Serving the Community College of Vermont & Vermont State University
Serving the Community College of Vermont & Vermont State University
“It is important to understand that there are many different ways of seeing the world and expressing the wisdom of Native belief...No one voice speaks for all voices.”
– Joseph Bruchac, Abenaki
National Native American Heritage Month is celebrated in November to recognize the history, culture, and achievements of the original inhabitants of the United States and their descendants. See below for select VSCS Libraries materials by Native American authors and filmmakers, or that explore the culture, achievements, and struggles of Native people and communities in Vermont and across the United States.
A sampling of recent or noteworthy books by Native American authors or that explore Native American culture and history in Vermont and across the United States. All electronic titles are available to read online and our physical titles may be requested for pick-up at a VSCS library or sent to your home.
American Disgust shows how perceptions of disgust and fears of contamination are rooted in the country's history of colonialism and racism.
Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 recodified the state’s long-standing racial hierarchy as a more rigid Black-white binary. Then, Virginia officials asserted that no Virginia Indians could be other than legally Black, given centuries of love and marriage across color lines.
A four-year-old Mi'kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a mystery that will haunt the survivors, unravel a family, and remain unsolved for nearly fifty years.
This work examines social, ethnic and religious tensions and reveals how population studies, theories of human heredity, and a rhetoric of altruism became subtle, tools of social control and exclusion in a state whose motto was freedom and unity.
Why is there no Native woman David Sedaris? Or Native Anne Lamott? Humor categories in publishing are packed with books by funny women and humorous sociocultural-political commentary—but no Native women. There are presumably more important concerns in Indian Country. More important than humor? Among the Diné/Navajo, a ceremony is held in honor of a baby's first laugh. While the context is different, it nonetheless reminds us that laughter is precious, even sacred.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's eloquent, fully documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century. A national bestseller in hardcover for more than a year after its initial publication (1971), it has sold almost four million copies and has been translated into seventeen languages. Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows the great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them demoralized and defeated.
A powerful work of reportage and American history in the vein of Caste and How the Word Is Passed that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation's earliest days, and a small-town murder in the '90s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land over a century later.
In this transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo, one of our leading Native American voices, details her journey to becoming a poet.
Dawnland Voices calls attention to the little known but extraordinarily rich literary traditions of New England's Native Americans. This pathbreaking anthology includes both classic and contemporary literary works from ten New England indigenous nations: the Abenaki, Maliseet, Mi'kmaq, Mohegan, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Schaghticoke, and Wampanoag.
A history of the overlooked Native Americans in the Monadnock region of New Hampshire.
The Earth Shall Weep is a groundbreaking, critically acclaimed history of the Native American peoples. Combining traditional historical sources with new insights from ethnography, archaeology, Indian oral tradition, and years of his original research, James Wilson weaves a historical narrative that puts Native Americans at the center of their struggle for survival against the tide of invading European peoples and cultures.
Describes the actions of both whites and Comanches during a 40-year war over territory, in a story that begins with the kidnapping of a white girl, who grew up to marry a Comanche chief and have a son, Quanah, who became a great warrior.
Science fiction often operates as either an extended metaphor for human relationships or as a genuine attempt to encounter the alien Other. Both types of stories tend to rehearse the processes of colonialism, in which a sympathetic protagonist encounters and tames the unknown. Despite this logic, Native American writers have claimed the genre as a productive space in which they can critique historical colonialism and reassert the value of Indigenous worldviews.
Nineteen-year-old Cowney Sequoyah yearns to escape his hometown of Cherokee, North Carolina, in the heart of the Smoky Mountains. When a summer job at Asheville's luxurious Grove Park Inn and Resort brings him one step closer to escaping the hills that both cradle and suffocate him, he sees it as an opportunity.
An unprecedented analysis of the origin story of New Mexico's modern water management system. Maria Lane's Fluid Geographies traces New Mexico's transition from a community-based to an expert-led system of water management during the pre-statehood era.
The beautifully illustrated Held by the Land guides you through the traditional uses and properties of a selection of indigenous plants.
In The Incarceration of Native American Women, Carma Corcoran examines the rising number of Native American women being incarcerated in Indian Country.
Indigenous Methodologies is a groundbreaking text. Since its original publication in 2009, it has become the most trusted guide used in the study of Indigenous methodologies and has been adopted in university courses around the world. It provides a conceptual framework for implementing Indigenous methodologies and serves as a useful entry point for those wishing to learn more broadly about Indigenous research.
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally-recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.
Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces applies Indigenous frameworks and epistemologies to online cultural movements through four case studies, including hashtags, memes, cryptocurrency, and digital artistry, and develops decolonizing practices for digital rhetoric, online identity work, and digital literacy practices.
This volume highlights the work of the late Gordon M. Day, renowned for his research on the history and culture of the Western Abenakis and their Indian neighbours.
Presents a true account of the early twentieth-century murders of dozens of wealthy Osage and law-enforcement officials, citing the contributions and missteps of a fledgling FBI that eventually uncovered one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.
Jamestown, the Lost Colony of Roanoke, and Plymouth Rock are central to America's mythic origin stories. Then, we are told, the main characters--the'friendly'Native Americans who met the settlers--disappeared. But the history of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina demands that we tell a different story.
This stirring memoir is the story of Ada Deer, the first woman to serve as head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Deer begins, "I was born a Menominee Indian. That is who I was born and how I have lived." She proceeds to narrate the first eighty-three years of her life, which are characterized by her tireless campaigns to reverse the forced termination of the Menominee tribe and to ensure sovereignty and self-determination for all tribes.
Haunting illustrations are woven throughout these horror stories that follow one extended Cherokee family across the centuries and well into the future as they encounter predators of all kinds in each time period.
A moving collection of twenty powerful essays, poems, and more that capture and celebrate the modern Native American experience, featuring entries by Angeline Boulley, Madison Hammond, Kara Roselle Smith, and many more.
What happens when American Indians take over an institution designed to eliminate them? The Bureau of Indian Affairs was hatched in the U.S. Department of War to subjugate and eliminate American Indians. Yet beginning in the 1970s, American Indians and Alaska Natives took over and now run the agency.
This narrative delves into the health and healing practices of indigenous tribes across the United States prior to the arrival of settlers through to the present day.
Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy.
No Friday Night Lights is the story of a rural Nevada high school football team that never wins. Veteran reporter John M. Glionna examines the 2022 season in which the McDermitt Bulldogs practiced for weeks in the summer only to learn once again that they had come up short of the necessary players due to the dwindling population on the Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation on the Nevada-Oregon border.
Utilizing archaeological site reports, unpublished manuscripts, and previous scholarly publications, Haviland and Power present an informative sociohistorical analysis of the Native American story in northern New England
What if we understood the idea of family as central to representing alternative forms of governance as expressions of racial deviance? In The Politics of Kinship, Mark Rifkin shows how ideologies of family, including notions of kinship, recast Indigenous and other forms of collective self-organization and self-determination as disruptive racial tendencies in need of state containment and intervention.
n 2012, Matika Wilbur sold everything in her Seattle apartment and set out on a Kickstarter-funded pursuit to visit, engage, and photograph people from what were then the 562 federally recognized Native American Tribal Nations.
Reclaiming the Ancestors sets the record straight about the early history of the Wabanaki - the Abenaki, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Malecite, and Mi'kmaq. Wiseman proposes a sovereigntist approach to understanding the current archaeological understanding of Abenaki prehistory.
A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.
In the early twentieth century, the Bay Area Outing Program coercively recruited over a thousand Native girls and women from boarding schools to labor as live-in domestic workers across the San Francisco Bay Area.
A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.
These teachings were given to Martin through the ancient White Buffalo Calf Woman Pipe as he stepped into his patrilineal and matrilineal heritage as a spiritual leader and holy man in the 1970's. For 25 years, he traveled sharing them with his own people as they began to restore their cultural identity and ceremonies.
A gorgeous story of a native Hawaiian family, telling a tale of old gods & faith & modernity & survival & sexuality & the history of Hawai’i & just so much more.
In Speaking for the People Mark Rifkin examines nineteenth-century Native writings to reframe contemporary debates around Indigenous recognition, refusal, and resurgence.
A group of well-intentioned white teaching artists scramble to create an ambitious "woke" Thanksgiving pageant. Despite their eager efforts to put on the most culturally sensitive show possible, it quickly becomes clear that even those with good intentions can be undone by their own blind spots.
As the environmental justice movement slowly builds momentum, Diane J. Purvis highlights the work of Indigenous peoples in Alaska's small rural villages, who have faced incredible odds throughout history yet have built political clout fueled by vigorous common cause in defense of their homes and livelihood.
These essays, produced and published over thirty years, are prescient in the prophetic tradition yet current. They reflect consistent engagement in Native issues and deliver a profoundly indigenous analysis of modern existence.
Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous.
Calloway draws on an impressive array of letters, journals, government documents, and other primary sources to recount how an Algonquian tribe on the periphery of the Iroquois Confederacy survived the first two centuries of white settlement.
United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into one momentous volume.
Writing Backwards explores what the dominance of historical fiction in the contemporary canon reveals about American literary culture. Alexander Manshel investigates the most celebrated historical genres—contemporary narratives of slavery, the World War II novel, the multigenerational family saga, immigrant fiction, and the novel of recent history—alongside the literary and academic institutions that have elevated them.
The story of Wilhelmina Yazzie and her son's effort to seek an adequate education in New Mexico schools revealed an educational system with poor policy implementation, inadequate funding, and piecemeal educational reform. The 2018 decision in the Yazzie/Martinez lawsuit proved what has always been known: the educational needs of Native American students were not being met.
A sampling of recent films or noteworthy by Native American filmmakers or that explore Native American culture and history in Vermont and across the United States. Videos can be from the library streaming video databases: Kanopy and Films on Demand.
If you haven't accessed Kanopy before, learn how to set up your account in this FAQ.
2020 1 hr. 14 min.
Gather follows the stories of natives on the frontlines of a growing movement to reconnect with spiritual and cultural identities that were devastated by genocide.
2021 54 min.
Home From School follows the difficult journey of Soldierwolf and tribal elders as they delve into the controversial history of Indian boarding schools, patch together the historic record and personal stories of the relatives who were shipped away, and, finally, travel to Carlisle to reunite with, and ultimately retrieve, the lost children of their tribe.
Educational Toolkit (discussion guides, etc.)
2017 1 hr. 9 min.
An exploration of Native American-based mascots, especially the Washington R_dskins, and their impact on real-life attitudes, issues, and policies. Through interviews with scholars, tribal leaders, lawyers, policy experts, activists, and Washington R_dskins fans, the film explores the history of the slanderous term "redskin," and delves into cultural stereotypes of Native Americans and their relationship to history. Ultimately, the film argues for representations that honor and celebrate the humanity of Indigenous people.
2011 1 hr. 32 min.
Featuring stunning footage from seven winters in the Arctic, People of a Feather takes us through time into the world of the Inuit in the northern reaches of Canada. Connecting past, present and future is the Inuit's unique relationship with the eider duck. Eider down, the warmest feather in the world, allows both Inuit and bird to survive harsh Arctic winters.
2017 56 min.
For millennia, Alaska Native peoples thrived in the seasonally harsh conditions of life in the far north. They depended upon strong social, cultural and spiritual practices passed from generation to generation. In the last century, rapid and forced changes in the life ways of Alaska Native peoples created many complex, painful scars for Elders who experienced them, and for their children’s children. In a landscape as dramatic as its stories, We Breathe Again intimately explores the lives of four Alaska Native people, each confronting the impacts of inter-generational trauma and suicide.
2009 5 1 hr. 20 min. episodes
A provocative multi-media project that establishes Native history as an essential part of American history. The centerpiece of this initiative is a television series that tells five heartbreaking, yet inspiring stories. Together they highlight Native ingenuity and resilience over the course of 300 years. The series upends two-dimensional stereotypes of American Indians as simply ferocious warriors or peaceable lovers of the land.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
