer whose community included Tlingit Indians from a nearby village as well as Russian Americans, so-called Creoles, who worked in a local fertilizer factory. Using a Kodak camera, Soboleff, the son of a Russian Orthodox priest, documented the life of this multiethnic parish at work and at play until 1920. Despite their significance, few of Soboleff's photographs have been published since their discovery in 1950. Anthropologist Sergei Kan rectifies that oversight in A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country, which brings together more than 100 of Soboleff's striking black-and-white images. Combining Soboleff's photographs with ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Kan brings to life the communities of Killisnoo, where Soboleff grew up, and Angoon, the Tlingit village. The photographs gathered here depict Russian Creoles, Euro-Americans, the operation of the Killisnoo factory, and the daily life of its workers. But Soboleff's work is especially valuable as a record of Tlingit life. As a member of this multiethnic community, he was able to take unusually personal photographs of people and daily life. Soboleff's photographs offer candid and intimate glimpses into Tlingit people's then-new economic pursuits such as commercial fishing, selling berries, and making "Indian curios" to sell to tourists. Other images show white, Creole, and Native factory workers rubbing shoulders while keeping a certain distance during leisure time. Kan offers readers, historians, and photography lovers a beautiful visual resource on Tlingit and Russian American life that shows how the two cultures intertwined in southeastern Alaska at the turn of the past century.

In Against Extraction Matt Hooley traces a modern tradition of Ojibwe invention in Minneapolis and St. Paul from the mid-nineteenth century to the present as that tradition emerges in response to the cultural legacies of US colonialism. Hooley shows how Indigenous literary and visual art modernisms challenge the strictures of everyday life and question the ecological, political, and cultural fantasies that make multivalent US colonialism seem inevitable. Hooley analyzes literature and art by Louise Erdrich, William Whipple Warren, David Treuer, George Morrison, and Gerald Vizenor in relation to histories of Indigenous dispossession and occupation, enslavement and Black life, and environmental harm and care. He shows that historical narratives of these cities are intimately bound up with the violence of colonial systems of extraction and that concepts like Indigeneity and sovereignty extend beyond treaty-granted promises of political control. These works, created in opposition and proximity to the extraction of cultural, political, and territorial resources, demonstrate how Indigenous claims to life and land matter to rethinking and unmaking the social and ecological devastations of the colonial world.