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The book explores the history of rape and sex trafficking in North America, and provides historical and contemporary examples of federal complicity in the high rate of rape committed against Native women. The book considers a wide range of colonial violence, including rape, sex trafficking, and incarceration, Deer explores how tribal nations and anti-rape activists can leverage the tribal self-determination efforts of the 21^st century to end violence against women. Deer bridges the gap between Indian law and feminist theory by explaining how intersectional approaches are vital to addressing the rape of Native women. The book offers specific recommendations for tribal legal reform and concludes with a consideration of how to document success.

Being Together in Place explores the landscapes that convene Native and non-Native people into sustained and difficult negotiations over their radically different interests. Using ethnographic research and a geographic perspective, this book shows activists in three sites learning how to articulate and defend their intrinsic and life-supportive ways of being—particularly to those who are intent on damaging these places.

In 1970 the Nixon administration inaugurated a new era in federal Indian policy. No more would the U.S. government seek to deny and displace Native peoples or dismantle Native governments; from now on federal policy would promote “the Indian’s sense of autonomy without threatening his sense of community.” This book offers a telling perspective on what such a policy of self-determination has meant and looks at how contemporary queer Native writers use representations of sensation to challenge official U.S. accounts of Native identity. The book focuses on four Native writers—Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee), Deborah Miranda (Esselen), Greg Sarris (Graton Rachería), and Chrystos (Menominee)—approaching their fiction and poetry as forms of political theory. The book shows how the work of these queer or two-spirit Native writers affirms the significance of the erotic as an exercise of individual and community sovereignty. In this way, we come to see how their work contests the homophobic, sexist, and exclusivist policies and attitudes of tribal communities as well as those of the nation-state.

With a new and more inclusive perspective for the growing field of queer Native studies, this book provides a genealogy of queer Native writing after Stonewall. Looking across a broad range of literature, the text offers an overview and guide to queer Native literature from its rise in the 1970s to the present day. This book recovers ties between two simultaneous renaissances of the late twentieth century: queer literature and Native American literature. It foregrounds how Indigeneity intervenes within and against dominant interpretations of queer genders and sexualities, recovering unfamiliar texts from the 1970s while presenting fresh, cogent readings of well-known works. In juxtaposing the work of Native authors—including the longtime writer-activist Paula Gunn Allen, the first contemporary queer Native writer Maurice Kenny, the poet Janice Gould, the novelist Louise Erdrich, and the filmmakers Sherman Alexie, Thomas Bezucha, and Jorge Manuel Manzano—with the work of queer studies scholars, the book proposes resourceful interventions in foundational concepts in queer studies while also charting new directions for queer Native studies.

The forty years of American Indian literature taken up in this book—the decades between 1920 and 1960—have been called politically and intellectually moribund. On the contrary, this book identifies a group of American Indian writers who share an interest in the revolutionary potential of the indigenous peoples of Mexico—and whose work demonstrates a surprisingly assertive literary politics in the era. By contextualizing this group of American Indian authors in the work of their contemporaries, this book reveals how the literary history of this period is far more rich and nuanced than is generally acknowledged. The writers it focuses on—Todd Downing (Choctaw), Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), and D’Arcy McNickle (Confederated Salish and Kootenai)—are shown to be on par with writers of the preceding Progressive and the succeeding Red Power and Native American literary renaissance eras. Arguing that American Indian literary history of this period actually coheres in exciting ways with the literature of the Native American literary renaissance, the book repudiates the intellectual and political border that has emerged between the two eras.

Elizabeth Hoover takes us deep into Akwesasne—an indigenous community in upstate New York—the remarkable community that partnered with scientists and developed grassroots programs to fight the contamination of its lands and reclaim its health and culture. This moving book is essential reading for anyone interested in Native Americans, social justice, and the pollutants contaminating our food, water, and bodies.

Settler Common Sense considers how writings by several canonical mid-nineteenth-century authors that are not “about” Indians still participate in processes of settler colonialism. More than focusing on the ways Native peoples are treated and imagined by non-natives, the book illustrates how the legal concepts, practices, and geographies developed in claiming Native lands and displacing Native peoples live on in the everyday lives of non-natives even when political struggles with Native peoples seem to be of the past. Rifkin shows how authors implicitly draw on such ongoing histories as the background for offering queer critiques of state policy. While displacing the nuclear family and engaging with forms of desire and family-formation that would have been understood as deviant, these writers all imagine a kind of place to which one might flee that allows one to exist beyond government influence – a space in which one can discover and experiment with more democratic ways of being in the world. However, those very spaces become available for such imaginative investment as a result of displacing Indigenous sovereignties, treating the “domestic” space of the nation as self-evident despite the persistence of Native peoples and claims. Unlike existing work that focuses on representations of Native peoples, Settler Common Sense emphasizes how the imperial incorporation of Native lands into the U.S. nation-state shapes everyday non-native perception, experience, and ethics.

Explaining how relational distinctions of “Native” and “settler” define the status of being “queer,” this book argues that modern queer subjects emerged among Natives and non-Natives by engaging the meaningful difference indigeneity makes within a settler society. The book’s analysis exposes white settler colonialism as a primary condition for the development of modern queer politics in the United States. Bringing together historical and ethnographic cases, it shows how U.S. queer projects became non-Native and normatively white by comparatively examining the historical activism and critical theory of Native queer and Two-Spirit people. Presenting a “biopolitics of settler colonialism”—in which the imagined disappearance of indigeneity and sustained subjugation of all racialized peoples ensures a progressive future for white settlers—this text demonstrates the interdependence of nation, race, gender, and sexuality and offers opportunities for resistance in the United States.

This book provides the first history of the AIM survival schools, two alternative, culture-based, community-controlled schools founded by American Indian Movement organizers and other Indian parents in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in 1972. It tells a compelling story of the schools’ origins, structure, curriculum, evolution, closing, impact, and meanings from 1968 to 2008. Davis explains how the survival schools emerged out of AIM’s local activism in education, child welfare, and juvenile justice and its efforts to achieve self-determination over urban Indian institutions. At the Heart of the Earth School in Minneapolis and the Red School House in St. Paul, AIM organizers and other local Indian people worked to nurture the identity development of Native youth through an educational system grounded in traditional Indigenous knowledge, infused with social consciousness, galvanized by political action, and anchored by a commitment to community. Over time, the schools themselves would become a center for Indigenous community in the Twin Cities and the upper Midwest region. Davis argues that the people of the survival schools practiced Indigenous decolonization. They resisted American settler colonialism’s “logic of elimination” by repairing the losses incurred through past assimilation policies and rejecting the ongoing assimilationist imperative at work in post-World War Two urban society. Survival school educators also contributed to the transnational Indigenous decolonization movement by restoring connections to individual and collective Indigenous identities; rebuilding Native family and community structures; and revitalizing Indigenous languages, cultural knowledge, and spiritual systems.

Wastelanding tells the history of the uranium industry on Navajo land in the U.S. Southwest, asking why certain landscapes and the peoples who inhabit them come to be targeted for disproportionate exposure to environmental harm. Uranium mines and mills on the Navajo Nation land have long supplied U.S. nuclear weapons and energy programs. By 1942, mines on the reservation were the main source of uranium for the top-secret Manhattan Project. Today, the Navajo Nation is home to more than a thousand abandoned uranium sites. Radiation-related diseases are endemic, claiming the health and lives of former miners and nonminers alike. Traci Brynne Voyles argues that the presence of uranium mining on Diné (Navajo) land constitutes a clear case of environmental racism. Looking at discursive constructions of landscapes, she explores how environmental racism develops over time. For Voyles, the “wasteland,” where toxic materials are excavated, exploited, and dumped, is both a racial and a spatial signifier that renders an environment and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable. Because environmental inequality is inherent in the way industrialism operates, the wasteland is the “other” through which modern industrialism is established. In examining the history of wastelanding in Navajo country, Voyles provides “an environmental justice history” of uranium mining, revealing how just as “civilization” has been defined on and through “savagery,” environmental privilege is produced by portraying other landscapes as marginal, worthless, and pollutable.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, North American Indian leaders commonly signed treaties with the European powers and the American and Canadian governments with an X, signifying their presence and assent to the terms. These x-marks indicated coercion (because the treaties were made under unfair conditions), resistance (because they were often met with protest), and acquiescence (to both a European modernity and the end of a particular moment of Indian history and identity). This book explores the complexity of contemporary Indian identity and current debates among Indians about traditionalism, nationalism, and tribalism. Employing the x-mark as a metaphor for what it calls the “Indian assent to the new,” the book offers a valuable alternative to both imperialist concepts of assimilation and nativist notions of resistance, calling into question the binary oppositions produced during the age of imperialism and maintaining that indigeneity is something that people do, not what they are. Drawing on personal experiences and family history on the Leech Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota, discourses embedded in Ojibwemowin (the Ojibwe language), and disagreements about Indian identity within Native American studies, the text contends that Indians should be able to choose nontraditional ways of living, thinking, and being without fear of being condemned as inauthentic.