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Presents the origins, history, and contemporary use (and misuse) of tobacco by Native Americans. The book describes wild and domesticated tobacco species and how their cultivation and use may have led to the domestication of corn, potatoes, beans, and other food plants. It also analyses many North American Indian practices and beliefs.

Offers a complex and nuanced picture of the Ioways' efforts to retain their tribal identity within the constrictive boundaries of the Great Nemaha Agency. Drawing on diaries, newspapers, and correspondence from the agency's files and Presbyterian archives, Olson offers a compelling case study in US colonialism and Indigenous resistance.

This is the history of a remarkable nation, the only Indian tribe that never officially made peace with the United States. General Thomas Sidney Jesup admired the Seminoles as adversaries: "We have, at no former period in our history, had to contend with so formidable an enemy. No Seminole proves false to his country, nor has a single instance occurred of a first rate warrior having surrendered." Jesup made those comments in 1837, and they proved true throughout the Seminole-white confrontations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Portions of the Seminoles' story--particularly their wars--have been told, but until this book no extensive history of the tribe had been written. Here is the record of those dauntless people who were tricked, robbed, defrauded, and abused. The origins of the tribe, the complex problems concerning their rights in Florida, the military operations against them, their forced removal to Indian Territory, their role in the Civil War, and their adjustment to life in the West are important elements of the book.

The Cheyenne Indians, in sharp contrast to other Plains tribes, are renowned for the clear sense of form and structure in their institutions. This cultural trait, together with the colorful background of the Cheyennes, attracted the unique collaboration of a legal theorist and an anthropologist, who, in this volume, provide a definitive picture of the law-ways of a primitive, nonliterate people.

"An outstandingly clear picture of Spotted Tail . . . the definitive work."-Saturday ReviewSpotted Tail, the great head chief of the Brule Sioux, was an intelligent and farseeing man who realized alone of all the Sioux that the old way of life was doomed and that to war with the white soldiers was certain suicide. Although he was branded a traitor by many members of his tribe, the canny Brule, with all the skill of an accomplished diplomat, fought a delaying action over the council tables with the high officials in Washington. The only man in the tribe big enough to stand up to the whites and insist upon the rights of the Brulés under existing treaties with the U. S. government, he used every means available to him, short of a shooting war, to protect his people from being rushed into the white man's ways by government agents and eastern "Friends of the Indians."Thus the story of Spotted Tail is the story of the Brulé struggle against being made into imitation whites overnight, even when they were forced on the reservation, where they were expected to farm the land, raise cattle, send their children to school, and adopt Christianity-all at once.The assassination of Spotted Tail in 1881 by his political enemy, Crow Dog, ended the history of the Brulé Sioux as a tribe. With the great voice stilled, at Rosebud Agency only the voices of little men were heard, quarreling about little matters. With his death, the government effected its purpose: to break the tribal organization to bits and put the Brulés under the control of their white agent.George E. Hyde was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1882. As a boy he became interested in Indians and began writing about them in 1910. He has produced some of the most important books on the American Indian ever written, including Indians of the High Plains, Indians of the Woodlands, Red Cloud's Folk, Spotted Tail's Folk, and Life of George Bent, all published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Hyde died in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1968 at the age of 86.

A history of peyotism, an important Native American religious movement. Presenting ethnographic and ethnohistorical data, rather than a theoretical exegesis, the study of this pan-tribal movement should appeal to anthropologists and historians, as well as those interested in religious groups.

Presents the medical practices of the American Indians and portrays the historical relationship between the native Americans and the newcomers from the Old World. The author touches on such topics as pharmacology, healing, folklore and botany.

Illuminates the complexities of federal Indian reform, Catholic mission policy, and pre- and post-reservation Lakota culture. Harvey Markowitz examines the battles waged on a national level between the Catholic Church and the Protestant organisations that often opposed its agenda for American Indian conversion and education.

The westward drive of the warlike Sioux Indians along a thousand miles of prairie and woodland, from the upper reaches of the Mississippi to the lower Powder River in Montana, is one of the epic migrations of history. From about 1660 to the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Teton Sioux swept away all opposition: Arikaras, Ponkas, Crees, Crows, Cheyennes--all fell away and dispersed as the Sioux advanced, until the invaders ranged over a vast territory in the northwest, hunting buffalo and raiding their neighbors. During the ensuing years of heavy conflict, between 1865 and 1877, Red Cloud of the Oglalas stood out as one of the greatest of the Sioux leaders.George E. Hyde was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1882. As a boy he became interested in Indians and began writing about them in 1910. He has produced some of the most important books on the American Indian ever written, including Indians of the High Plains, Indians of the Woodlands, Red Cloud's Folk, Spotted Tail's Folk, and Life of George Bent, all published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Hyde died in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1968 at the age of 86.Royal B. Hassrick was the author of serveral books on Indians and Indian art, including The Sioux: Customs of a Warrior Society, also published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

A study of the dress of the Plains Indians which counters the misconception that all the tribes of the central region dressed alike. Certain similarities could be found amongst the groups, but each tribe had its own distinctive traditions and preferences.

The fierce bands of Comanche Indians, on the testimony of their contemporaries, both red and white, numbered some of the most splendid horsemen the world has ever produced. Often the terror of other tribes, who, on finding a Comanche footprint in the Western plains country, would turn and go in the other direction, they were indeed the Lords of the South Plains. For more than a century and a half, since they had first moved into the Southwest from the north, the Comanches raided and pillaged and repelled all efforts to encroach on their hunting grounds. They decimated the pueblo of Pecos, within thirty miles of Santa Fé. The Spanish frontier settlements of New Mexico were happy enough to let the raiding Comanches pass without hindrance to carry their terrorizing forays into Old Mexico, a thousand miles down to Durango. The Comanches fought the Texans, made off with their cattle, burned their homes, and effectively made their own lands unsafe for the white settlers. They fought and defeated at one time or another the Utes, Pawnees, Osages, Tonkawas, Apaches, and Navahos. These were "The People," the spartans of the prairies, the once mighty force of Comanches, a surprising number of whom survive today. More than twenty-five hundred live in the midst of an alien culture which as grown up around them. This book is the story of that tribe--the great traditions of the warfare, life, and institutions of another century that are today vivid memories among its elders. Despite their prolonged resistance, the Comanches, too, had to "come in." On a sultry summer day in June 1875, a small band of starving tribesmen straggled in to Fort Sill, near the Wichita Mountains in what is now the southwestern part of the state of Oklahoma. There they surrendered to the military authorities. So ended the reign of the Comanches on the southwestern frontier. Their horses had been captured and destroyed; the buffalo were gone; most of their tipis had been burned. They had held out to the end, but the time had now come for them to submit to the United States government demands.

The 200 letters in this volume chronicle more than 40 years of history in the old Cherokee Nation - from removal through the Civil War to Reconstruction - as recorded in the correspondence of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot families, the minority leaders in the Nation, and known as the "Treaty Party".

The Blackfeet were the strongest military power on the northwestern plains throughout the eighteenth century. But the near extinction of buffalo in the late nineteenth century brought dire poverty to the tribe, forcing them to rely in part on the U.S. government for sustenance. In this history of the Blackfeet, historian John C. Ewers relied on his own experience living among the Blackfeet as well as archival research to tell of not only the events that have so drastically affected the Blackfeet way of life, but also the ways the Blackfeet have responded, adapting and preserving their culture in the face of a changing landscape.

Chronicles the rise of the Cherokee Nation and its rapid decline, focusing on the Ridge-Watie family and their experiences during the Cherokee removal.

This biography situates Chief Moses of the Columbias in the opening of the Northwest and subsequent Indian-white relations, between 1850 and 1898. He held his tribe at peace and resisted the call to arms of his friend Chief Joseph of the Nez Perces.

C. L. Sonnichsen tells the story of the Mescalero Apaches from the earliest records to the modern day, from the Indian's point of view. In early days the Mescaleros moved about freely. Their principal range was between the Río Grande and the Pecos in New Mexico, but they hunted into the Staked Plains and southward into Mexico. They owned nothing and everything.