During the month of November, we celebrate National Native American Heritage Month and recognize the contributions, culture, and history of groups indigenous to the United States.
On a local level, The City of Chicago recognized Zhigaagong, known today as Chicago, by resolution as always being "an indigenous landscape" on November 14, 2018. The resolution acknowledges that the City sits upon the homeland of the Council of the Three Fires, and that many of the names of our region were provided by these tribes. The contributions of Chicago's Indigenous community continues today, as there are over 75,000 Urban Indians living in the Chicago area.
This page provides a selection of resources available on this topic through CCC Libraries and the web. While considering articles and stubs to update, check out a few free and open exhibits and sources for National Native American Heritage Month:
View the Indian Experience Database for access to primary sources available through CCC Libraries.
Selected books from CCC Libraries
Find more print and eBooks by searching the CCC Libraries Catalog. View this tutorial for tips on how to search for eBooks.
Indigenous Cities by
In Indigenous Cities Laura M. Furlan demonstrates that stories of the urban experience are essential to an understanding of modern Indigeneity. She situates Native identity among theories of diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism by examining urban narratives--such as those written by Sherman Alexie, Janet Campbell Hale, Louise Erdrich, and Susan Power--along with the work of filmmakers and artists. In these stories Native peoples navigate new surroundings, find and reformulate community, and maintain and redefine Indian identity in the postrelocation era. These narratives illuminate the changing relationship between urban Indigenous peoples and their tribal nations and territories and the ways in which new cosmopolitan bonds both reshape and are interpreted by tribal identities. Though the majority of American Indigenous populations do not reside on reservations, these spaces regularly define discussions and literature about Native citizenship and identity. Meanwhile, conversations about the shift to urban settings often focus on elements of dispossession, subjectivity, and assimilation. Furlan takes a critical look at Indigenous fiction from the last three decades to present a new way of looking at urban experiences, one that explains mobility and relocation as a form of resistance. In these stories Indian bodies are not bound by state-imposed borders or confined to Indian Country as it is traditionally conceived. Furlan demonstrates that cities have always been Indian land and Indigenous peoples have always been cosmopolitan and urban.
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by
2015 Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples' Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: "The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them." Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples' history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.
American Indian Business by
American Indian business is booming. The number of American Indian? and Alaska Native'owned businesses increased by 15.3 percent from 2007 to 2012?a time when the total number of US businesses increased by just 2 percent'and receipts grew from $34.4 million in 2002 to $8.8 billion in 2012. Despite this impressive growth, there is an absence of small businesses on reservations, and Native Americans own private businesses at the lowest rate per capita for any ethnic or racial group in the United States. Many Indigenous entrepreneurs face unique cultural and practical challenges in starting, locating, and operating a business, from a perceived lack of a culture of entrepreneurship and a suspicion of capitalism to the difficulty of borrowing start-up funds when real estate is held in trust and cannot be used as collateral. This book provides an accessible introduction to American Indian businesses, business practices, and business education. Its chapters cover the history of American Indian business from early trading posts to today's casino boom; economic sustainability, self-determination, and sovereignty; organization and management; marketing; leadership; human resource management; tribal finance; business strategy and positioning; American Indian business law; tribal gaming operations; the importance of economic development and the challenges of economic leakage; entrepreneurship; technology and data management; business ethics; service management; taxation; accounting; and health-care management. American Indian Business also furthers the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives in the study of American business practices in general and demonstrates the significant impact that American Indians have had on business, as well as their cultural contributions to management, leadership, marketing, economic development, and entrepreneurship.
The A to Z of Native American Movements by
Native Americans in the United States, similar to other indigenous people, created political, economic, and social movements to meet and adjust to major changes that impacted their cultures. For centuries, Native Americans dealt with the onslaught of non-Indian land claims, the appropriation of their homelands, and the destruction of their ways of life. Through various movements, Native Americans accepted, rejected, or accommodated themselves to the non-traditional worldviews of the colonizers and their policies. The A to Z of Native American Movements--through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on important persons, places, events, and institutions and significant political, economic, social, and cultural aspects--is a useful reference on topics dealing with key movements, organizations, leadership strategies, and the major issues Native Americans have confronted.