New Books October 1, 2009

These books are on the New Book Shelf in Dafoe Library. You place a request on them in the Libraries Catalogue and they will be put aside for you when the display period is over.

Want to write a review. Send your review to the comments section and I will post it.

Maggie Wilson, Rainy River Lives: Stories told by Maggie Wilson, University of Nebraska Press, 2009, Dafoe E99 C6 W64 2009.

This is a collection of stories told to anthropologist Ruth Landes by Maggie Wilson, 1879 to 1940, an Ojibwe woman who lived on the Manitou Rapids Reserve on the border of Ontario and Minnesota. The transcriptions of the stories were lost when they were misfiled at the Smithsonian Institute and they are presented in here in a new edition by Concordia University anthropologist Sally Cole. The stories recount every day events but are a rich resource for understanding Ojibwe cultural beliefs.

Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, Alfred Knopf, 2005, Dafoe E61 M266 2005.

Mann, an award winning science writer who publishes in Science and the Atlantic Monthly, uses recent research results to paint a picture of the cultures of the Americas in 1491. Many of the discoveries and speculations that he reports on differ from the conventional wisdom about indigenous America. The population of the Americas may well have been larger than that of Europe; Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, was not only larger than any European city but cleaner and healthier to live in. An interesting and readable addition to the ever-growing literature on pre 1492 America.

Kathryn Derounian-Stodola, The War in Words: Reading the Dakota Conflict through the Captivity Literature, University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

Dafoe E83.86 D47 2009.

This book is a study of 24 of the many accounts of the war between whites and the Dakota in 1862. A Professor of English at the University of Arkansas, Dr. Derounian-Stodola gives the reader an "ethnography of representative Dakota Conflict narratives and an analysis of the war's historiography." from the cover.

Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940. University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Dafoe E98 C89 J32 2009.

Jacobs is a History professor at University of Nebraska. In this work she contrasts the role of white women in implementing the policy of removing indigenous children from their families and communities in Australia and the U.S..