The Bear-Walker and Other Stories. 1195, color and b/w paintings by David A. Johnston (Anishinaabe)
Mermaids and Medicine Women: Native Myths and Legends. (1993), 1998, color and b/w paintings by Maxine Noel/Ioyan Mani (Santee/Oglala)
The Star-Man and Other Tales. 1997, color and b/w paintings by Ken Syrette (Anishinaabe)

Working with other Anishinaabek elders, Basil Johnston shows readers how the traditional stories—inhabited by the spirits of wind, water, and woods—tie the Anishinaabek to the land. In Bear-Walker, a young bear-walker-in-training learns that one must dig deep to get to the source of beauty. A man finds out that wherever there is a lake there will also be fish. The great Nanabush fights a bear, creates red willows, and turns a greedy old lady into a woodpecker. In Mermaids, the wise counsel of Nanabush guides the people back to “that beautiful land where the wild animals abound…where fish are abundant, and berries as well.” A mermaid and her human husband, blessed with the good will of the thunders, return to the world above the water. A woman who has died before her time is released back into the land of the living. A little girl learns how to appease the thunder spirits, and a woman filled with medicine power helps defeat a wendigo. In Star-Man, Johnston tells of warring animals and star visitors, thunder bolts and thunderbirds, sea serpents and mermaids, and, of course, the ever-present Nanabush. The intriguing, glowing, intensely saturated abstract paintings, along with simple black-and-white line drawings, complement the stories. The stories and exquisite art in these volumes come together to speak of the real and unreal, known and unknown, past and future, helpful animals and powerful tricksters. Full of mystery and humor, the stories are to be read over and over, for meanings and messages that are always changing.
Bear-Walker and Other Stories, hc 20.00
Mermaids and Medicine Women, hc 20.00
Star-Man and Other Tales, hc 20.00

Lobo, Susan, Sharon Mitchell Bennett (Pomo), Charlene Betsille (Yurok), Joyce Keoke (Lakota), Geraldine Martinez Lira (Lakota), Marilyn LaPlante St. Germaine (Blackfeet), eds., Urban Voices: The Bay Area Indian Community. 2003, b/w photos and illustrations.

During the 1950s, the federal government relocated thousands of Indian families from their home reservations to 12 major cities, where they were promised educational and vocational training. While many, homesick and lonely, returned to their reservations, many stayed in the cities, creating intertribal communities and “friendship centers” to help each other survive. The Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland remains a gathering place for Indian people who are new to the city, as well as for “urban Indians” whose parents and grandparents came here half a century ago. Lovingly put together by the Editorial Committee of the IFH Community History Project, Urban Voices is a “family album” of photos, told stories and reminiscences, drawings, poems, letters, essays, posters, newspaper clippings and songs. From Darryl Babe Wilson’s telling of the Song that created the galaxies and the land and the people who “left footprints in the sand…(and) sang and danced to all of the powers of the universe,” to poems by the children of Hintil Kuu Ca School, to a letter from Hooty Croy on Death Row at San Quentin State Prison, to “Relocation: The Promise and the Lie” by Ray Moisa, to the bold in-your-face poetry of Esther G. Belin, to Rosalie McKay-Want’s story of her arrival on Alcatraz Island during the occupation, to Sarah Poncho’s recipe for frybread, to reminiscences by Millie Ketcheshawno and Bill Wahpepah, the voices here are many and varied. Urban Voices is a living thing, an honoring for everyone who dropped in to IFH for Wednesday night dinner and never left.
pb 22.00

LaDuke, Winona (Anishinaabe), and Sarah Alexander, Food Is Medicine: Recovering Traditional Foods to Heal the People. 2004, b/w photos.

Beginning with a discussion of traditional agriculture and biodiversity, the authors review issues brought about by colonization of the people and removal from the land: from Navajo livestock reduction to commodity foods to industrial agriculture and biotechnology to the inevitable results, including malnutrition and diabetes at a rate four times higher in Indian communities than in the general population. LaDuke and Alexander then come full circle, connecting the path between the teachings of the old stories and Indian communities’ working to recover their traditional food systems.
pb 8.00

LaDuke, Winona (Anishinaabe), Indigenous Peoples, Power & Politics: A Renewable Future for the Seventh Generation. 2004, b/w photos and maps.

“Uranium has only brought us sickness, death and heartache,” says Diné activist Kathleen Tsosie. “Please for the sake of our children, leave us alone.” Beginning with an analysis of the deadly environmental and social impacts of energy development in Native America—such as pollution, strip mining, radioactive waste, flooded homelands, and the confiscation of tribal resources—LaDuke describes Indian struggles to reclaim the land and democratize energy production, to put power back into the hands of the Native communities.
pb 5.00

Martinez, Elizabeth (Chicana), ed., 500 Años del Pueblo Chicano/500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures. 1991, Spanish-English bilingual, b/w photos.

This book is about the lives and histories of the Mestizo people in whom Indian blood runs strong.
pb 16.00
Also available to accompany this book:

¡Viva La Causa! 500 Years of Chicano History.
A two-part video based on the book. Archival footage, narration, and music ranging from corridos to rap have been added to the photos.

institutional 52.50, individual 38.50
book, video, and 2 curriculum guides, 120.50

Momaday, N. Scott (Kiowa), The Way to Rainy Mountain. (1969), 2003, b/w illustrations by Al Momaday (Kiowa).

“In the beginning was the world,” Momaday writes, “and it was spoken.” First published in 1969, The Way to Rainy Mountain is the embodiment of timelessness. The stories are in three voices: the first, Momaday’s father’s voice, the voice of oral tradition; the second, the voice of outsider historical commentary—here you will find words such as “peculiar”; and the third, the voice of Momaday’s personal reminiscence. The three voices provide for the reader “a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself.” These amazing stories, out of Kiowa myth and history and illuminated by Momaday’s father, are to be read aloud, “that they should remain, as they have always remained, alive at the level of the human voice.”
pb 15.00

National Museum of the American Indian, Do All Indians Live in Tipis? Questions & Answers from the National Museum of the American Indian. 2007, b/w photos.

Do all Indians live in tipis? Is it true that Indians do not like to have their photographs taken because they believe the camera might steal their spirit? Is it true that Indians sold Manhattan for twenty-four dollars worth of beads and trinkets? Was Tonto a real Indian? Did Indians really use smoke signals? Do they today? Did Indians wear socks? Do Indians have funerals? Apparently, few questions about Indians are too ridiculous to ask; and for the staff at the George Gustav Heye Center—the New York branch of the National Museum of the American Indian—to answer. The answers to the frequently asked questions in this book are well-researched, thoughtful and informative, and grouped into the following categories: identity; origins and histories; popular myths; clothing, housing, food and health; ceremony and ritual; sovereignty; animals and land; language and education; love and marriage; and art, music, dance and sports. Anyone who wonders if all Indians live in tipis really needs this book. Written at a level that is accessible to upper elementary students, Do All Indians Live in Tipis? is an essential resource for just about all teachers and librarians.
pb 15.00

Ortiz, Simon (Acoma), Men on the Moon: Collected Short Stories. 1999.

Simon Ortiz is first of all a poet, and as such he is a very accomplished storyteller. “For me,” he says, “there has never been a conscious moment without story.” Here are stories of migrants working potato fields in Idaho and longing for home, a grandfather trying to understand why men go to the moon to bring back rocks, three women in a laundromat silently giving each other courage, a daring escape from boarding school, a father teaching his son to fly a kite, and white people who want to become Indians. These are sad, funny, gritty stories that you will want to read over and over.
pb 18.00

Reid, Betty (Diné), and Ben Winton (Pascua Yaqui/Aztec/Crow), Keeping Promises: What Is Sovereignty and other Questions about Indian Country. 2004, b/w and color photos.

In highly readable language accompanied by beautiful contemporary photographs (no sepia-toned Curtis images here), Reid and Winton describe the complex relationship between Native nations and federal and state governments. From “Who is an Indian?” to “What is a tribe?” to “What is sovereignty?” to “What is the relationship between state governments and tribal governments?” to the ever-present “Why can reservations have gambling if the states they are in don’t allow it?,” the authors discuss Indian identity, the connection of language and story, the people and the land, the reservation system, tribal governments, treaties, reorganization and termination, political activism, and cultural survival. Keeping Promises is a must for all classrooms and libraries containing books about "Indian history" that begin with Columbus and end with Wounded Knee.
pb 9.00.

Salish-Pend d’Oreille Culture Committee and Elders Cultural Advistory Council, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, The Salish People and the Lewis and Clark Expedition. 2005, maps, b/w and color photographs, b/w art and color paintings.

On September 4, 1805, dozens of lodges were set up in the Upper Bitterroot Valley in what is now called “Montana.” As their horses pastured on the lush grasses, more than 400 Salish people were enjoying the warm sunny days and cold nights, harvesting and preparing chokecherries and red osier dogwood berries, and preparing to move toward the plains for the fall buffalo hunt. On that day, the scouts spotted a group of pale-skinned men approaching the encampment. This beautiful book is a tribal response to the media frenzy describing the Lewis and Clark expedition only from the perspective of the “discoverers,” drowning out the voices of the Salish people and ignoring the cultural and political context in which the expedition—a “reconnaissance for invasion”—occurred. Now, in Salish and English, the elders speak.
hc 25.00

Savageau, Cheryl (Abenaki), Mother/Land. 2006.

A new collection by one of the most accomplished poets of our time, Savageau’s writing has always reflected the world in which we all live, her life as a Native woman, our histories, and the Earth that some of us call “Mother,” remembering who we are. A real world is here, various, broad and deep, calling us to see in a way we have not before and to know that all our lives are the full sum of where we have been and what we will become.
pb 17.00