Cambridge Studies in North American Indian History Reihe

Focusing on the colonial theory, the book offers a fresh perspective on the complex dynamics between the Plains Sioux and the United States during the 1800s. It delves into significant events like the Oregon Trail and the lives of iconic figures such as Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, while also exploring lesser-known aspects of Sioux culture and history. By emphasizing Sioux viewpoints, the analysis reveals their adaptive responses to U.S. expansion and the eventual constraints on their autonomy, culminating in a new interpretation of the Wounded Knee massacre.

As a definitive study of the poorly understood Apaches de paz, this book explains how war-weary, mutually suspicious Apaches and Spaniards negotiated an ambivalent compromise after 1786 that produced over four decades of uneasy peace across the region. In response to drought and military pressure, thousands of Apaches settled near Spanish presidios in a system of reservation-like establecimientos, or settlements, stretching from Laredo to Tucson. Far more significant than previously assumed, the establecimientos constituted the earliest and most extensive set of military-run reservations in the Americas and served as an important precedent for Indian reservations in the United States. As a case study of indigenous adaptation to imperial power on colonial frontiers and borderlands, this book reveals the importance of Apache-Hispanic diplomacy in reducing cross-cultural violence and the limits of indigenous acculturation and assimilation into empires and states.

Despite popular belief, Native peoples did not simply disappear from colonial New England as the English extended their domination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather, the Native peoples in such places as Natick, Massachusetts, creatively resisted colonialism, defended their lands, and rebuilt kin networks and community through the strategic use of English cultural practices and institutions. So why did New England settlers believe that the Native peoples had vanished? In this thoroughly researched and astutely argued study, historian Jean M. O’Brien reveals that, in the late eighteenth century, the Natick tribe experienced a process of “dispossession by degrees,” which rendered them invisible within the larger context of the colonial social order, thus enabling the construction of the myth of Indian extinction.

Offers a new reading of the history of the colonization of North America and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples.

An acclaimed classic book, the 20th anniversary edition of The Middle Ground includes a new preface by the author.

This book is for readers interested in Indigenous responses to European and American colonialism. The study illuminates Hawaiian cultural change - in Native religion, medicine, and gender - amid the incursion of Western diseases and their side effects, including infertility, infant mortality, and chronic ill health.