Traces the history of the Omaha Indians from 1790, through the years under Chief Black Bird, to their confinement to a reservation in the 1850s and the loss of most of their land in 1916

The Omaha Tribe of Nebraska has borne more than its fair share of the burden created by the federal government’s wildly vacillating Indian policy. Mark R. Scherer’s Imperfect Victories provides a detailed examination of the Omahas’ tenacious efforts to overcome the damaging effects of shifting directions in federal policy during the last fifty years. The Omahas’ struggles are particularly significant because the tribe often bore the initial impact of experimental legislation that would later be implemented nationally. Scherer details the disastrous consequences of postwar federal legislation that transferred control over Indian affairs to state authorities as a precursor to the wholesale termination of Indian tribalism. The legislation brought jurisdictional turmoil to the Omaha reservation and placed the Omahas in chronic conflict with local law enforcement agencies. As the tribe fought to become the first Indian group in the nation to escape the effects of that law through retrocession, they waged equally notable struggles for the redress of past wrongs with the Indian Claims Commission and in the federal courts. Scherer demonstrates that the Omahas’ successes in those campaigns have been at best imperfect victories, coming only after years of hardship and failing to eliminate many underlying tensions and problems.

After the Omaha Nation was officially granted its reservation land in northeastern Nebraska in 1854, Omaha culture appeared to succumb to a Euro-American standard of living under the combined onslaught of federal Indian policies, governmental officials, and missionary zealots. At the same time, however, new circular wooden structures appeared on some Omaha homesteads. Blending into the architectural environment of the mainstream culture, these lodges provided the ritual space in which dances and ceremonies could be conducted at a time when such practices were coercively suppressed. ø Drawing on the oral histories of forty Omaha elders collected in 1992, Dance Lodges of the Omaha People provides insights into how these lodges shaped Omaha cultural identity and illustrates the adaptive abilities of the modern Omaha tribe. The lodges replaced the diminished pre-reservation tribal institutions as maintainers of tribal cohesion and unity and at the same time provided an arena for selective acculturation of outside ideas and behaviors. A new afterword by the author highlights advances in research on these unique structures since 1992 and speculates on the connection between these lodges and the spread of the Omaha Hethushka dance across the Great Plains.

The Pawnees have appeared in many historical documents, from early Spanish accounts and journals of American explorers and adventurers to fascinating accounts of daily life by Quaker agents and Presbyterian missionaries during the nineteenth century. In recent years, Pawnee activists have taken the lead in the repatriation struggle and have fought for respectful burials of their ancestors' remains. This is the first comprehensive bibliography of the Pawnees, examining a wide spectrum of books and journals on Pawnee history, culture, and ethnology. Chapters are devoted to topics such as: Pawnee archaeology and anthropology, Myths and legends, Social organization, Material culture, Music and dance, Religion, Education, Repatriation. Entries are thoroughly annotated and evaluated, making this up-to-date research tool essential for historians, ethnologists, and other Pawnee researchers.

Published through the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation The Omaha Language and the Omaha Way provides a comprehensive textbook for students, scholars, and laypersons to learn to speak and understand the language of the Omaha Nation. Mark Awakuni-Swetland, Vida Woodhull Stabler, Aubrey Streit Krug, Loren Frerichs, and Rory Larson have collaborated with elder speakers, including Alberta Grant Canby, Emmaline Walker Sanchez, Marcella Woodhull Cavou, and Donna Morris Parker, to write this book. The original and creative pedagogical method used in this textbook—teaching the Omaha language through Omaha culture—consists of a structured series of lesson plans. It is the result of a generous collaboration between the Department of Anthropology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the Umóⁿhoⁿ Language and Culture Center at Umóⁿhoⁿ Nation Public School in Macy, Nebraska. The method draws on the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of Awakuni-Swetland to illustrate the Omaha values of balance and integration. The contents are shaped into two parts, each of which complements the other—just as the Earth and Sky do. This textbook features an introduction by Awakuni-Swetland on the history and phonology of the Omaha language; lessons from the Umóⁿhoⁿ Language and Culture Center at Macy, with a writing system quick sheet; situation quick sheets; lessons on games; lessons on spring, summer, fall, and winter; an Omaha language resource list; and a glossary in the standard Macy orthography of the Omaha language. The textbook also includes cultural lessons in the language by Awakuni-Swetland and lessons from the Omaha language class at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. The Omaha Language and the Omaha Way offers a linguistic foundation for tribal members, students, scholars, and laypersons, featuring Omaha community lessons, the standard Macy orthography, and UNL orthography all under one cover.

Frederick E. Hoxie, one of our most prominent and celebrated academic historians of Native American history, has for years asked his undergraduate students at the beginning of each semester to write down the names of three American Indians. Almost without exception, year after year, the names are Geronimo, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The general conclusion is inescapable: Most Americans instinctively view Indians as people of the past who occupy a position outside the central narrative of American history. These three individuals were warriors, men who fought violently against American expansion, lost, and died. It’s taken as given that Native history has no particular relationship to what is conventionally presented as the story of America. Indians had a history too; but theirs was short and sad, and it ended a long time ago. In This Indian Country, Hoxie has created a bold and sweeping counter-narrative to our conventional understanding. Native American history, he argues, is also a story of political activism, its victories hard-won in courts and campaigns rather than on the battlefield. For more than two hundred years, Indian activists—some famous, many unknown beyond their own communities—have sought to bridge the distance between indigenous cultures and the republican democracy of the United States through legal and political debate. Over time their struggle defined a new language of “Indian rights” and created a vision of American Indian identity. In the process, they entered a dialogue with other activist movements, from African American civil rights to women’s rights and other progressive organizations. Hoxie weaves a powerful narrative that connects the individual to the tribe, the tribe to the nation, and the nation to broader historical processes. He asks readers to think deeply about how a country based on the values of liberty and equality managed to adapt to the complex cultural and political demands of people who refused to be overrun or ignored. As we grapple with contemporary challenges to national institutions, from inside and outside our borders, and as we reflect on the array of shifting national and cultural identities across the globe, This Indian Country provides a context and a language for understanding our present dilemmas.

A survey of two centuries of Indian political writings

Employing innovative research and unique interpretations, these essays provide a fresh perspective on Native American history by focusing on how Indians lived and helped shape each of the United States. Native America: A State-by-State Historical Encyclopedia comprises 50 chapters offering interpretations of Native American history through the lens of the states in which Indians lived or helped shape. This organizing structure and thematic focus allows readers access to information on specific Indians and the regions they lived in while also providing a collective overview of Native American relationships with the United States as a whole. These three volumes synthesize scholarship on the Native American past to provide both an academic and indigenous perspective on the subject, covering all states and the native peoples who lived in them or were instrumental to their development. Each state is featured in its own chapter, authored by a specialist on the region and its indigenous peoples. Each essay has these main sections: Chronology, Historical Overview, Notable Indians, Cultural Contributions, and Bibliography. The chapters are interspersed with photographs and illustrations that add visual clarity to the written content, put a human face on the individuals described, and depict the peoples and environment with which they interacted.

It was a spring day in Paris in 1780, and Michael Barada, was 20. As he sauntered along a fashionable street, very gay in the silk, ribbons and ruffles of a young French gallant of the court of Louis XVI ... So begins the charming story of Michael Barada and his chance meeting with the lovely Omaha maiden, Laughing Buffalo. This romantic fairytale was told to the US congress in 1934 in a bill granting my grandfather and other descendants of Laughing Buffalo membership in the Omaha tribe. The bill never passed but this unlikely fairytale became part of our history. Am I part Omaha? Is Laughing Buffalo my great grandmother? And if this story isn't true what is her real story? Antoine's Legacy is my search for the truth and my Omaha roots.

Guide to the extensive ethnohistorical research that, in recent decades, has recovered the varied and often unexpected history of Comanche, Cheyenne, Osage, and Sioux Indians, to name only a few of the tribal groups included.