Sugar maple (Acer saccharum) in The North American Sylva by François André Michaux. Illustration by Henri-Joseph Redouté, 1819.

Tradition in Turmoil: Sugar Maple and Climate Change

With harvests dependent on the spring freeze-thaw cycle, the maple industry is seeking ways to mitigate damage wrought by a changing climate.
Wilbert Hunt, 97, the oldest member of the Pueblo of Acoma, casts his ballot at the Acoma Tribal Center in Acoma, New Mexico, 2004

The Fight for Native American Voting Rights

Despite the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, Native American activists have had to repeatedly take their fight for voting rights to Congress.
Shrunken heads in the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum

Human Remains and Museums: A Reading List

Questions over their value for research conflict with the ethics of possessing the dead, especially when presenting human remains in the setting of a museum.
Buffalo Bill's wild West and congress of rough riders of the world

The Triumphalism of American Wild West Shows

From the 1880s to the 1930s, hundreds of Wild West shows encouraged white audiences to view Native American culture as a rapidly vanishing curiosity.
Burial mound in Moundsville, West Virginia

Native Origin Stories As Tools of Conquest

In the nineteenth century, the Euro-American “Lost Tribes of Israel” theory was one of the most popular explanations for the existence of Indigenous peoples.
From the cover of NARP Newsletter, published by Native Alliance for Red Power, 1969

The Importance of Newspapers for the Red Power Movement

In the 1960s and 1970s, activists and organizers used Indian Country newspapers to cultivate a pan-Indigenous identity through a poetics of resistance.
Studio portrait of Mourning Dove

Christine Quintasket

Better known by the pen name Mourning Dove, Quintasket was a leader and activist who used her position as a public intellectual to fight for Colville rights.
Alpha Pi Omega in UNC's Yackety Yack, 2003

Inside the First Indigenous Sorority

Alpha Pi Omega, the first historically Native American sorority, supports Native students and creates cultural space for them on university campuses.
Flag of Mohawk Warriors Society

How the Media Framed the Oka Crisis as Terrorism

For over two months in 1990, Indigenous activists defended Kanien'kehá:ka lands against encroachment. They were portrayed negatively.
A large group of Native Americans stage a protest over land rights by occupying the Bureau of Indian Affairs building and steps in front, Washington DC, November 6, 1972.

Native Nations and the BIA: It’s Complicated

Historically, relations between Native Americans and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have been contentious. Is that still the case?