Tribal Worlds ― Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building

Explores how indigenous nationhood has emerged and been maintained in the face of aggressive efforts to assimilate Native peoples.

Tribal Worlds considers the emergence and general project of indigenous nationhood in several geographical and historical settings in Native North America. Ethnographers and historians address issues of belonging, peoplehood, sovereignty, conflict, economy, identity, and colonialism among the Northern Cheyenne and Kiowa on the Plains, several groups of the Ojibwe, the Makah of the Northwest, and two groups of Iroquois. Featuring a new essay by the eminent senior scholar Anthony F. C. Wallace on recent ethnographic work he has done in the Tuscarora community, as well as provocative essays by junior scholars, Tribal Worlds explores how indigenous nationhood has emerged and been maintained in the face of aggressive efforts to assimilate Native peoples.

Brian Hosmer holds the H. G. Barnard Chair of Western American History at the University of Tulsa. He is the author of American Indians in the Marketplace: Persistence and Innovation among the Menominees and Metlakatlans, 1870–1920; the editor of Native Americans and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman; and the coeditor (with Colleen O’Neill) of Native Pathways: American Indian Culture and Economic Development in the Twentieth Century.

Larry Nesper is Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of The Walleye War: The Struggle for Ojibwe Spearfishing and Treaty Rights.