This week the American Indian Studies Center at University of California, Los Angeles and its Southern California co-hosts will welcome NAISA, the largest scholarly organization devoted to Indigenous issues and research. UNP will have new and notable titles on display at booth 212. Below is a sample of what you’ll find. 

Indigenous Cities: Urban Indian Fiction and the Histories of Relocation by Laura M. Furlan is a critical study of contemporary American Indian narratives set in urban spaces that reveals how these texts respond to diaspora, dislocation, citizenship, and reclamation.

Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations
edited by Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose interweaves the voices of students’ descendants, poets, and activists, with cutting edge research by Native and non-Native scholars to reveal the complex history and enduring legacies of the school that spearheaded the federal campaign for Indian assimilation. It was picked as a top book in 2016 by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film by Michelle H. Raheja is an examination of the role of Native Americans in shaping Native portrayals and representations in film. A review in Western Historical Quarterly describes the book as “deeply researched and beautifully conceptualized and written.”

The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age by Robert Aquinas McNally is the wrenching story of the Modoc War of 1872–73, one of the nation’s most dramatic conflicts against North American Indigenous peoples. The Modoc War recently won a California Book Award.

So, How Long Have You Been Native? Life as an Alaska Native Tour Guide by Alexis Bunten is a narrative of the cultural tourism industry in Alaska through the author’s experiences working as a Native tour guide. The book won the 2016 Alaskana Award from the Alaska Library Association.

Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet by Rosalyn R. LaPier presents a nuanced look at the history of the Blackfeet and their relationship with the natural world.

Chehalis Stories is an important collection in which Jolynn Amrine Goertz and the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation examine the methodologies, shortcomings, and limitations of anthropologists’ relationship with Chehalis people in Western Washington and present complementary approaches to field work and its contextualization.

In the Lands of Fire and Sun: Resistance and Accommodation in the Huichol Sierra, 1723–1930 by Michele McArdle Stephens is a history of western Mexico’s Huichol people, an indigenous group that resisted and selectively adapted to colonial Spanish and Mexican life rather than fully assimilating into the Hispanic fold.