Native American Science

Explore the enchanting world of Polynesian folklore in this beautiful collection of traditional stories. A woman falls in love with the king of the sharks. Two powerful sorcerers compete in a battle of magical wits. The king of Maui's fastest messenger races to bring a young woman back from the dead. In these traditional tales, the borders blur between life and death, reality and magic, and land and sea.

Ilarion Merculieff weaves the remarkable strands of his life and culture into a fascinating account that begins with his traditional Unangan (Aleut) upbringing on a remote island in the Bering Sea, through his immersion in both the Russian Orthodox Church and his tribe's holistic spiritual beliefs. He recounts his developing consciousness and call to leadership and describes his work of the past 30 years bringing together Western science and indigenous peoples' traditional knowledge and wisdom to address the most pressing issues of our time.

Climate change is today's news, but it isn't a new phenomenon. Centuries-long cycles of heating and cooling are well documented for Europe and the North Atlantic. These variations in climate, including the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), AD 900 to 1300, and the early centuries of the Little Ice Age (LIA), AD 1300 to 1600, had a substantial impact on the cultural history of Europe.

Two young sisters are taken from their home and family. Powerless to change their fortunes, they are separated, and each put into different foster homes. Yet over the years, the bond between them grows. As they each make their way in a society that is, at times, indifferent, hostile, and violent, one embraces her Métis identity, while the other tries to leave it behind. In the end, out of tragedy, comes an unexpected legacy of triumph and reclamation.

For decades, the singular and provocative paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman have featured a recurring character—an alter ego of sorts, a shape-shifting, time-travelling elemental being named Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Though we have glimpsed her across the years in films and on countless canvases, it is finally time to hear her story, in her own words. And, in doing so, to hear the whole history of Turtle Island anew.

When Europeans first arrived in North America, between five and eight million Indigenous people were already living there. But how did they come to be here? What were their agricultural, spiritual, and hunting practices? How did their societies evolve, and what challenges do they face today? Eminent historians Theda Perdue and Michael Green begin by describing how nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers followed the bison and woolly mammoth over the Bering land mass between Asia and what is now Alaska between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago, settling throughout North America.

This story has its beginnings on a day long ago when Earth rolled and heaved, and rocks fell like rain... Thus began what some today would call a “migration” of The Walking People. Leaderless and bereft of the shared knowledge of tradition, they set off on their journey. Their story is the story of how one particular group of human beings was able to start anew - to learn through difficulty and changing circumstance to prosper as a Whole People.

Long before state health care or food stamps, before the creation of welfare ghettoes in our major cities, America’s first experiment with socialism and government dependency practically destroyed the American Indian. Government experts created the Indian reservations. America’s churches whole-heartedly supported it, convinced the reservation would be the key to winning souls for Christianity.

Indigenomics in action—moving beyond Indian Act economics towards Indigenous economic sovereignty. In this groundbreaking new work, Carol Anne Hilton, author of the bestselling Indigenomics, explores the phenomenon of growing Indigenous economic power and sovereignty, achieved despite monumental historic injustices. The Indigenous economy in Canada is on track to exceed $100 billion. Yet full Indigenous participation at the economic table is still fundamentally lacking, due in large part to the inherently colonial and racist policies of the Indian Act.

In 2008, Daniel Richard Wolfe was awaiting trial on two counts of first-degree murder at the Regina Correctional Centre. This wasn't his first time in jail; from his teenage years his life had been marked by stints in and out of prison - with Danny sometimes finding his own way out. This time around, he was orchestrating his boldest move yet: a carefully plotted escape that would send the RCMP on a nationwide manhunt, launching Danny Wolfe to headline-topping notoriety.

Long before the indigenous people of southeastern North America first encountered Europeans and Africans, they established communities with clear social and political hierarchies and rich cultural traditions. Award-winning historian Gregory D. Smithers brings this world to life in Native Southerners, a sweeping narrative of American Indian history in the Southeast from the time before European colonialism to the Trail of Tears and beyond.

At a crucial and fragile moment in Canada's long history with Indigenous peoples, one of our most essential writers begins at the centre, capturing a web spanning centuries of community, art, and resistance. Based on years' worth of columns, Niigaan Sinclair delivers a defining essay collection on the resilience of Indigenous peoples. Here, we meet the creators, leaders, and everyday people preserving the beauty of their heritage one day at a time. But we also meet the ugliest side of colonialism, the Indian Act, and the communities who suffer most from its atrocities.

For over 100 years, thousands of Aboriginal children passed through the Canadian residential school system. Begun in the 1870s, it was intended, in the words of government officials, to bring these children into the “circle of civilization,” the results, however, were far different. More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse. Using previously unreleased government documents, historian John S. Milloy provides a full picture of the history and reality of the residential school system.

In the tradition of Calvino’s Italian Folktales, Greg Sarris, author of the award-winning novel Grand Avenue, turns his attention to his ancestral homeland of Sonoma Mountain in Northern California. In 16 interconnected original stories, the twin crows Question Woman and Answer Woman take us through a world unlike yet oddly reminiscent of our own: one that blooms bright with poppies, lupines, and clover; one in which Water Bug kidnaps an entire creek; in which songs have the power to enchant; in which Rain is a beautiful woman who keeps people’s memories in stones.

Back at home after their first adventure in the Barren Grounds, Eli and Morgan each struggle with personal issues: Eli is being bullied at school, and tries to hide it from Morgan, while Morgan has to make an important decision about her birth mother. They turn to the place where they know they can learn the most and make the journey to Misewa to visit their animal friends. This time they travel back in time and meet a young fisher who might just be their lost friend. But they discover that the village is once again in peril.

When a woman from the twenty-first century and a hunter from the 1700’s are thrown together in the most unlikely circumstance, there is sure to be mistrust, miscommunication, and mistaken identity. Tensions build when their paths repeatedly intersect as they race through time to secure the future of the sacred mountains in what is to become Yellowstone National Park. What will it take for them to let down their guards and see clearly the true enemy that is determined to keep them apart? Listen to find out more.

In the 13th century, Moundville was one of the largest Native American settlements north of Mexico. Spread over 325 acres were 29 earthen mounds arranged around a great plaza, a mile-long stockade, and dozens of dwellings for thousands of people. Moundville, in size and complexity second only to the Cahokia site in Illinois, was a heavily populated town as well as a political and religious center. Moundville was sustained by tribute of food and labor provided by the people who lived in the nearby floodplain as well as other smaller mound centers.

When Danielle Geller’s mother dies of alcohol withdrawal during an attempt to get sober, Geller returns to Florida and finds her mother’s life packed into eight suitcases. Most were filled with clothes, except for the last one, which contained diaries, photos, and letters, a few undeveloped disposable cameras, dried sage, jewelry, and the bandana her mother wore on days she skipped a hair wash. Geller, an archivist and a writer, uses these pieces of her mother’s life to try and understand her mother’s relationship to home, and their shared need to leave it.

A broad range of perspectives from natives and nonnatives makes this book the most complete account and analysis of the Lakota ghost dance ever published. A revitalization movement that swept across native communities of the West in the late 1880s, the ghost dance took firm hold among the Lakotas, perplexed and alarmed government agents, sparked the intervention of the US Army and culminated in the massacre of hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in December 1890.

On a winter morning in 1990, Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota picked up the Bismarck Tribune. On the front page, a small girl gazed into the distance, shedding a tear. The headline: Foster home children beaten - and nobody's helping. Dorgan, who had been working with American Indian tribes to secure resources, was distressed. He flew to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation to meet with five-year-old Tamara and her grandfather. They became friends. Then she disappeared. And he would search for her for decades until they finally found each other again.