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Nujeen: One Girl's Journey from War-Torn Syria in a Wheelchair
By Christina Lamb, Nujeen Mustafa. 2016
Prize-winning journalist and the co-author of smash New York Times bestseller I Am Malala, Christina Lamb, now tells the inspiring…
true story of another remarkable young hero: Nujeen Mustafa, a teenager born with cerebral palsy, whose harrowing journey from war-ravaged Syria to Germany in a wheelchair is a breathtaking tale of fortitude, grit, and hope that lends a face to the greatest humanitarian issue of our time, the Syrian refugee crisis.For millions around the globe, sixteen-year-old Nujeen Mustafa embodies the best of the human spirit. Confined to a wheelchair because of her cerebral palsy and denied formal schooling in Syria because of her illness, Nujeen taught herself English by watching American soap operas. When her small town became the epicenter of the brutal fight between ISIS militants and US-backed Kurdish troops in 2014, she and her family were forced to flee.Despite her physical limitations, Nujeen embarked on the arduous trek to safety and a new life. The grueling sixteen-month odyssey by foot, boat, and bus took her across Turkey and the Mediterranean to Greece, through Macedonia to Serbia and Hungary, and finally, to Germany. Yet, in spite of the tremendous physical hardship she endured, Nujeen's extraordinary optimism never wavered. Refusing to give in to despair or see herself as a passive victim, she kept her head high. As she told a BBC reporter, "You should fight to get what you want in this world."Nujeen's positivity and resolve infuses this unforgettable story of one young woman determined to make a better life for herself. Told by acclaimed British foreign correspondent Christina Lamb, Nujeen is a unique and powerful memoir that gives voice to the Syrian refugee crisis, helping us to understand that the world must change--and offering the inspiration to make that change reality.Mohawks on the Nile explores the absorbing history of sixty Aboriginal men who left their occupations in the Ottawa River…
timber industry to participate in a military expedition on the Nile River in 1884-1885. Chosen becuase of their outstanding skills as boatmen and river pilots, they formed part of the Canadian Voyageur Contingent, which transported British troops on a fleet of whaleboats through the Nile’s treacherous cataracts in the hard campaigning of the Sudan War. Their objective was to reach Khartoum, capital of the Egyptian province of Sudan. Their mission was to save its governor general, Major-General Charles Gordon, besieged by Muslim forces inspired by the call to liberate Sudan from foreign control by Muhammad Ahmad, better known to his followers as the "the Mahdi." In addition to Carl Benn’s historical exploration of this remarkable subject, this book includes the memoirs of two Mohawk veterans of the campaign, Louis Jackson and James Deer, who recorded the details of their adventures upon returning to Canada in 1885. It also presents readers with additional period documents, maps, historical images, and other materials to enhance appreciation of this unusual story, including an annotated roll of the Mohawks who won praise for the exceptional quality of their work in this legendary campaign in the chronicle of Britain’s expansion into Africa.End-of-Earth People: The Arctic Sahtu Dene
By Bern Will Brown. 2014
A history of the "End-of-Earth" Native people of Canada’s far-North Sahtu region. Bern Will Brown, noted northern author, artist, photographer,…
and respected community leader living in Colville Lake, Northwest Territories, provides new insights and perspectives on the Sahtu Dene, the people referred to as the "Hareskin" in Alexander Mackenzie’s 1793 journal. Having lived among them for over sixty years and as a speaker of their dialect, Brown is well positioned to provide an adventure in history and culture rooted in the Hareskin traditional way of life. End-of-Earth People, his latest contribution and a valuable record of the North, is a portrait of a people Brown has come to know in ways that anthropologists and ethnologists can only envy.Moose to Moccasins: The Story of Ka Kita Wa Pa No Kwe
By Madeline Katt Theriault. 2006
Having been born in a tent on Bear Island, Lake Temagami, in 1908, Madeline Katt Theriault could recall an earlier…
independent and traditional First Nations lifestyle. In this book, the late author proudly tells of her youth and coming of age by sharing her vivid memories and drawing on exceptional old family photographs. In her own words, she writes of a time long ago – a time that was difficult, but not without personal rewards. "Moose to Moccasins is a remarkable account by Madeline Theriault, or Ka Kita Wa Pa No Kwe (’Wise Day Woman’), who, in her own words, has lived ’in both cultures, Indian and white man’s.’ From her birth in the Temagami region in 1908, to her life in North Bay in the 1970s and 1980s, she takes the reader on a remarkable journey. We travel through the bush with her as a young girl. ’We killed animals only when needed and we could drink water anywhere. Our camp was always fresh; fresh balsam branches for our beds and floors in the camp. Such lively smells and the air was pure.’ We step back into another century, into another universe. There is a wealth of information in these pages about a people, and a way of life, about which most non-Natives know almost nothing." – Donald B. Smith, Professor of History, University of Calgary"Defining Métis" examines categories used in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Catholic missionaries to describe Indigenous people…
in what is now northwestern Saskatchewan. It argues that the construction and evolution of these categories reflected missionaries’changing interests and agendas. "Defining Métis" sheds light on the earliest phases of Catholic missionary work among Indigenous peoples in western and northern Canada. It examines various interrelated aspects of this work, including the beginnings of residential schooling, transportation and communications, and relations between the Church, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the federal government. While focusing on the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and their central mission at Île-à-la-Crosse, this study illuminates broad processes that informed Catholic missionary perceptions and impelled their evolution over a fifty-three-year period. In particular, this study illuminates processes that shaped Oblate conceptions of sauvage and métis. It does this through a qualitative analysis of documents that were produced within the Oblates’ institutional apparatus – official correspondence, mission journals, registers, and published reports. Foran challenges the orthodox notion that Oblate commentators simply discovered and described a singular, empirically existing, and readily identifiable Métis population. Rather, he contends that Oblates played an important role in the conceptual production of les métis.Smoke Signals: The Native Takeback of North America's Tobacco Industry
By Jim Poling. 2012
A compelling look at tobacco’s uses and abuses from its Native origins to today’s controversies. When Europeans discovered tobacco among…
Amerindians in the New World, it became a long-sought panacea of panaceas, the critical ingredient in enemas, ointments, syrups, and powders employed to treat everything from syphilis to cancer. Almost five centuries passed before medical researchers concluded that tobacco is unhealthy and can cause cancer.Smoke Signals follows tobacco from its origins in South America’s Andes through its checkered history as a "miracle cure," powerful addictive and poison, friend of government revenue departments, and enemy of law enforcement directed at contraband and tax diversion. Author Jim Poling, Sr., traces tobacco’s sacredness among Natives, notably how the modern substance has changed Native lives, sometimes for the good, often for the bad, explores how the coffers of governments, now so dependent on tobacco revenue, will be affected if the plant’s commercial use is eliminated, and examines how Native traditions, including tobacco as a holy herb, might survive in modern society and strengthen Natives.Sounding Thunder: The Stories of Francis Pegahmagabow
By Brian D. Mcinnes, Waubgeshig Rice. 2016
Francis Pegahmagabow (1889–1952), a member of the Ojibwe nation, was born in Shawanaga, Ontario. Enlisting at the onset of the…
First World War, he became the most decorated Canadian Indigenous soldier for bravery and the most accomplished sniper in North American military history. After the war, Pegahmagabow settled in Wasauksing, Ontario. He served his community as both chief and councillor and belonged to the Brotherhood of Canadian Indians, an early national Indigenous political organization. Francis proudly served a term as Supreme Chief of the National Indian Government, retiring from office in 1950. Francis Pegahmagabow’s stories describe many parts of his life and are characterized by classic Ojibwe narrative. They reveal aspects of Francis’s Anishinaabe life and worldview. Interceding chapters by Brian McInnes provide valuable cultural, spiritual, linguistic, and historic insights that give a greater context and application for Francis’s words and world. Presented in their original Ojibwe as well as in English translation, the stories also reveal a rich and evocative relationship to the lands and waters of Georgian Bay. In "Sounding Thunder", Brian McInnes provides new perspective on Pegahmagabow and his experience through a unique synthesis of Ojibwe oral history, historical record, and Pegahmagabow family stories.From the Tundra to the Trenches
By Thibault Martin, Eddy Weetaltuk, Isabelle St. Amand. 2016
“My name is Weetaltuk; Eddy Weetaltuk. My Eskimo tag name is E9-422.” So begins From the "Tundra to the Trenches."…
Weetaltuk means “innocent eyes” in Inuktitut, but to the Canadian government, he was known as E9-422: E for Eskimo, 9 for his community, 422 to identify Eddy. In 1951, Eddy decided to leave James Bay. Because Inuit weren’t allowed to leave the North, he changed his name and used this new identity to enlist in the Canadian Forces: Edward Weetaltuk, E9-422, became Eddy Vital, SC-17515, and headed off to fight in the Korean War. In 1967, after fifteen years in the Canadian Forces, Eddy returned home. He worked with Inuit youth struggling with drug and alcohol addiction, and, in 1974, started writing his life’s story. This compelling memoir traces an Inuk’s experiences of world travel and military service. Looking back on his life, Weetaltuk wanted to show young Inuit that they can do and be what they choose. From the Tundra to the Trenches is the fourth book in the First Voices, First Texts series, which publishes lost or underappreciated texts by Indigenous writers. This new English edition of Eddy Weetaltuk’s memoir includes a foreword and appendix by Thibault Martin and an introduction by Isabelle St-Amand.A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System
By John S. Milloy, Mary Jane Mccallum. 1999
“I am going to tell you how we are treated. I am always hungry.” — Edward B., a student at…
Onion Lake School (1923) "[I]f I were appointed by the Dominion Government for the express purpose of spreading tuberculosis, there is nothing finer in existance that the average Indian residential school.” — N. Walker, Indian Affairs Superintendent (1948) 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. He begins by tracing the ideological roots of the system, and follows the paper trail of internal memoranda, reports from field inspectors, and letters of complaint. In the early decades, the system grew without planning or restraint. Despite numerous critical commissions and reports, it persisted into the 1970s, when it transformed itself into a social welfare system without improving conditions for its thousands of wards. A National Crime shows that the residential system was chronically underfunded and often mismanaged, and documents in detail and how this affected the health, education, and well-being of entire generations of Aboriginal children."A Report of an Inquiry into an Injustice" chronicles Peter Kulchyski’s experiences with the Begade Shutagot’ine, a small community of…
a few hundred people living in and around Tulita (formerly Fort Norman), on the Mackenzie River in the heart of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Despite their formal objections and boycott of the agreement, the band and their lands were included in the Sahtu Treaty, a modern comprehensive land claims agreement negotiated between the Government of Canada and the Sahtu Tribal Council, representing Dene and Metis peoples of the region. While both Treaty 11 (1921) and the Sahtu Treaty (1994) purport to extinguish Begade Shutagot'ine Aboriginal title, oral history and documented attempts to exclude themselves from treaty strongly challenge the validity of that extinguishment. Structured as a series of briefs to an inquiry into the Begade Shutagot’ine’s claim, this manuscript documents the negotiation and implementation of the Sahtu Treaty and amasses evidence of historical and continued presence and land use to make eminently clear that the Begade Shutagot'ine are the continued owners of the land by law: they have not extinguished title to their traditional territories; they continue to exercise their customs, practices, and traditions on those territories; and they have a fundamental right to be consulted on, and refuse or be compensated for, development projects on those territories. Kulchyski bears eloquent witness to the Begade Shutagot'ine people's two-decade struggle for land rights, which have been blatantly ignored by federal and territorial authorities for too long.Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada
By J R Miller. 2000
Highly acclaimed when the first edition appeared in 1989, "Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens" is the first comprehensive account of Indian-white…
relations throughout Canada's history. J.R. Miller charts the deterioration of the relationship from the initial, mutually beneficial contact in the fur trade to the current impasse in which Indians are resisting displacement and marginalization.This new edition is the result of substantial revision to incorporate current scholarship and bring the text up to date. It includes new material on the North, and reflects changes brought about by the Oka crisis, the sovereignty issue, and the various court decisions of the 1990s. It also includes new material on residential schools, treaty making, and land claims.Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma
By Circe Sturm. 2002
In a contribution to contemporary debates over race and identity, an anthropologist examines the meaning of blood in the Cherokee…
nation as a symbolic and literal tool for determining who's a "real" Cherokee. Includes an insightful look at the conflicts over black Cherokees' membership on the tribal rolls.Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America
By David J. Silverman. 2010
New England Indians created the multitribal Brothertown and Stockbridge communities during the eighteenth century with the intent of using Christianity…
and civilized reforms to cope with white expansion. In Red Brethren, David J. Silverman considers the stories of these communities and argues that Indians in early America were racial thinkers in their own right and that indigenous people rallied together as Indians not only in the context of violent resistance but also in campaigns to adjust peacefully to white dominion. All too often, the Indians discovered that their many concessions to white demands earned them no relief. In the era of the American Revolution, the pressure of white settlements forced the Brothertowns and Stockbridges from New England to Oneida country in upstate New York. During the early nineteenth century, whites forced these Indians from Oneida country, too, until they finally wound up in Wisconsin. Tired of moving, in the 1830s and 1840s, the Brothertowns and Stockbridges became some of the first Indians to accept U.S. citizenship, which they called "becoming white," in the hope that this status would enable them to remain as Indians in Wisconsin. Even then, whites would not leave them alone. Red Brethren traces the evolution of Indian ideas about race under this relentless pressure. In the early seventeenth century, indigenous people did not conceive of themselves as Indian. They sharpened their sense of Indian identity as they realized that Christianity would not bridge their many differences with whites, and as they fought to keep blacks out of their communities. The stories of Brothertown and Stockbridge shed light on the dynamism of Indians' own racial history and the place of Indians in the racial history of early America.Wild Yankees: The Struggle for Independence along Pennsylvania's Revolutionary Frontier
By Paul B. Moyer. 2007
Northeast Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley was truly a dark and bloody ground, the site of murders, massacres, and pitched battles. The…
valley's turbulent history was the product of a bitter contest over property and power known as the Wyoming controversy. This dispute, which raged between the mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, intersected with conflicts between whites and native peoples over land, a jurisdictional contest between Pennsylvania and Connecticut, violent contention over property among settlers and land speculators, and the social tumult of the American Revolution. In its later stages, the controversy pitted Pennsylvania and its settlers and speculators against "Wild Yankees"--frontier insurgents from New England who contested the state's authority and soil rights.In Wild Yankees, Paul B. Moyer argues that a struggle for personal independence waged by thousands of ordinary settlers lay at the root of conflict in northeast Pennsylvania and across the revolutionary-era frontier. The concept and pursuit of independence was not limited to actual war or high politics; it also resonated with ordinary people, such as the Wild Yankees, who pursued their own struggles for autonomy. This battle for independence drew settlers into contention with native peoples, wealthy speculators, governments, and each other over land, the shape of America's postindependence social order, and the meaning of the Revolution. With vivid descriptions of the various levels of this conflict, Moyer shows that the Wyoming controversy illuminates settlement, the daily lives of settlers, and agrarian unrest along the early American frontier.Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America
By Gwenn A. Miller. 2010
From the 1780s to the 1820s, Kodiak Island, the first capital of Imperial Russia's only overseas colony, was inhabited by…
indigenous Alutiiq people and colonized by Russians. Together, they established an ethnically mixed "kreol" community. Against the backdrop of the fur trade, the missionary work of the Russian Orthodox Church, and competition among Pacific colonial powers, Gwenn A. Miller brings to light the social, political, and economic patterns of life in the settlement, making clear that Russia's modest colonial effort off the Alaskan coast fully depended on the assistance of Alutiiq people. In this context, Miller argues, the relationships that developed between Alutiiq women and Russian men were critical keys to the initial success of Russia's North Pacific venture. Although Russia's Alaskan enterprise began some two centuries after other European powers--Spain, England, Holland, and France--started to colonize North America, many aspects of the contacts between Russians and Alutiiq people mirror earlier colonial episodes: adaptation to alien environments, the "discovery" and exploitation of natural resources, complicated relations between indigenous peoples and colonizing Europeans, attempts by an imperial state to moderate those relations, and a web of Christianizing practices. Russia's Pacific colony, however, was founded on the cusp of modernity at the intersection of earlier New World forms of colonization and the bureaucratic age of high empire. Miller's attention to the coexisting intimacy and violence of human connections on Kodiak offers new insights into the nature of colonialism in a little-known American outpost of European imperial power.To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast
By Rachel Wheeler. 2008
Two Northeast Indian communities with similar histories of colonization accepted Congregational and Moravian missionaries, respectively, within five years of one…
another: the Mohicans of Stockbridge, Massachusetts (1735), and Shekomeko, in Dutchess County, New York (1740). In To Live upon Hope, Rachel Wheeler explores the question of what "missionary Christianity" became in the hands of these two native communities. The Mohicans of Stockbridge and Shekomeko drew different conclusions from their experiences with colonial powers. Both tried to preserve what they deemed core elements of Mohican culture. The Indians of Stockbridge believed education in English cultural ways was essential to their survival and cast their acceptance of the mission project as a means of preserving their historic roles as cultural intermediaries. The Mohicans of Shekomeko, by contrast, sought new sources of spiritual power that might be accessed in order to combat the ills that came with colonization, such as alcohol and disease. Through extensive research, especially in the Moravian records of day-to-day life, Wheeler offers an understanding of the lived experience of Mohican communities under colonialism. She complicates the understanding of eighteenth-century American Christianity by demonstrating that mission programs were not always driven by the destruction of indigenous culture and the advancement of imperial projects. To Live upon Hope challenges the prevailing view of accommodation or resistance as the two poles of Indian responses to European colonization. Colonialism placed severe strains on native peoples, Wheeler finds, yet Indians also exercised a level of agency and creativity that aided in their survival.Daughters of the Earth
By Carolyn Niethammer. 1977
She was both guardian of the hearth and, on occasion, ruler and warrior, leading men into battle, managing the affairs…
of her people, sporting war paint as well as necklaces and earrings. She built houses and ground corn, wove blankets and painted pottery, played field hockey and rode racehorses. Frequently she enjoyed an open and joyous sexuality before marriage; if her marriage didn't work out she could divorce her husband by the mere act of returning to her parents. She mourned her dead by tearing her clothes and covering herself with ashes, and when she herself died was often shrouded in her wedding dress. She was our native sister, the American Indian woman, and it is of her life and lore that Carolyn Niethammer writes in this rich tapestry of America's past and present. Here, as it unfolded, is the chronology of the native American woman's life. Here are the birth rites of Caddo women from the Mississippi-Arkansas border, who bore their children alone by the banks of rivers and then immersed themselves and their babies in river water; here are Apache puberty ceremonies that are still carried on today, when the cost for the celebrations can run anywhere from one to six thousand dollars. Here are songs from the Night Dances of the Sioux, where girls clustered on one side of the lodge and boys congregated on the other; here is the Shawnee legend of the Corn Person and of Our Grandmother, the two female deities who ruled the earth. Far from the submissive, downtrodden "squaw" of popular myth, the native American woman emerges as a proud, sometimes stoic, always human individual from whom those who came after can learn much. At a time when many contemporary American women are seeking alternatives to a life-style and role they have outgrown, Daughters of the Earth offers us an absorbing -- and illuminating -- legacy of dignity and purpose."Good News from New England" by Edward Winslow: A Scholarly Edition
By Kelly Wisecup. 2014
First published in 1624, Edward Winslow’s Good News from New England chronicles the early experience of the Plimoth colonists, or…
Pilgrims, in the New World. For several years Winslow acted as the Pilgrims’ primary negotiator with New England Algonquians, including the Wampanoag, Massachusett, and Narragansett Indians. During this period he was credited with having cured the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit, one of the colonists’ most valuable allies, of an apparently life-threatening illness, and he also served as the Pilgrims’ chief agent in England. It was in the context of all of these roles that Winslow wrote Good News in an attempt to convince supporters in England that the colonists had established friendly relations with Native groups and, as a result, gained access to trade goods. Although clearly a work of diplomacy, masking as it did incidents of brutal violence against Indians as well as evidence of mutual mistrust, the work nevertheless offers, according to Kelly Wisecup, a more complicated and nuanced representation of the Pilgrims’ first years in New England and of their relationship with Native Americans than other primary documents of the period. In this scholarly edition, Wisecup supplements Good News with an introduction, additional primary texts, and annotations to bring to light multiple perspectives, including those of the first European travelers to the area, Native captives who traveled to London and shaped Algonquian responses to colonists, the survivors of epidemics that struck New England between 1616 and 1619, and the witnesses of the colonists’ attack on the Massachusetts.Native Heart
By Gabriel Horn. 2003
Most lives are lived solely in the present. But some lives are also lived with a spiritual and historical connection…
to the past. These lives grant us a sense of hope for the future. Native Heart is the story of Gabriel Horn and his attempt to live a modern man's life that's true to the indigenous spirit of this land we call America. As a teacher in the American Indian Movement Survival Schools, and as a writer, activist, husband, and father, Horn presents a challenging and haunting perspective on our "new world" culture and values. Whether it's revealing a genocide Western historians choose to ignore, enabling Native American prisoners to pray with the pipe, or teaching his own Native children the lessons of nature and history, Horn stays true to his heart and to the vision that inspired his journey. His encounters with the "shadow people," his relationship to the Earth, and his quest for understanding and purpose within the "Great Holy Mystery" are retold in this intimate autobiographical novel.Standing Bear is a Person: The True Story of a Native American's Quest for Justice
By Stephen Dando-Collins. 2004