Currently, there are three approaches to studying American Indians: from how white Americans approach Indian studies, from the dynamics or exchange of Indian-white relations and from the Indian point of view. Donald Fixico, an American Indian, has been teaching and writing history for a quarter of a century. This book is the direct result of his experience as a scholar who 'thinks like an Indian' in an academic environment created predominantly by non-Indian thinkers. This book addresses current approaches to studying Native American traditional knowledge and acknowledges an Indian intellectualism that has up until now been ignored in studying Native American history. Written primarily from inside the Native world, but fully cognizant of the American cultures outside of that world, his unique voice speaks to a need for understanding the interior Native world: a world in which linear thinking is atypical and circularity is preferable.

For centuries American Indians and the Irish experienced assaults by powerful, expanding states, along with massive land loss and population collapse. In the early nineteenth century the U.S. government, acting through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), began a systematic campaign to assimilate Indians. Initially dependent on Christian missionary societies, the BIA later built and ran its own day schools and boarding schools for Indian children. At the same time, the British government established a nationwide elementary school system in Ireland, overseen by the commissioners of national education, to assimilate the Irish. By the 1920s, as these campaigns of cultural transformation were ending, roughly similar proportions of Indian and Irish children attended state-regulated schools. In the first full comparison of American and British government attempts to assimilate “problem peoples” through mass elementary education, Michael C. Coleman presents a complex and fascinating portrait of imperialism at work in the two nations. Drawing on autobiographies, government records, elementary school curricula, and other historical documents, as well as photographs and maps, Coleman conveys a rich personal sense of what it was like to have been a pupil at a school where one’s language was not spoken and one’s local culture almost erased. In absolute terms the campaigns failed, yet the schools deeply changed Indian and Irish peoples in ways unpredictable both to them and to their educators. Meticulously researched and engaging, American Indians, the Irish, and Government Schooling sets the agenda for a new era of comparative analyses in global indigenous studies.

"American Indians in the Early West ranges from the development of American Indian communities and the first migrations, to the arrival of the European and Russian settlers, to the appearance of Anglo-American traders in the West around 1800. Readers will see that many of the issues arising during this two-and-a-half century period are ones that remain relevant to Native Americans today - political autonomy, preserving traditions, land and water rights, and resisting the intrusions of non-Indian sovereigns, including the newly independent United States." "There is no way to understand the American West - past, present, and future - without understanding the unique perspectives of the incredible variety of its peoples."--Jacket.

This book gives an in-depth literary history focusing on the lives and works of five major Native American authors: John Rollin Ridge, Sarah Winnemucca, Simon Pokagon, Alexander Lawrence Posey, and Charles Alexander Eastman. Their writings, produced in an era characterized by severe cultural oppression, are not only milestones in the evolution of early Native American literature but also comprise a significant contribution to American letters. The literary bequest of the authors covered in this book openly contests the perennial stereotype of the - Vanishing Indian."

Material culture is something we can touch and can be touched by. It is simultaneously concrete artefacts and expression of values produced and shared by humans. But what is modern material culture like? Material culture has always played an essential role in ethnological studies. The object of ethnological study has been the culture itself, the life reflected in things and artefacts, and the beliefs that lie behind the material. But like the definitions of subjects and concepts, the very meaning of material culture in modern ethnology is manifold and therefore needs to be considered continuously and repeatedly anew. This book discusses material culture from various viewpoints, such as museums, everyday life and consuming. The focus is on modern things from honeymoon mementoes to sweaters and summer cottages. Articles are based on the papers presented in the IX Finnish-Hungarian Symposium on Ethnology which was held in Jyv�skyl�, Finland on 24 to 27 August 2006.