The Dine have been a pastoral people for as long as they can remember; but when livestock reductions in the New Deal era forced many into the labor market, some scholars felt that Navajo culture would inevitably decline. Although they lost a great deal with the waning of their sheep-centered economy, Colleen O'Neill argues that Navajo culture persisted. O'Neill's book challenges the conventional notion that the introduction of market capitalism necessarily leads to the destruction of native cultural values. She shows instead that contact with new markets provided the Navajos with ways to diversify their household-based survival strategies. Through adapting to new kinds of work, Navajos actually participated in the "reworking of modernity" in their region, weaving an alternate, culturally specific history of capitalist development. O'Neill chronicles a history of Navajo labor that illuminates how cultural practices and values influenced what it meant to work for wages or to produce commodities for the marketplace. Through accounts of Navajo coal miners, weavers, and those who left the reservation in search of wage work, she explores the tension between making a living the Navajo way and "working elsewhere." Focusing on the period between the 1930s and the early 1970s-a time when Navajos saw a dramatic transformation of their economy—O'Neill shows that Navajo cultural values were flexible enough to accommodate economic change. She also examines the development of a Navajo working class after 1950, when corporate development of Navajo mineral resources created new sources of wage work and allowed former migrant workers to remain on the reservation. Focusing on the household rather than the workplace, O'Neill shows how the Navajo home serves as a site of cultural negotiation and a source for affirming identity. Her depiction of weaving particularly demonstrates the role of women as cultural arbitrators, providing mothers with cultural power that kept them at the center of what constituted "Navajo-ness." Ultimately, Working the Navajo Way offers a new way to think about Navajo history, shows the essential resilience of Navajo lifeways, and argues for a more dynamic understanding of Native American culture overall.

""This book is a lively and accessible account of the remarkably complex legal and political situation of American Indian tribes and tribal citizens (who are also U.S. citizens) David E. Wilkins and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark have provided the g̀o-to' source for a clear yet detailed and sophisticated introduction to tribal soverignty and federal Indian policy. It is a valuable resource both for readers unfamiliar with the subject matter and for readers in Native American studies and related fields, who will appreciate the insightful and original scholarly analysis of the authors."--Thomas Biolsi, University of California at Berkeley" ""American Indian Politics and the American Political System is simply an indispensable compendium of fact and reason on the historical and modern landscape of American Indian law and policy. No teacher or student of American Indian studies, no policymaker in American Indian policy, and no observer of American Indian history and law should do without this book. There is nothing in the field remotely as comprehensive, usable, and balanced as Wilkins and Stark's work."--Matthew L.M. Fletcher, director of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University College of Law" ""Wilkins has written the first general study of contemporary Indians in the United States from the disciplinary standpoint of political science. His inclusion of legal matters results in sophisticated treatment of many contemporary issues involving Native American governments and the government of the United States and gives readers a good background for understanding other questions. The writing is clear-not a minor matter in such a complex subject--and short case histories are presented, plus links (including websites) to many sources of information."--Choice

This ground-breaking work develops theories and methods of analyzing the United States' domination of Native Americans through a study of the Lakota society known as the Sioux Nation of Indians. Two centuries of struggle between nations and cultures during the U.S. expansion over North America are described utilizing policy (BIA) and cross-cultural (US-Lakota) history, with insightful additions to understanding the Tetonwan-Sioux. Contributing new forms of analysis to the study of attempted domination and destruction of Native American societies, the author explores the concept of culturicide in relation to theories of genocide and cultural domination. He links resistance by traditionalists and activists to cultural survival in charts of U.S. and Lakota policies and counter-policies. The study provides maps to identify struggles over land, and shows how social institutions have been used to attack Lakota culture. The author provides documented recent events to illustrate contemporary Lakota social life, often from an insider's point of view. The work provides a framework for understanding similar conflicts for other Native Nations. Also includes maps. James Fenelon is Dakota/Lakota, and is Assistant Professor of Sociology at John Carroll University. Bibliography. Index.

This book demonstrates that Immanuel Wallerstein's reluctance to apply core and periphery to precapitalist transformations is a product of the way he views the luxury trade. It utilizes the study of different kinds of world-systems to explore how logics of social reproduction become transformed.

This book addresses for the first time in a comprehensive way the place of Native American studies in the university curriculum.--Provided by publisher.

A reference surveying the major concerns, findings, and terms of social history. The coverage includes major categories within social history (family, demographic transition, multiculturalism, industrialization, nationalism); major aspects of life for which social history has provided a crucial per

Author David La Vere offers a complete chronological and cultural history of Texas Indians from twelve thousand years ago to the present day. He presents a unique view of their cultural history before and after European arrival, examining Indian interactions-both peaceful and violent-with Europeans, Mexicans, Texans, and Americans.

A centerpiece of the New History of the American West, this book embodies the theme that, as succeeding groups have occupied the American West and shaped the land, they have done so without regard for present inhabitants. Like the cowboy herding the dogies, they have cared little about the cost their activities imposed on others; what has mattered is the immediate benefit they have derived from their transformation of the land. Drawing on a recent flowering of scholarship on the western environment, western gender relations, minority history, and urban and labor history, as well as on more traditional western sources, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own is about the creation of the region rather than the vanishing of the frontier. Richard White tells how the various parts of the West—its distinct environments, its metropolitan areas and vast hinterlands, the various ethnic and racial groups and classes—are held together by a series of historical relationships that are developed over time. Widespread aridity and a common geographical location between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean would have provided but weak regional ties if other stronger relationships had not been created. A common dependence on the deferral government and common roots in a largely extractive and service-based economy were formative influences on western states and territories. A dual labor system based on race and the existence of minority groups with distinctive legal status have helped further define the region. Patterns of political participation and political organization have proved enduring. Together, these relationships among people, and between people and place, have made the West a historical creation and a distinctive region. From Europeans contact and subsequent Anglo-American conquest, through the civil-rights movement, the energy crisis, and the current reconstructing of the national and world economies, the West has remained a distinctive section in a much larger nation. In the American imagination the West still embodies possibilities inherent in the vastness and beauty of the place itself. But, Richard White explains, the possibilities many imagined for themselves have yielded to the possibilities seized by others. Many who thought themselves cowboys have in the end turned out to be dogies.

In this groundbreaking book, the first Navajo to earn a doctorate in history seeks to rewrite Navajo history. Reared on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico and Arizona, Jennifer Nez Denetdale is the great-great-great-granddaughter of a well-known Navajo chief, Manuelito (1816Ð1894), and his nearly unknown wife, Juanita (1845Ð1910). Stimulated in part by seeing photographs of these ancestors, she began to explore her family history as a way of examining broader issues in Navajo historiography. Here she presents a thought-provoking examination of the construction of the history of the Navajo people (DinŽ, in the Navajo language) that underlines the dichotomy between Navajo and non-Navajo perspectives on the DinŽ past. Reclaiming DinŽ History has two primary objectives. First, Denetdale interrogates histories that privilege Manuelito and marginalize Juanita in order to demonstrate some of the ways that writing about the DinŽ has been biased by non-Navajo views of assimilation and gender. Second, she reveals how Navajo narratives, including oral histories and stories kept by matrilineal clans, serve as vehicles to convey Navajo beliefs and values. By scrutinizing stories about Juanita, she both underscores the centrality of womenÕs roles in Navajo society and illustrates how oral tradition has been used to organize social units, connect Navajos to the land, and interpret the past. She argues that these same stories, read with an awareness of Navajo creation narratives, reveal previously unrecognized Navajo perspectives on the past. And she contends that a similarly culture-sensitive re-viewing of the DinŽ can lead to the production of a Navajo-centered history.