As far back as colonial times, Native individuals and communities have fought alongside European and American soldiers against common enemies. Medicine Bags and Dog Tags is the story of these Native men and women whose military service has defended ancient homelands, perpetuated longstanding warrior traditions, and promoted tribal survival and sovereignty.

When it became public that Osama bin Laden’s death was announced with the phrase “Geronimo, EKIA!” many Native people, including Geronimo’s descendants, were insulted to discover that the name of a Native patriot was used as a code name for a world-class terrorist. Geronimo descendant Harlyn Geronimo explained, “Obviously to equate Geronimo with Osama bin Laden is an unpardonable slander of Native America and its most famous leader.” The Militarization of Indian Country illuminates the historical context of these negative stereotypes, the long political and economic relationship between the military and Native America, and the environmental and social consequences. This book addresses the impact that the U.S. military has had on Native peoples, lands, and cultures. From the use of Native names to the outright poisoning of Native peoples for testing, the U.S. military’s exploitation of Indian country is unparalleled and ongoing.

Traditional explorations of war look through the lens of history and military science, focusing on big events, big battles, and big generals. By contrast, The SAGE Encyclopedia of War: Social Science Perspective views war through the lens of the social sciences, looking at the causes, processes and effects of war and drawing from a vast group of fields such as communication and mass media, economics, political science and law, psychology and sociology. Key features include: More than 650 entries organized in an A-to-Z format, authored and signed by key academics in the field Entries conclude with cross-references and further readings, aiding the researcher further in their research journeys An alternative Reader’s Guide table of contents groups articles by disciplinary areas and by broad themes A helpful Resource Guide directing researchers to classic books, journals and electronic resources for more in-depth study This important and distinctive work will be a key reference for all researchers in the fields of political science, international relations and sociology.

In the campaign against Japan in the Pacific during the Second World War, the armed forces of the United States, Australia, and the Australian colonies of Papua and New Guinea made use of indigenous peoples in new capacities. The United States had long used American Indians as soldiers and scouts in frontier conflicts and in wars with other nations. With the advent of the Navajo Code Talkers in the Pacific theater, Native servicemen were now being employed for contributions that were unique to their Native cultures. In contrast, Australia, Papua, and New Guinea had long attempted to keep indigenous peoples out of the armed forces altogether. With the threat of Japanese invasion, however, they began to bring indigenous peoples into the military as guerilla patrollers, coastwatchers, and regular soldiers. Defending Whose Country? is a comparative study of the military participation of Papua New Guineans, Yolngu, and Navajos in the Pacific War. In examining the decisions of state and military leaders to bring indigenous peoples into military service, as well as the decisions of indigenous individuals to serve in the armed forces, Noah Riseman reconsiders the impact of the largely forgotten contributions of indigenous soldiers in the Second World War.

War at the Margins offers a broad comparative view of the impact of World War II on Indigenous societies. Using historical and ethnographic sources, Lin Poyer examines how Indigenous communities emerged from the trauma of the wartime era with social forms and cultural ideas that laid the foundations for their twenty-first century emergence as players on the world's political stage. With a focus on Indigenous voices and agency, a global overview reveals the enormous range of wartime activities and impacts on these groups, connecting this work with comparative history, Indigenous studies, and anthropology. The distinctiveness of Indigenous peoples offers a valuable perspective on World War II, as those on the margins of Allied and Axis empires and nation-states were drawn in as soldiers, scouts, guides, laborers, and victims. Questions of loyalty and citizenship shaped Indigenous combat roles--from integration in national armies to service in separate ethnic units to unofficial use of their special skills, where local knowledge tilted the balance in military outcomes. Front lines crossed Indigenous territory most consequentially in northern Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands, but the impacts of war go well beyond combat. Like others around the world, Indigenous civilian men and women suffered bombing and invasion, displacement, forced labor, military occupation, and economic and social disruption. Infrastructure construction and demand for key resources affected even areas far from front lines. World War II dissolved empires and laid the foundation for the postcolonial world. Indigenous people in newly independent nations struggled for autonomy, while other veterans returned to home fronts still steeped in racism. National governments saw military service as evidence that Indigenous peoples wished to assimilate, but wartime experiences confirmed many communities' commitment to their home cultures and opened new avenues for activism. By century's end, Indigenous Rights became an international political force, offering alternative visions of how the global order might make room for greater local self-determination and cultural diversity. In examining this transformative era, War at the Margins adds an important contribution to both World War II history and to the development of global Indigenous identity.

References to the Indian Wars, those conflicts that accompanied US continental expansion, suffuse American military history. From Black Hawk helicopters to the exclamation "Geronimo" used by paratroopers jumping from airplanes, words and images referring to Indians have been indelibly linked with warfare. In Indian Wars Everywhere, Stefan Aune shows how these resonances signal a deeper history, one in which the Indian Wars function as a shadow doctrine that influences US military violence. The United States' formative acts of colonial violence persist in the actions, imaginations, and stories that have facilitated the spread of American empire, from the "savage wars" of the nineteenth century to the counterinsurgencies of the Global War on Terror. Ranging across centuries and continents, Indian Wars Everywhere considers what it means for the conquest of Native peoples to be deemed a success that can be used as a blueprint for modern warfare.

Since 9/11, war literature has become a key element in American popular culture, spurring critical debate about depictions of combat--Who can write war literature? When can they do it? This book presents a new way to closely read war narratives, questioning the idea of "combat gnosticism"--the belief that the experience of war is impossible to communicate to those who have not seen it--that has dominated the discussion. Adapting Kenneth Burke's scapegoat mechanism to the criticism of literature and film, the author examines three novels from 2012--Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, David Abrams's FOBBIT and Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds--that represent the U.S. military responses to 9/11.

This book, on Jimi Hendrix’s life, times, visual-cultural prominence, and popular music, with a particular emphasis on Hendrix’s relationships to the cultural politics of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and nation. Hendrix, an itinerant “Gypsy” and “Voodoo child” whose racialized “freak” visual image continues to internationally circulate, exploited the exoticism of his race, gender, and sexuality and Gypsy and Voodoo transnational political cultures and religion. Aaron E. Lefkovitz argues that Hendrix can be located in a legacy of black-transnational popular musicians, from Chuck Berry to the hip hop duo Outkast, confirming while subverting established white supremacist and hetero-normative codes and conventions. Focusing on Hendrix’s transnational biography and centrality to US and international visual cultural and popular music histories, this book links Hendrix to traditions of blackface minstrelsy, international freak show spectacles, black popular music’s global circulation, and visual-cultural racial, gender, and sexual stereotypes, while noting Hendrix’s place in 1960s countercultural, US-exceptionalist, cultural Cold War, and rock histories.

Examines how African Americans' participation in the nation's wars after President Truman's order to intergrate the military, and their protracted struggles for equal citizenship, galvanized the antiwar activism that reshaped their struggles for freedom.

Brings together 1,000 focused biographies of Americans who affected how the United States made, supported, perceived, and protested its major wars from the Revolution to Gulf War II. Inventors and scientists, nurses and physicians, reformers and clerics, civil rights and labor leaders, financiers and economist, artists and musicians have all been soldiers on the home front. Home Front Heroes brings together brief and focused biographies of 1,000 Americans who affected how the United States made, supported, perceived and protested its major war efforts from the Revolution to Gulf War II. Battlefield victories and defeats are in a very real sense the reflection of the society waging war. Inventors and scientists, social reformers and clerics, civil rights and labor leaders, nurses and physicians, actors and directors, financiers and industrialists, economists and psychologists, artists and musicians, writers and journalists, have all been soldiers on the home front. The biographical entries highlighting the subjects' wartime contributions are arranged alphabetically. Many of the entries also include suggestions for further reading. Thematic indexes make it easy to look up people alphabetically by last name and by war, and other indices list entries under broad categories - Arts and Culture; Business, Industry, and Labor; Nursing and Medicine; Science, Engineering and Inventions - with more detailed occupational background. Entries include: Julia Ward Howe, composer of The Battle Hymn of the Republic; Robert Fulton, inventor of the steam engine and architect of the submarine Nautilus; Martin Brander, maker of Eliot's Saddle Ring Carbine; Robert Parker Parrott, inventor of the Parrott cannon; Novelist and War Correspondent Stephen Crane; Founder of the Army Nurse Corps Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee; Composer John Philip Sousa (Stars and Stripes Forever); Louis M. Terman, who invented the IQ test; Reginald Fessenden, developer of a sonic depth finder; machine-gun inventor Benjamin Hotchkiss; Labor leader John L. Lewis; Comedian and USO stalwart Bob Hope; Dr. Ancel Keys developer of the K-ration; napalm inventor Louis F. Fieser; and many more. The work is fully indexed, and contains an extensive bibliography.