Alamosa Public Library

The received idea of Native American history--as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee--has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U. S. Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching...

"Leah Myers may be the last member of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe in her family line, due to her tribe's strict blood quantum laws. In this unflinching and intimate memoir, Myers excavates the stories of four generations of women in order to leave a record of her family. Beginning with her great-grandmother, the last full-blooded Native member in their lineage, she connects each woman with her totem to construct her family's totem pole: protective...

Discusses the identity, survival, religion, culture, social development, and modern world of the Blackfeet.

"Monica Youn's From From brilliantly evokes the conflicted consciousness of deracination. If you have no core of 'authenticity,' no experience of your so-called homeland, how do you piece together an Asian American identity out of Westerners' ideas about Asians? Your sense of yourself is part stereotype, part aspiration, part guilt. In this...collection, one sequence deconstructs the sounds and letters of the word 'deracinations' to create a sonic...

"[The author] tells the stories of twelve mixed-blood women who, steeped in the tradition of their Indian mothers but forced into the world of their white fathers, fought to find their identities in a rapidly changing world. In an era when most white women had limited opportunities outside the home, these mix-blood women often became nationally recognized leaders in the fight for Native American rights. They took the tools and training the whites...

Masuo Yasui's family struggled to adjust, endure, and triumph in their new country as they fought racism.

"Drawing on a rich family archive as well as the anthropological work of her late great-grandmother, LaPointe explores themes ranging from indigenous identity and stereotypes to cultural displacement and environmental degradation to understand what our experiences teach us about the power of community, commitment, and conscientious honesty. Unapologetically punk, the essays in Thunder Song segue between the miraculous and the mundane, the spiritual...