Native American Heritage Month - Recommended Readings
Written by Faculty
Elizabeth Fenn – History
Distinguished Professor Emerita– Early America / Native American History
Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, (New York: Hill & Wang, 2014) – Awarded 2015 Pulitzer Prize in History.
Philip J. Deloria – History
Professor (at CU 1994-2001) – modern U.S. history
Indians in Unexpected Places, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004)– John C. Ewers Book Award winner
Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019)
Recommended by Faculty
- Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
Celia E. Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens. (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2008).
Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013).
Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Holt, 1970).
Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coasts: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2020).
David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019).
Alaina Roberts, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).
Mary Crow Dog / Richard Erdoes, Lakota Woman (New York: Grove Press,1990).
Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
Michael John Witgren, Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America, (Williamsburg: Omohundra Institute of Early American History and Culture, and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022).
Tiya Miles, The Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).
Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021).
Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
Recommended by Graduate Students
- Farina King, The Earth Memory Compass: Diné Landscapes and Education in the Twentieth Century. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2018).
Daniel Cobb, M. Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008).
Clint Carroll, Roots of Our Renewal: Ethnobotany and Cherokee Environmental Governance. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Traci Lynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).