This book offers twenty original scholarly chapters featuring historical and biographical analyses of Native American women. The lives of women found her contributed significantly to their people and people everywhere. The book presents Native women of action and accomplishments in many areas of life. This work highlights women during the modern era of American history, countering past stereotypes of Native women. With the exceptions of Pocahontas and Sacajawea, historians have had little to say about American Indian women who have played key roles in the history of their tribes, their relationship with others, and the history of the United States. Indigenous women featured herein distinguished themselves as fiction and non-fiction writers, poets, potters, basket makers, musicians, and dancers. Other women contributed as notable educators and women working in health and medicine. They are representative of many women within the Native Universe who excelled in their lives to enrich the American experience.
Clifford E. Trazer is distinguished professor of history and Rupert Costo Chair in American Indian Affairs at the University of California, Riverside. Donna L. Akers (Choctaw) is professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. Amanda K. Wixon (Chickasaw) and is Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of California, Riverside.
This edited work presents generally short biographical studies of 20 quite extraordinary Native American/First Nations women who have contributed creatively and productively to the humanities, science, education, medicine, and community work, each with a sharp focus on social justice. Trafzer, Akers, and Wixon frame these diverse women, born collectively between the late 19th century and 1960, in an introduction centered on the prominence of women and female spiritual principles throughout all Indigenous societies, spanning diverse times and places. Brief sketches of the women are woven throughout the introduction, highlighting the influences of those with whom each woman worked and collaborated. Overall, the book demonstrates how these women addressed and resisted the ravages of infectious disease, medical and educational neglect and malpractice, racism, sexism, assimilation, and other interlocking expressions of discrimination on behalf of their broader communities. The approach of seeking historical understanding through biographical analysis is successful. Recommended. All readers. -- "Choice Reviews"
