Indigenous Studies

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science....

Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude.

In this important addition to the growing tradition of North American history centered on Indigenous nations, Kathleen DuVal shows how the definitions of power and means of exerting it shifted over time, but the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant....

Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories....

Widely hailed as a spiritual classic, this inspirational and unfailingly powerful story reveals the life and visions of the Lakota healer Nicholas Black Elk....

This collection of writings from revered Native Americans offers timeless, meaningful lessons on living and learning....

A paradigm-shifting book in the vein of Sapiens that brings a crucial Indigenous perspective to historical and cultural issues of history, education, money, power, and sustainability - and offers a new template for living....

The most enduring feature of US history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants....

A comprehensive guide to the foundations of Toltec wisdom, Beyond Fear is essential reading for fans of Don Miguel Ruiz’s New York Times best-selling book, The Four Agreements, which has sold over 8 million copies and has been translated into 46 languages worldwide....

T. R. Fehrenbach brilliantly delineates the contrasts and conflicts between the many Mexicos, unraveling the history while weaving a fascinating tapestry of beauty and brutality: the Amerindians, who wrought from the vulnerable land a great indigenous Meso-American civilization....

In Asia’s narcotics-producing heartland, the Wa reign supreme. They dominate the Golden Triangle, a mountainous stretch of Burma between Thailand and China. Their 30,000-strong army, wielding missiles and attack drones, makes Mexican cartels look like street gangs....

An extraordinary compilation of legends and rituals about nature's ever-present signs. From the birds that soar above us to the insects beneath our feet, Native American healer Bobby Lake-Thom shows how the creatures of the earth can aid us in healing and self-knowledge....

A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later.

Drawing on four years of research, interviews, and 20,000 miles of travel, author Kent Nerburn takes us beyond the surrender to the captives' unlikely welcome in Bismarck, North Dakota, their tragic eight-year exile in Indian Territory, and their ultimate return to the Northwest....

Compelling and profound, The Lakota Way gives a fresh outlook to those searching for a new perspective on spiritual and ethical living....

Drawing from ancestral knowledge, as well as her experience as an attorney and activist, Sherri Mitchell addresses some of the most crucial issues of our day—including indigenous land rights, environmental justice, and our collective human survival....

When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom....

As Rouse discusses the Tainos' contributions to the Spaniards-from Indian corn, tobacco, and rubber balls to art, artifacts, and new words-we realize that their effect on Western civilization, brief through their contact, was an important and lasting one.

In this strange and wonderful book, thirty elders of the ancient Hopi tribe of Northern Arizona—a people who regard themselves as the first inhabitants of America—freely reveal the Hopi worldview for the first time in written form.

Mary Brave Bird grew up fatherless in a one-room cabin, without running water or electricity, on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota....

Indigenous worldviews, and the knowledge they confer, are critical for human survival and the wellbeing of future generations.

"I Am a Man" chronicles what happened when Standing Bear set off on a 600-mile walk to return the body of his only son to their traditional burial grounds....

There is a contagious psychospiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, that is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via a collective psychosis of titanic proportions....

This American Book Award winning title about Native American struggle and resistance radically reframes more than 400 years of US history.

In this teaching memoir, Shawn Leonard shares his personal story of developing his abilities as a spirit talker, revealing incredible stories from his childhood to the present.

When she was twenty-five, Ursula Pike boarded a plane to Bolivia and began her term of service in the Peace Corps. A member of the Karuk Tribe, Pike sought to make meaningful connections with Indigenous people halfway around the world. But she arrived in La Paz with trepidation as well as excitement, 'knowing I followed in the footsteps of Western colonizers and missionaries who had also claimed they were there to help.'

Presenting a deep dive into the world of psychedelic initiation and ancestral wisdom, Tricia Eastman demonstrates the power of plant medicine and psychedelic journeys for cultivating new beliefs, healing trauma, and accessing latent gifts within us—an inner alchemical process she calls “seeding consciousness.” Drawing on her studies with Indigenous elders, including two decades of iboga initiations with the Bwiti of Gabon, Africa, and training with the Kogi Kággaba of Colombia, Eastman provides a blueprint to transform pain and trauma into profound connections.

Taking us through his more than 50 years of immersion in psychedelic shamanism, Tom Soloway Pinkson shares profound Indigenous teachings, plant teacher wisdom, and his own transformative experiences on the psychedelic Wisdom Warrior path. Pinkson shares his journey of awakening through childhood trauma to a revelatory connection with nature. He describes his mentorship with Indigenous medicine peoples around the world, including an eleven-year initiatory apprenticeship with Guadalupe de la Cruz, a renowned Huichol shaman.

In 1963 – a year of agitation for civil rights worldwide – the Yolŋu of northeast Arnhem Land created the Yirrkala Bark Petitions: Näku Dhäruk. ‘The land grew a tongue’ and the land-rights movement was born. Näku Dhäruk is the story of a founding document in Australian democracy and the trailblazers who made it. It is also a pulsating picture of the ancient and enduring culture of Australia’s first peoples. And it is a masterful, groundbreaking history.

Young 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 example of settler colonial resource extraction and wealth accumulation. Reed shares this history to inform the path toward an alternative future.