Milford Town Library - Native American Heritage Month

"As a young man, David A. Boxley hungered for authentic Tsimshian culture. Christian missionaries had whitewashed his people's past, stripping them of their language and traditions. Boxley bristled at the cheap totem poles passed off on tourists for a couple of bucks. He missed the potlatches, the totem-pole raisings, the traditional dances that bonded his people in previous generations. But Tsimshian culture had been so thoroughly erased, he had...

"As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise.""--

"Featuring an array of tempting traditional Native recipes and no-nonsense practical advice about health and fitness, "Recovering Our Ancestors' Gardens" draws on the rich indigenous heritages of this continent to offer a helpful guide to a healthier life."--

A magnificent selection of fifty poems to celebrate three-term US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo's fifty years as a poet.

The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk...

Unpacks the twenty-one most common myths and misconceptions about Native Americans
In this enlightening book, scholars and activists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture and history that have misinformed generations. Tracing how these ideas evolved, and drawing from history, the authors disrupt long-held and enduring myths such as:
“Columbus Discovered America”
“Thanksgiving...

"Interrogating the concept of environmental justice in the U.S. as it relates to Indigenous peoples, this book argues that a different framework must apply compared to other marginalized communities, while it also attends to the colonial history and structure of the U.S. and ways Indigenous peoples continue to resist, and ways the mainstream environmental movement has been an impediment to effective organizing and allyship"--

The received idea of Native American history--as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee--has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U. S. Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching...

"The riveting story of the Shawnee brothers who led the last great pan-Indian confederacy against the United States"-- Until the Americans killed Tecumseh in 1813, he and his brother Tenskwatawa were the co-architects of the broadest pan-Indian confederation in United States history. In previous accounts of Tecumseh's life, Tenskwatawa has been dismissed as a talentless charlatan and a drunk. Cozzens shows us that while Tecumseh was a brilliant diplomat...