Coyote Nation

With the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s came the emergence of a modern and profoundly multicultural New Mexico. Native Americans, working-class Mexicans, elite Hispanos, and black and white newcomers all commingled and interacted in the territory in ways that had not been previously possible. But what did it mean to be white in this multiethnic milieu? And how did ideas of sexuality and racial supremacy shape ideas of citizenry and determine who would govern the region? Coyote Nation considers these questions as it explores how New Mexicans evaluated and categorized racial identities through bodily practices. Where ethnic groups were numerous and—in the wake of miscegenation—often difficult to discern, the ways one dressed, bathed, spoke, gestured, or even stood were largely instrumental in conveying one's race. Even such practices as cutting one's hair, shopping, drinking alcohol, or embalming a deceased loved one could inextricably link a person to a very specific racial identity. A fascinating history of an extraordinarily plural and polyglot region, Coyote Nation will be of value to historians of race and ethnicity in American culture.

The New York Times best-selling account of how coyotes--long the target of an extermination policy--spread to every corner of the United States Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award "A masterly synthesis of scientific research and personal observation." -Wall Street Journal Legends don't come close to capturing the incredible story of the coyote In the face of centuries of campaigns of annihilation employing gases, helicopters, and engineered epidemics, coyotes didn't just survive, they thrived, expanding across the continent from Alaska to New York. In the war between humans and coyotes, coyotes have won, hands-down. Coyote America is the illuminating five-million-year biography of this extraordinary animal, from its origins to its apotheosis. It is one of the great epics of our time.

For most North Americans--Canadians as well as Americans--the term "Western" evokes images of the frontier, brave sheriffs and ruthless outlaws, good cowboys and bad Indians. As Arnold E. Davidson shows in this groundbreaking study, a number of Canada's most interesting and experimental Western writers parody, reverse, or otherwise defuse the paraphernalia of the classic U.S. Western. Lacking both a real and imagined frontier--Canadian settlers rode trains into the new territory, already policed by Mounties--the writers of Canadian Westerns were set a different task from their American counterparts and were subsequently freed to create some of the most complex and engrossing fiction yet produced in Canada. Davidson details the evolution of the U.S. and Canadian Western forms, tracing the divergence between the two as Canadian writers responded to their unique historical circumstances by reinventing the West as well as the Western and establishing a new literary landscape where author and reader could work out new possibilities of being. Surveying a range of texts by Canada's most innovative writers, with special attention to women writers and Native stories of Coyote, he provides close readings of novels by Howard O'Hagan, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, Aritha van Herk, Anne Cameron, Peter Such, W. O. Mitchell, Beatrice Culleton, and Thomas King. A unique study, Coyote Country offers at one and the same time a theory of Canadian Western fiction, a history of crosscultural paradigms of the West as manifested in novels, and an intensive reading of some of Canada's best literature.

"A Civil Action" meets Indian country, as one man takes on the federal government and the largest boondoggle in U.S. history--and wins.

The story of Lane's journey as he visits coyote territories: swamps, nature preserves, old farm fields, suburbs, a tannery, and even city streets. Along the way, he gains insight concerning the migration into the Southeast of the American coyote, an animal that, in the end, surprises him with its intelligence, resilience, and amazing adaptability.

This survey of education for aboriginal groups in Canada includes a historical overview and reports from each province, including data on use of native languages, local control of programs, the Hawthorn Report, the 1988 Assembly of First Nations Report, and course outlines.

A Native foster youth brings a completed Pfizer Corporation’s "PTSD Self-Quiz" she found in a U.S. Indian Health Service clinic waiting room to her psychologist, hoping a new diagnosis will allow her to discontinue her current stimulant medication. After advocating on her behalf and that of other Native clients in his care, the psychologist is put on a "performance improvement plan" by clinic supervisors. Subsequently, a nurse practitioner at the clinic sends a letter to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services regarding concerns over poor medical care and infection control, only to be transferred out shortly after. Coyote’s Swing reveals how the U.S. mental health system reframes Native American reactions to oppression and marginalization into "mental disorders" and "mental illness." Contemporary practices of the Indian Health Service echo historical "Indian lunacy" determinations, false imprisonment in the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians, stigmatizing of Native children kidnapped to federally- and mission-run boarding schools as "feebleminded," sterilizing of Native people evaluated by white psychologists as "unfit to reproduce," and long-standing doctrines of impairment and deficiency foreign to Native values of spiritual balance and wellbeing. Immersed in this system and its history for two decades, David Edward Walker develops provocative connections between past and present while using a traditional Yakama tale as a motif. Combining narrative ease and a scholar’s eye, he exposes how the "white man’s Cat" continues to push Coyote, Sacred Trickster, on a "swing" of Western mental health ideology that has threatened Native lives and culture for over 150 years. Coyote’s Swing combines Walker’s firsthand experiences as a consulting psychologist with rare history and sociocultural critique.