Novelist David Treuer examines Native American reservation life--past and present--illuminating misunderstood contemporary issues of sovereignty, treaty rights, and natural-resource conservation while also exploring crime and poverty, casinos and wealth, and the preservation of native language and culture.

Government officials and missionaries wanted all Sioux men to become self-sufficient farmers, wear pants, and cut their hair. The Indians, confronted by a land-hungry white population and a loss of hunting grounds, sought to exchange title to their homeland for annuities of cash and food, schools and teachers, and farms and agricultural knowledge. By 1862 the Sioux realized that their extensive kinship network and religion were in jeopardy and that...

Chippewa Customs, first published in 1929, remains an authoritative source for the tribal history, customs, legends, traditions, art, music, economy, and leisure activities of the Chippewa (Ojibway) Indians of the United States and Canada.

Personal recollections and impressions of Minnesota's Indian peoples, selected and edited from the author's manuscript "A history of the Indians in Minnesota written for children."

A woman's remarkable life provides a new perspective on a century of turbulent change. Daybreak Woman, (also known as Jane Anderson Robertson), the daughter of an Anglo-Canadian trader and a Scots-Dakota woman, was born at a trading post on the Minnesota River in 1810. When she died in 1904, after having lived in the region all those years, she had witnessed seismic changes, survived cataclysmic events, and, with her children, endured to rebuild...

"What do our myths say about us? Why do we choose to believe stories that have been disproven? David M. Krueger takes an in-depth look at a legend that held tremendous power in one corner of Minnesota, helping to define both a community's and a state's identity for decades. In 1898, a Swedish immigrant farmer claimed to have discovered a large rock with writing carved into its surface in a field near Kensington, Minnesota. The writing told a North...