The History Of The Assiniboine And Sioux Tribes Of The Fort Peck Indian Reservation 1600 2012

The History of the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, 1600-2012 explores the struggles and triumphs of the Native Americans who were relegated by the federal government to a small portion of northeast Montana in the late 1880s.

The 1960s and 1970s were a time of radical change in U.S. history. During these turbulent decades, Native Americans played a prominent role in the civil rights movement, fighting to achieve self-determination and tribal sovereignty. Yet they did not always agree on how to realize their goals. In 1971, a group of tribal leaders formed the National Tribal Chairmen’s Association (NTCA) to advocate on behalf of reservation-based tribes and to counter the more radical approach of the Red Power movement. Voice of the Tribes is the first comprehensive history of the NTCA from its inception in 1971 to its 1986 disbandment. Scholars of Native American history have focused considerable attention on Red Power activists and organizations, whose confrontational style of advocacy helped expose the need for Indian policy reform. Lost in the narrative, though, are the achievements of elected leaders who represented the nation’s federally recognized tribes. In this book, historian Thomas A. Britten fills that void by demonstrating the important role that the NTCA, as the self-professed “voice of the tribes,” played in the evolution of federal Indian policy. During the height of its influence, according to Britten, the NTCA helped implement new federal policies that advanced tribal sovereignty, protected Native lands and resources, and enabled direct negotiations between the United States and tribal governments. While doing so, NTCA chairs deliberately distanced themselves from such well-known groups as the American Indian Movement (AIM), branding them as illegitimate—that is, not “real Indians”—and viewing their tactics as harmful to meaningful reform. Based on archival sources and extensive interviews with both prominent Indian leaders and federal officials of the period, Britten’s account offers new insights into American Indian activism and intertribal politics during the height of the civil rights movement.

Many Americans are familiar with the real, but repeatedly stereotyped problem of alcohol abuse in Indian country. Most know about the Prohibition Era and reformers who promoted passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, among them the members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. But few people are aware of how American Indian women joined forces with the WCTU to press for positive change in their communities, a critical chapter of American cultural history explored in depth for the first time in In League Against King Alcohol. Drawing on the WCTU’s national records as well as state and regional organizational newspaper accounts and official state histories, historian Thomas John Lappas unearths the story of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Indian country. His work reveals how Native American women in the organization embraced a type of social, economic, and political progress that their white counterparts supported and recognized—while maintaining distinctly Native elements of sovereignty, self-determination, and cultural preservation. They asserted their identities as Indigenous women, albeit as Christian and progressive Indigenous women. At the same time, through their mutual participation, white WCTU members formed conceptions about Native people that they subsequently brought to bear on state and local Indian policy pertaining to alcohol, but also on education, citizenship, voting rights, and land use and ownership. Lappas’s work places Native women at the center of the temperance story, showing how they used a women’s national reform organization to move their own goals and objectives forward. Subtly but significantly, they altered the welfare and status of American Indian communities in the early twentieth century.

John P. Hopkins critiques recent efforts to reform Indigenous education in public schools. He centers his critique on Montana State’s innovative and bold multicultural education policy called Indian Education for All (IEFA), and demonstrates why Indigenous education reforms must decolonize the curriculum and pedagogy to address the academic inequalities facing Native students. Using tribal critical race theory and culturally sustaining and revitalizing pedagogy, Indian Education for All proposes a shift in the ways teacher candidates learn about Indigenous education and instruct Native students. It explains why teachers and schools need to privilege Indigenous knowledge and explicitly integrate decolonization concepts into teaching and learning to address the academic gaps in Native education. This book will also help non-Native educators to engage in productive and authentic conversations with tribal communities about what Indigenous education reform should entail. “A must-read for educational justice across Indian Country.” —K. Tsianina Lomawaima, School of Social Transformation, Arizona State University “This important, highly accessible book provides a needed shift in stance whereby anti-colonialism becomes a vital education project for all.” —Teresa L. McCarty, GF Kneller Chair in Education and Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles “Hopkins offers important insights into the problems of paradigms of inclusion as an approach to educational policy change.” —Megan Bang, Northwestern University

Beneath the windswept North Dakota plains, riches await... At first, Erika Bolstad knew only one thing about her great-grandmother, Anna: she was a homesteader on the North Dakota prairies in the early 1900s before her husband committed her to an asylum under mysterious circumstances. As Erika's mother was dying, she revealed more. Their family still owned the mineral rights to Anna's land—and oil companies were interested in the black gold beneath the prairies. Their family, Erika learned, could get rich thanks to the legacy of a woman nearly lost to history. Anna left no letters or journals, and very few photographs of her had survived. But Erika was drawn to the young woman who never walked free of the asylum that imprisoned her. As a journalist well versed in the effects of fossil fuels on climate change, Erika felt the dissonance of what she knew and the barely-acknowledged whisper that had followed her family across the Great Plains for generations: we could be rich. Desperate to learn more about her great-grandmother and the oil industry that changed the face of the American West forever, Erika set out for North Dakota to unearth what she could of the past. What she discovers is a land of boom-and-bust cycles and families trying their best to eke out a living in an unforgiving landscape, bringing to life the ever-present American question: What does it mean to be rich?

Six weeks after the 1929 stock market crash, Frank Bruce Robinson created a self-help religion he called Psychiana. An ingenious mass-marketing pioneer, he sold a correspondence course promising health, wealth, and happiness to those who believed in the “God Power.” In the midst of the Great Depression, his mail-order religion with a money-back guarantee swept the United States and spread to some sixty-seven countries--or so its founder claimed--to become one of the most successful twentieth century New Thought religions. Facing charges of passport fraud in May 1936, an immaculately dressed Robinson arrived at the federal building in rural Moscow, Idaho. A person of considerable local and regional significance, he was Latah County’s largest private employer. Throngs lined the streets and sidewalks waiting for him. He exited his sleek green Duesenberg, waved to the crowd, and smiled for pictures. His son later wrote that the charismatic leader possessed “an insatiable appetite for publicity.” Central to the investigation was Robinson’s true identity. He was not all he claimed to be, and his small-town trial captivated the country and made national headlines. A full-length biography of Robinson combined with an in-depth historical examination of Psychiana, this book traces the improbable rise and fall of a master charlatan while also giving voice to his unwavering followers--from a dust bowl farmer to a former heavyweight boxing champion--who clung to their beliefs despite ongoing financial and emotional costs. Their stories reveal how adversity can galvanize faith in a false prophet, and paint an intriguing, intimate portrait of a nation challenged by a brutal depression and war.