“I am here. You will never be alone. We are dancing for you.” So begins Cutcha Risling Baldy’s deeply personal account of the revitalization of the women’s coming-of-age ceremony for the Hoopa Valley Tribe. At the end of the twentieth century, the tribe’s Flower Dance had not been fully practiced for decades. The women of the tribe, recognizing the critical importance of the tradition, undertook its revitalization using the memories of elders and medicine women and details found in museum ...

**Winner of the 2025 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award, American Society for EthnohistoryHonorable Mention for the 2025 Labriola Center American Indian National Book AwardHonorable Mention for the 2025 Pacific Coast Branch Award, American Historical AssociationTraces young Native women’s lives and experiences as Bay Area domestic workers**In the early twentieth century, the Bay Area Outing Program coercively recruited over a thousand Native girls and women...

Challenges the romantic portrayal of Spanish missionsSites of slavery and spiritual conquest, the California missions played a central role in the brutal subjugation of the region’s Indigenous peoples. Mainstream California history, however, still largely presents a romanticized portrait of the creation of the twenty-one Spanish missions between San Diego and Sonoma in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Providing a corrective to this benign histori...

**Winner of a 2026 Pacific Northwest Book Award, Pacific Northwest Booksellers AssociationA provocative retelling of shipwreck tales from the Northwest Coast**The Northwest Coast of North America is a treacherous place. Unforgiving coastlines, powerful currents, unpredictable weather, and features such as the notorious Columbia River bar have resulted in more than two thousand shipwrecks, earning the coastal areas of Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver Island the moniker “Gra...

An inside account of one Luiseño tribe's history and their efforts to be recognized by the United StatesWith the largest number of Native Americans as well as the most non-federally recognized tribes in the United States, the state of California is a key site for sovereignty struggles, including federal recognition. In Unrecognized in California, Olivia M. Chilcote, member of the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians of San Diego County, demonstrates how th...

**Winner of the 2025 Robert M. Utley Award, Western History AssociationWinner of the 2025 John C. Ewers Award, Western History AssociationWinner of the 2025 Robert G. Athearn Award, Western History AssociationWinner of the 2025 Caroline Bancroft History Prize, Denver Public Library’s Special Collection and ArchivesFinalist for the 2025 Shapiro Book Prize, Huntington LibraryHonorable Mentionn for the 2025 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize, American Socie...

Winner of the 2008 Washington State Book Award in History/BiographyThis updated edition of Native Seattle brings the indigenous story to the present day and puts the movement of recognizing Seattle's Native past into a broader context. Native Seattle focuses on the experiences of local indigenous communities on whose land Seattle grew, accounts of Native migrants to the city and the development of a multi-tribal urban community, as well as the rol...

Connects California cannabis production to the violence and dispossession of Indigenous land and peopleYoung countercultural back-to-the-land settlers flocked to northwestern California beginning in the 1960s, and by the 1970s, unregulated cannabis production proliferated on Indigenous lands. As of 2021, the California cannabis economy was valued at $3.5 billion. In Settler Cannabis, Kaitlin Reed demonstrates how this "green rush" is only the most recent e...

An imaginative retelling of London’s history, framed through the experiences of Indigenous travelers who came to the city over the course of more than five centuries London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. In Indigenous London, historian Coll Thrush offers an imaginative vision of the city's past crafted from an almost entirely new perspective: that of Indigenous children, wome...

From 1998 through 2013, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs sought to develop a casino in Cascade Locks, Oregon. This prompted objections from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, who already operated a lucrative casino in the region. Brook Colley’s in-depth case study unravels the history of this disagreement and challenges the way conventional media characterizes intertribal casino disputes in terms of corruption and greed. Instead, she locates these conflicts within historical, s...

An extensive body of literature on Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing has been written since the 1980s. This research has for the most part been conducted by scholars operating within Western epistemological frameworks that tend not only to deny the subjectivity of knowledge but also to privilege masculine authority. As a result, the information gathered predominantly reflects the types of knowledge traditionally held by men, yielding a perspective that is at once gendered and incomp...

In this revolutionary text, prominent Native American studies scholar and activist Andrea Smith reveals the connections between different forms of violence—perpetrated by the state and by society at large—and documents their impact on Native women. Beginning with the impact of the abuses inflicted on Native American children at state-sanctioned boarding schools from the 1880s to the 1980s, Smith adroitly expands our conception of violence to include the widespread appropriation of Indian c...