Suggest materials to add to VCU Libraries NAIS collections.
Contact Kevin Farley directly at kdfarley@vcu.edu or (804) 828-8772 to discuss VCU Libraries collections.
Purchase Suggestion Form
Suggest something to VCU Libraries to add to the collections by filling out a form, which will be reviewed by a librarian for possible addition to VCU Libraries.
Welcome to the Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) guide. This guide is intended to help you identify books, databases, primary sources, and other materials that might be useful in NAIS. It is not an exhaustive guide, but a starting place. Because NAIS is a multi-disciplinary academic field, its students and practitioners use sources, methods, theories drawn from many different places to approach a wide range of topics.
Finding the most useful search terms to research your project is always important. Searching for NAIS topics can be even more complicated than usual, because of the variation in naming over time and between authors. Depending on your topic, you may have to use various combinations of:
VCU's two largest campuses are located on the traditional lands of the Powhatan Confederacy. I acknowledge the role of the Powhatan as the traditional custodians of these lands, and I pay respect to their elders past, present and emerging.
Awareness of the history of a land and its indigenous peoples involves more than making a blanket statement. If you have not already done so, consider learning more at Native Land, the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, or from resources offered by your local tribe, band or nation.
Selected new or recent resources from VCU Libraries collections.
The Chiefs Now in This City by
During the years of the Early Republic, prominent Native leaders regularly traveled to American cities--Albany, Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, Montreal, Quebec, New York, and New Orleans--primarily on diplomatic or trade business, but also from curiosity and adventurousness. They were frequently referred to as "the Chiefs now in this city" during their visits, which were sometimes for extended periods of time. Indian people spent a lot of time in town. Colin Calloway, National Book Award finalist and one of the foremost chroniclers of Native American history, has gathered together the accounts of these visits and from them created a new narrative of the country's formative years, redefining what has been understood as the "frontier." Calloway's book captures what Native peoples observed as they walked the streets, sat in pews, attended plays, drank in taverns, and slept in hotels and lodging houses. In the Eastern cities they experienced an urban frontier, one in which the Indigenous world met the Atlantic world. Calloway's book reveals not just what Indians saw but how they were seen. Crowds gathered to see them, sometimes to gawk; people attended the theatre to watch "the Chiefs now in this city" watch a play. Their experience enriches and redefines standard narratives of contact between the First Americans and inhabitants of the American Republic, reminding us that Indian people dealt with non-Indians in multiple ways and in multiple places. The story of the country's beginnings was not only one of violent confrontation and betrayal, but one in which the nation's identity was being forged by interaction between and among cultures and traditions.
A National Crime by
"I am going to tell you how we are treated. I am always hungry." -- Edward B., a student at Onion Lake School (1923)"[I]f I were appointed by the Dominion Government for the express purpose of spreading tuberculosis, there is nothing finer in existance that the average Indian residential school." -- N. Walker, Indian Affairs Superintendent (1948)For over 100 years, thousands of Aboriginal children passed through the Canadian residential school system. Begun in the 1870s, it was intended, in the words of government officials, to bring these children into the "circle of civilization," the results, however, were far different. More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse. Using previously unreleased government documents, historian John S. Milloy provides a full picture of the history and reality of the residential school system. He begins by tracing the ideological roots of the system, and follows the paper trail of internal memoranda, reports from field inspectors, and letters of complaint. In the early decades, the system grew without planning or restraint. Despite numerous critical commissions and reports, it persisted into the 1970s, when it transformed itself into a social welfare system without improving conditions for its thousands of wards. A National Crime shows that the residential system was chronically underfunded and often mismanaged, and documents in detail and how this affected the health, education, and well-being of entire generations of Aboriginal children.
Shifting Grounds by
A distinctly Indigenous form of landscape representation is emerging among contemporary Indigenous artists from North America. For centuries, landscape painting in European art typically used representational strategies such as single-point perspective to lure viewers?and settlers?into the territories of the old and new worlds. In the twentieth century, abstract expressionism transformed painting to encompass something beyond the visual world, and, later, minimalism and the Land Art movement broadened the genre of landscape art to include sculptural forms and site-specific installations. In Shifting Grounds, art historian Kate Morris argues that Indigenous artists are expanding and reconceptualizing the forms of the genre, expressing Indigenous attitudes toward land and belonging even as they draw upon mainstream art practices. The resulting works evoke all five senses: from the overt sensuality of Kay WalkingStick?s tactile paintings to the eerie soundscapes of Alan Michelson?s videos to the immersive environments of Kent Monkman?s dioramas, this art resonates with a fully embodied and embedded subjectivity. Shifting Grounds explores themes of presence and absence, survival and vulnerability, memory and commemoration, and power and resistance, illuminating the artists? engagement not only with land and landscape but also with the history of representation itself.
When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through by
United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into one momentous volume. This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries. Opening with a blessing from Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday, the book contains powerful introductions from contributing editors who represent the five geographically organized sections. Each section begins with a poem from the massive libraries of oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a young Dinéh poet born in 1991, and including renowned writers such as Natalie Diaz, Tommy Pico, Layli Long Soldier, and Ray Young Bear. In When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, Harjo offers the extraordinary sweep of Native literature.
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