Exploring Deeper

           

Movies:

 Blood Memory: For Sandy White Hawk, the story of America’s Indian Adoption Era is not one of saving children but of destroying families and tribes. At 18 months of age, Sandy was removed from her Sicangu Lakota relatives and placed with white missionaries over 400 miles from the reservation. Growing up as the only brown girl in a small Wisconsin town, Sandy’s cultural identity was rejected, leaving her feeling ugly, alone, and unworthy of love.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/hIEiRTaGusM

Full length movie: https://worldchannel.org/episode/arf-blood-memory/?mc_cid=0e51d3cb12&mc_eid=9c8d12fc73

           

 Dances with Wolves: Lt. John Dunbar is dubbed a hero after he accidentally leads Union troops to a victory during the Civil War. He requests a position on the western frontier, but finds it deserted. He soon finds out he is not alone but meets a wolf he dubs "Two-socks" and a curious Indian tribe (Lakota Sioux). Dunbar quickly makes friends with the tribe and discovers a white woman who was raised by the Indians. He gradually earns the respect of these native people and sheds his white-man's ways.  

Trailer: https://youtu.be/J0obOvGGb1U

DVD available from library

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 Broken Arrow (1950): Broken Arrow is a 1950 American Western film directed by Delmer Daves and starred James Stewart as Tom Jeffords and Jeff Chandler as Cochise. The film is based on these historical figures but fictionalizes their story in dramatized form. It was nominated for three Academy Awards, and won a Golden Globe award for Best Film Promoting International Understanding. Film historians have said that the movie was one of the first major Westerns since the Second World War to portray the Indians sympathetically.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/qdYOfdwB_iM

 

 

Books: All titles are available in the BHHS library

Non-fiction:

Looks like daylight: voices of indigenous kids by: Deborah Ellis-- Presents a collection of interviews with Native American children aged nine to eighteen from North America, focusing on their daily lives, what interests them and what it means to be Native American.

 

Between earth & sky: legends of Native American sacred places-- Through the guidance of his uncle and the retelling of various Native American legends, a young boy learns that everything living and inanimate has its place, should be considered sacred, and given respect.

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Dreaming in Indian: contemporary Native American voices: Looks at over fifty emerging and established contemporary Native American artists.

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Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football team:

"A great American sport and Native American history come together in this true story of how Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner created the legendary Carlisle Indians football team"

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Canyon dreams: a basketball season on the Navajo Nation by Michael Powell :

Deep in the heart of northern Arizona, in a small and isolated patch of the vast 17.5-million-acre Navajo reservation, sits Chinle High School. Here, basketball is passion, passed from grandparent to parent to child. Rez Ball is a sport for winters where dark and cold descend fast and there is little else to do but roam mesa tops, work, and wonder what the future holds. The town has 4,500 residents and the high school arena seats 7,000. Fans drive thirty, fifty, even eighty miles to see the fast-paced and highly competitive matchups that are more than just games to players and fans. Celebrated Times journalist Michael Powell brings us a narrative of triumph and hardship, a moving story about a basketball team on a Navajo reservation that shows how important sports can be to youths in struggling communities, and the transcendent magic and painful realities that confront Native Americans living on reservations. This book details his season-long immersion in the team, town, and culture, in which there were exhilarating wins, crushing losses, and conversations on long bus rides across the desert about dreams of leaving home and the fear of the same"

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#NotYourPrincess : voices of Native American Women: an eclectic collection of poems, essays, interviews, and art that combine to express the experience of being a Native woman. Stories of abuse, humiliation, and stereotyping are countered by the voices of passionate women making themselves heard and demanding change

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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: an Indian history of the American west by Dee Brown

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's eloquent, fully documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century. Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows the great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them demoralized and defeated. A unique and disturbing narrative told with force and clarity; Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee changed forever our vision of how the West was really won.

 

The life & death of Crazy Horse: by Russell Freedman A biography of the Oglala (Sioux) leader who relentlessly resisted the white man's attempt to take over Indian lands.

 Tatan'ka Iyota'ke : Sitting Bull and his world: Discusses the life of the Hunkpapa (Sioux) chief who is remembered for his defeat of General Custer at Little Big Horn.

 

FICTION:

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Titles by Sherman Alexie- His writings draw on his experiences as an Indigenous American with ancestry from several tribes. 

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Titles by Tony Hillerman- Is famous for his Navajo mystery series featuring Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee who are with the Navajo Tribal Police.

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Code Talker : a novel about the Navajo Marines of World War Two: After being taught in a boarding school run by whites that Navajo is a useless language, Ned Begay and other Navajo men are recruited by the Marines to become Code Talkers, sending messages during World War II in their native tongue

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There, There by Tommy Orange:  Jacquie Red Feather, Edwin Black, and Tony Loneman are all going to the Big Oakland Pow Wow for different reasons in this relentlessly paced, multi-generational story.

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White Girl by Sylvia Olsen:  Fifteen-year-old Josie Jessop goes from blending into the crowd to being "White Girl" when her mother marries a First Nations man and moves them to his house on a reserve outside the city, where she must come to terms with her new home, new school, and new family amidst very few friendly faces.

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Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko:  Tayo, the hero of Leslie Marmon Silko’s groundbreaking novel Ceremony, is a half-blood Laguna Indian who returns to his reservation after surviving the Bataan Death March of World War II. As he struggles to recover the peace of mind that his experience of warfare has stolen from him, Tayo finds that memory, identity, and his relations with others all resemble the colored threads of his grandmother’s sewing basket. The elements of his personality feel knotted and tangled, and his every attempt to restore them to order merely snags and twists them all the more. Tayo’s problems, however, extend far beyond the frustrations and alienation he encounters in trying to readjust to peacetime. Having risked his life for an America that fundamentally disowns him, Tayo must confront difficult and painful questions about the society he has been fighting for.