AIS 230 American Indigenous Peoples of Minnesota

Three powerful tales from the acclaimed chronicler of the American West--including the #1 New York Times bestseller, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Two profoundly moving, candid histories and a powerful novel illuminate important aspects of the Native American story.   Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: The #1 New York Times bestseller that awakened the world to the destruction of American Indians in the nineteenth-century West, Dee Brown's groundbreaking history focuses on the betrayals, battles, and systematic slaughter suffered by Native American tribes between 1860 and 1890, culminating in the Sioux massacre at Wounded Knee. "Shattering, appalling, compelling . . . One wonders, reading this searing, heartbreaking book, who, indeed, were the savages" (The Washington Post).   The Fetterman Massacre: A riveting account of events leading up to the Battle of the Hundred Slain--the devastating 1866 conflict at Wyoming's Ft. Phil Kearney that pitted Lakota, Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne warriors--including Oglala chief Red Cloud, against the United States cavalry under the command of Captain William Fetterman. Based on a wealth of historical resources and sparked by Brown's narrative genius, this is an essential look at one of the frontier's defining conflicts.   Creek Mary's Blood: This New York Times bestseller fictionalizes the true story of Mary Musgrove--born in 1700 to a Creek tribal chief--and five generations of her family. The sweeping narrative spans the Revolutionary War, the Trail of Tears, and the Civil War--in which Mary's descendants fought on both sides of the conflict. Rich in detail and human drama, Creek Mary's Blood offers "a robust, unfussed crash-course in Native American history that rolls from East to West with dark, inexorable energy" (Kirkus Reviews).

The story of "western expansion" is a familiar one: U.S. government agents, through duplicity and force, persuaded Native Americans to sign treaties that gave away their rights to the land. But this framing, argues Martin Case, hides a deeper story. Land cession treaties were essentially the act of supplanting indigenous kinship relationships to the land with a property relationship. And property is the organizing principle upon which U.S. society is based. U.S. signers represented the relentless interests that drove treaty making: corporate and individual profit, political ambition, and assimilationist assumptions of cultural superiority. The lives of these men illustrate the assumptions inherent in the property system-and the dynamics by which it spread across the continent. In this book, for the first time, Case provides a comprehensive study of the treaty signers, exposing their business ties and multigenerational interrelationships through birth and marriage. Taking Minnesota as a case study, he describes the groups that shaped U.S. treaty making to further their own interests: interpreters, traders, land speculators, bureaucrats, officeholders, missionaries, and mining, timber, and transportation companies. Odds are, the deed to the land under your home rests on this system.

William C. Sturtevant, General Editor; Raymond J. DeMallie, Volume 13 editor. Describes the prehistory, history, and culture of the aboriginal peoples who lived in the region of tall-grass prairies and short-grass high plains of North America. Note: Preface indicates mistakenly that this is the twelfth volume in a 20 volume set. 2 parts in two books, sold as a set.