This fascinating rediscovery of Josephine Foard highlights her work at Laguna Pueblo beginning in 1899 and her efforts to improve and market pueblo pottery for the Lagunas' economic benefit.

The distinguished American Indian photographer Lee Marmon has documented over sixty years of Laguna history: its people, customs, and cultural changes. Here more than one hundred of Marmon’s photos showcase his talents while highlighting the cohesive, adaptive, and independent character of the Laguna people. Along with Marmon’s own oral history of the tribe and his family photos dating back to 1872, Tom Corbett presents archival images and historical research, making this the most complete published history of any southwestern pueblo. Marmon and Corbett also interviewed noted tribal elders and oral historians regarding customs, religious practices, and events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The resulting narrative provides a fascinating story of survival through severe natural and man-made adversities, including droughts, plagues, marauding tribes, and cultural invasion. Through it all, Laguna has preserved its culture and retained sovereign powers over the pueblo and its territory.

Over five centuries of foreign rule—by Spain, Mexico, and the United States—Native American pueblos have confronted attacks on their sovereignty and encroachments on their land and water rights. How five New Mexico and Texas pueblos did this, in some cases multiple times, forms the history of cultural resilience and tenacity chronicled in Pueblo Sovereignty by two of New Mexico’s most distinguished legal historians, Malcolm Ebright and Rick Hendricks. Extending their award-winning work Four Square Leagues, Ebright and Hendricks focus here on four New Mexico Pueblo Indian communities—Pojoaque, Nambe, Tesuque, and Isleta—and one now in Texas, Ysleta del Sur. The authors trace the complex tangle of conflicting jurisdictions and laws these pueblos faced when defending their extremely limited land and water resources. The communities often met such challenges in court and, sometimes, as in the case of Tesuque Pueblo in 1922, took matters into their own hands. Ebright and Hendricks describe how—at times aided by appointed Spanish officials, private lawyers, priests, and Indian agents—each pueblo resisted various non-Indian, institutional, and legal pressures; and how each suffered defeat in the Court of Private Land Claims and the Pueblo Lands Board, only to assert its sovereignty again and again. Although some of these defenses led to stunning victories, all five pueblos experienced serious population declines. Some were even temporarily abandoned. That all have subsequently seen a return to their traditions and ceremonies, and ultimately have survived and thrived, is a testimony to their resilience. Their stories, documented here in extraordinary detail, are critical to a complete understanding of the history of the Pueblos and of the American Southwest.

River-cane baskets woven by the Chitimachas of south Louisiana are universally admired for their beauty and workmanship. Recounting friendships that Chitimacha weaver Christine Paul (1874–1946) sustained with two non-Native women at different parts of her life, this book offers a rare vantage point into the lives of American Indians in the segregated South. Mary Bradford (1869–1954) and Caroline Dormon (1888–1971) were not only friends of Christine Paul; they were also patrons who helped connect Paul and other Chitimacha weavers with buyers for their work. Daniel H. Usner uses Paul’s letters to Bradford and Dormon to reveal how Indian women, as mediators between their own communities and surrounding outsiders, often drew on accumulated authority and experience in multicultural negotiation to forge new relationships with non-Indian women. Bradford’s initial interest in Paul was philanthropic, while Dormon’s was anthropological. Both certainly admired the artistry of Chitimacha baskets. For her part, Paul saw in Bradford and Dormon opportunities to promote her basketry tradition and expand a network of outsiders sympathetic to her tribe’s vulnerability on many fronts. As Usner explores these friendships, he touches on a range of factors that may have shaped them, including class differences, racial attitudes, and shared ideals of womanhood. The result is an engaging story of American Indian livelihood, identity, and self-determination.

A New Deal for Navajo Weaving provides a detailed history of early to mid-twentieth-century Diné weaving projects by non-Natives who sought to improve the quality and marketability of Navajo weaving but in so doing failed to understand the cultural significance of weaving and its role in the lives of Diné women. By the 1920s the durability and market value of Diné weavings had declined dramatically. Indian welfare advocates established projects aimed at improving the materials and techniques. Private efforts served as models for federal programs instituted by New Deal administrators. Historian Jennifer McLerran details how federal officials developed programs such as the Southwest Range and Sheep Breeding Laboratory at Fort Wingate in New Mexico and the Navajo Arts and Crafts Guild. Other federal efforts included the publication of Native natural dye recipes; the publication of portfolios of weaving designs to guide artisans; and the education of consumers through the exhibition of weavings, aiding them in their purchases and cultivating an upscale market. McLerran details how government officials sought to use these programs to bring the Diné into the national economy; instead, these federal tactics were ineffective because they marginalized Navajo women and ignored the important role weaving plays in the resilience and endurance of wider Diné culture.

When this book first appeared in 1996, it was “Pottery 101,” a basic introduction to the subject. It served as an art book, a history book, and a reference book, but also fun to read, beautiful to look at, and filled with good humor and good sense. After twenty years of faithful service, it’s been expanded and brought up-to-date with photographs of more than 1,600 pots from more than 1,600 years. It shows every pottery-producing group in the Southwest, complete with maps that show where each group lives. Now updated, rewritten, and re-photographed, it's a comprehensive study as well as a basic introduction to the art.

List of charter members of the society: v. 1, p. 98-99.

Reproduction of the original: The Indian Today by Charles A. Eastman