Gathering of Nations: Native American History, Identity, and Activism: NIU & Native American Activism

How two centuries of Indigenous resistance created the movement proclaiming "Water is life" In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century. Water Protectors knew this battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anticolonial struggle would continue. In Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance that led to the #NoDAPL movement. Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a manifesto, and an intergenerational story of resistance.

In lucid narrative prose, Sean Kicummah Teuton studies the stirring literature of "Red Power," an era of Native American organizing that began in 1969 and expanded into the 1970s. Teuton challenges the claim that Red Power thinking relied on romantic longings for a pure Indigenous past and culture. He shows instead that the movement engaged historical memory and oral tradition to produce more enabling knowledge of American Indian lives and possibilities. Looking to the era's moments and literature, he develops an alternative, "tribal realist" critical perspective to allow for more nuanced analyses of Native writing. In this approach, "knowledge" is not the unattainable product of disinterested observation. Rather it is the achievement of communally mediated, self-reflexive work openly engaged with the world, and as such it is revisable. For this tribal realist position, Teuton enlarges the concepts of Indigenous identity and tribal experience as intertwined sources of insight into a shared world.

Oklahoma Choctaw scholar Devon Abbott Mihesuah offers a frank and absorbing look at the complex, evolving identities of American Indigenous women today, their ongoing struggles against a centuries-old legacy of colonial disempowerment, and how they are seen and portrayed by themselves and others.   Mihesuah first examines how American Indigenous women have been perceived and depicted by non-Natives, including scholars, and by themselves. She then illuminates the pervasive impact of colonialism and patriarchal thought on Native women's traditional tribal roles and on their participation in academia.

The hidden crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada is both a national tragedy and a national shame. In this ground-breaking new volume, as part of their larger efforts to draw attention to the shockingly high rates of violence against our sisters, Jennifer Brant and D. Memee Lavell-Harvard have pulled together a variety of voices from the academic realms to the grassroots and front-lines to speak on what has been identified by both the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations as a grave violation of the basic human rights of Aboriginal women and girls. Linking colonial practices with genocide, through their exploration of the current statistics, root causes and structural components of the issue, including conversations on policing, media and education, the contributing authors illustrate the resilience, strength, courage, and spirit of Indigenous women and girls as they struggle to survive in a society shaped by racism and sexism, patriarchy and misogyny. This book was created to honour our missing sisters, their families, their lives and their stories, with the hope that it will offer lessons to non-Indigenous allies and supporters so that we can all work together towards a nation that supports and promotes the safety and well-being of all First Nation, Métis and Inuit women and girls.

For decades, Indigenous women and girls have gone missing or been found murdered along an isolated stretch of highway in northwestern British Columbia. The corridor is known as the Highway of Tears, and it has come to symbolize a national crisis. Journalist Jessica McDiarmid meticulously investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities, and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate in which Indigenous women and girls are overpoliced yet underprotected. McDiarmid interviews those closest to the victims--mothers and fathers, siblings and friends--and provides an intimate firsthand account of their loss and unflagging fight for justice. Examining the historically fraught social and cultural tensions between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the region, McDiarmid links these cases to others across Canada--now estimated to number up to four thousand--contextualizing them within a broader examination of the undervaluing of Indigenous lives in the country.

Violence against Indigenous women in Canada is an ongoing crisis, with roots deep in the nation's colonial history. Despite numerous policies and programs developed to address the issue, Indigenous women continue to be targeted for violence at disproportionate rates. What insights can literature contribute where dominant anti-violence initiatives have failed? Centring the voices of contemporary Indigenous women writers, this book argues for the important role that literature and storytelling can play in response to gendered colonial violence. Indigenous communities have been organizing against violence since newcomers first arrived, but the cases of missing and murdered women have only recently garnered broad public attention.

Winner of the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award. Despite what major media sources say, violence against Native women is not an epidemic. An epidemic is biological and blameless. Violence against Native women is historical and political, bounded by oppression and colonial violence. This book, like all of Sarah Deer's work, is aimed at engaging the problem head-on--and ending it. The Beginning and End of Rape collects and expands the powerful writings in which Deer, who played a crucial role in the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act in 2013, has advocated for cultural and legal reforms to protect Native women from endemic sexual violence and abuse. Deer provides a clear historical overview of rape and sex trafficking in North America, paying particular attention to the gendered legacy of colonialism in tribal nations--a truth largely overlooked or minimized by Native and non-Native observers. She faces this legacy directly, articulating strategies for Native communities and tribal nations seeking redress. In a damning critique of federal law that has accommodated rape by destroying tribal legal systems, she describes how tribal self-determination efforts of the twenty-first century can be leveraged to eradicate violence against women. Her work bridges the gap between Indian law and feminist thinking by explaining how intersectional approaches are vital to addressing the rape of Native women. Grounded in historical, cultural, and legal realities, both Native and non-Native, these essays point to the possibility of actual and positive change in a world where Native women are systematically undervalued, left unprotected, and hurt. Deer draws on her extensive experiences in advocacy and activism to present specific, practical recommendations and plans of action for making the world safer for all.

From the Mills College strike of 1990 to the Chicano Studies movement at UCLA, from African-American student unrest at Rutgers University in 1995 to student protest in California against the passage of propositions 187 and 209, issues of cultural diversity have rocked college campuses for much of this decade. Indeed, Robert Rhoads locates the key to understanding renewed student activism in the 1990s within the struggle over multiculturalism.

In 1968 over 10,000 Chicana/o high school students in East Los Angeles walked out of their schools in the first major protest against racism and educational inequality staged by Mexican Americans in the United States. They ignited the Mexican-American civil rights movement, which opened the doors to higher education and equal opportunity in employment for Mexican Americans and other Latinos previously excluded. Marching Students is a collaborative effort by Chicana/o scholars in several fields to place the 1968 walkouts and Chicana and Chicano Civil Rights Movement in historical context, highlighting the contribution of Chicana/o educators, students, and community activists to minority education.

Student radicals and hippies--in Oklahoma? Though most scholarship about 1960s-era student activism and the counterculture focuses on the East and West Coasts, Oklahoma's college campuses did see significant activism and "dropping out." In Prairie Power, Sarah Eppler Janda fills a gap in the historical record by connecting the activism of Oklahoma students and the experience of hippies to a state and a national history from which they have been absent. Janda shows that participants in both student activism and retreat from conformist society sought connections to Oklahoma's past while forging new paths for themselves.

Take an in-depth look at campus activism in the 21st century with this issue of New Directions for Higher Education. The purpose of this work is to dispel the myths that today's activists are either apathetic or "radicals" determined on disrupting the "establishment." It's also a guide to help higher education practitioners better understand the needs, rights, and responsibilities of campus activists. And, it will help readers understand the best paths to not only allowing student voice, but helping direct that voice toward peaceful and constructive expression.

During the 1960s, American Indian youth were swept up in a movement called Red Power--a civil rights struggle fueled by intertribal activism. While some define the movement as militant and others see it as peaceful, there is one common assumption about its history: Red Power began with the Indian takeover of Alcatraz in 1969. Or did it? In this groundbreaking book, Bradley G. Shreve sets the record straight by tracing the origins of Red Power further back in time: to the student activism of the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), founded in Gallup, New Mexico, in 1961. Unlike other 1960s and '70s activist groups that challenged the fundamental beliefs of their predecessors, the students who established the NIYC were determined to uphold the cultures and ideals of their elders, building on a tradition of pan-Indian organization dating back to the early twentieth century. Their cornerstone principles of tribal sovereignty, self determination, treaty rights, and cultural preservation helped ensure their survival, for in contrast to other activist groups that came and went, the NIYC is still in operation today.

In Sitting In and Speaking Out, Jeffrey A. Turner examines student movements in the South to grasp the nature of activism in the region during the turbulent 1960s. Based on primary research at more than twenty public and private institutions in the deep and upper South, including historically black schools, Sitting In and Speaking Out is a wide-ranging and sensitive portrait of southern students navigating a remarkably dynamic era.

While higher education is still far from universal in the United States, it plays an increasingly large role in shaping our collective understanding of what knowledge counts as legitimate and important. Therefore, understanding the college curriculum and how it is changed and shaped helps us to understand the overall dynamics of knowledge in contemporary society. This book considers the emergence of three curricular fields that have developed and spread over the past half century in American higher education - Women's studies, Asian American studies and Queer/LGBT studies.

In an era of corporate media and "alternative facts",academics committed to justice cannot simply rely on disseminating newknowledge, but must step out of the ivory tower and enter the streets asactivists. The Activist Academicserves as a guide for merging activism into academia. 

A ChoiceOutstanding Academic Title for 2013. While the success of higher education and student affairs is predicated on understanding the students we serve, the reality is, where the Native American population is concerned, that this knowledge is generally lacking. This lack may be attributed to this population's invisibility within the academy - it is often excluded from institutional data and reporting, and frequently noted as not statistically significant - and its relegation to what is referred to as the "American Indian research asterisk." The purpose of this book is to move beyond the asterisk in an effort to better understand Native students, challenge the status quo, and provide an informed base for leaders in student and academic affairs, and administrators concerned with the success of students on their campuses.

This edited volume is the result of a collaborative project of Indigenous graduate education training and higher education-tribal institution partnerships in the southwestern United States. We feature the work of interdisciplinary scholars writing about local peoples, issues, and knowledges that demonstrate rich linkages between universities and Indigenous communities. Collectively, as Indigenous peoples writing, this work takes the opportunity to explore why and how Indigenous peoples are working to reframe dominant limits of our power and to shift educational efforts from the colonial back to an Indigenous center. These efforts reflect a conscientious practice to maintain Indigenous worldviews through diverse yet unified approaches aimed at serving Indigenous peoples and places.

Indigenous students remain one of the least represented populations in higher education. They continue to account for only one percent of the total post-secondary student population, and this lack of representation is felt in multiple ways beyond enrollment. Less research money is spent studying Indigenous students, and their interests are often left out of projects that otherwise purport to address diversity in higher education.  Recently, Native scholars have started to reclaim research through the development of their own research methodologies and paradigms that are based in tribal knowledge systems and values, and that allow inherent Indigenous knowledge and lived experiences to strengthen the research. Reclaiming Indigenous Research in Higher Education highlights the current scholarship emerging from these scholars of higher education. From understanding how Native American students make their way through school, to tracking tribal college and university transfer students, this book allows Native scholars to take center stage, and shines the light squarely on those least represented among us.    

This book argues that two principal factors are inhibiting Native students from transitioning from school to college and from succeeding in their post-secondary studies. It presents models and examples of pathways to success that align with Native American students' aspirations and cultural values. Many attend schools that are poorly resourced where they are often discouraged from aspiring to college. Many are alienated from the educational system by a lack of culturally appropriate and meaningful environment or support systems that reflect Indigenous values of community, sharing, honoring extended family, giving-back to one's community, and respect for creation. The contributors to this book highlight Indigenized college access programs--meaning programs developed by, not just for--the Indigenous community, and are adapted, or developed, for the unique Indigenous populations they serve. Individual chapters cover a K-12 program to develop a Native college-going culture through community engagement; a "crash course" offered by a higher education institution to compensate for the lack of college counseling and academic advising at students' schools; the role of tribal colleges and universities; the recruitment and retention of Native American students in STEM and nursing programs; financial aid; educational leadership programs to prepare Native principals, superintendents, and other school leaders; and, finally, data regarding Native American college students with disabilities. The chapters are interspersed with narratives from current Indigenous graduate students. This is an invaluable resource for student affairs practitioners and higher education administrators wanting to understand and serve their Indigenous students.

In Identity Politics of Difference, author Michelle R. Montgomery uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine questions of identity construction and multiracialism through the experiences of mixed-race Native American students at a tribal school in New Mexico. She explores the multiple ways in which these students navigate, experience, and understand their racial status and how this status affects their educational success and social interactions. Montgomery contextualizes students' representations of their racial identity choices through the compounded race politics of blood quantum and stereotypes of physical features, showing how varying degrees of "Indianness" are determined by peer groups. Based on in-depth interviews with nine students who identify as mixed-race (Native American-White, Native American-Black, and Native American-Hispanic), Montgomery challenges us to scrutinize how the category of "mixed-race" bears different meanings for those who fall under it based on their outward perceptions, including their ability to "pass" as one race or another. Identity Politics of Difference includes an arsenal of policy implications for advancing equity and social justice in tribal colleges and beyond and actively engages readers to reflect on how they have experienced the identity politics of race throughout their own lives. The book will be a valuable resource to scholars, policy makers, teachers, and school administrators, as well as to students and their families.