A Select Reading List for National Native American Heritage Month

11/23/2020 | | American History & Studies, Native American Studies

In observance of National Native American Heritage Month, Penn Press has assembled a select reading list of our titles that highlight the contributions, struggles, and cultural and historical legacy of the original inhabitants of what is now known as the United States and their descendants.

 

Voting in Indian CountryVoting in Indian Country: The View from the Trenches
Jean Reith Schroedel
Voting in Indian Country uses conflicts over voting rights to understand the centuries-long fight for Native self-determination, using ethnographic data and weaving together history, politics, and law to provide a robust view of this often-ignored struggle for social justice.

Lenape CountryLenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn
Jean R. Soderlund
The first comprehensive account of the Lenape Indians and their encounters with European settlers before Pennsylvania’s founding, Lenape Country places Native culture at the center of this part of North America.

Delaware's Forgotten FolkDelaware’s Forgotten Folk: The Story of the Moors and Nanticokes
C. A. Weslager
Photographs by L. T. Alexander
Drawings by John Swientochowski
C. A. Weslager’s Delaware’s Forgotten Folk chronicles the history of the Nanticoke Indians and the Cheswold Moors, from John Smith’s first encounter with the Nanticokes along the Kuskakarawaok River in 1608, to the struggles faced by these uniquely multiracial communities amid the racial and social tensions of mid-twentieth-century America.

The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the SkyThe Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft
Edited by Robert Dale Parker
This book brings to the public for the first time the complete writings of the first known American Indian literary writer, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (her English name) or Bamewawagezhikaquay (her Ojibwe name), Woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky (1800–1842).

Changing is Not VanishingChanging Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930
Edited by Robert Dale Parker
Changing Is Not Vanishing reinvents the history of American Indian literature and American poetry by uncovering a vast but forgotten archive of early American Indian poems. The book includes work by 82 writers and a full bibliography of poems by more than 140 Indian writers who wrote before 1930.

Seneca PossessedSeneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic
Matthew Dennis
Seneca Possessed explores how the Seneca people and their homeland were “possessed”—culturally, spiritually, materially, and legally—in the wake of the American Revolution.