Research and Course Guides: Topic: Indigenous Resources: Books

Access to the University Libraries' book collections

The University libraries are open to all and visitors are welcome to browse and use our collections on site. Books may be checked out by University of St. Thomas faculty, staff, and students, as well as alumni and Friends of the Library.

Ebooks require a University of St. Thomas login. Visitors to the library may use our visitor computers to read ebooks in the library.

Searching for books

Use our online discovery tool, LibrarySearch to search for books in our collection, along with books at our CLIC consortium schools.

Keep in mind while searching that many of the terms used to talk about Indigenous and Native Peoples have changed over time. See below for more discussion on the subject headings used in our library.

Use the terms Native American, Amerindian, Indian, First Peoples or indigenous as keywords
Search by the name of a particular tribe or cultural group, keeping in mind that there may be alternate spellings and anglicizations (e.g. Ojibwe, Chippewa and Anishinaabe)

Outdated terminology in the Library of Congress subject headings

The Library of Congress uses controlled vocabularies and subject headings to classify bibliographic material. These subject headings are standardized, and they are difficult to change. Problematically, the United States' colonial history is evident in the way the Library of Congress has historically classified certain topics. This issue is nowhere more apparent than in its classification of issues surrounding Native American, First Nations', and indigenous peoples' history and culture.

Currently, the Library of Congress still uses outdated terminology to classify Native American topics and issues. Some subject headings that you are likely to see include:

Slowly over time, advocates have been petitioning the Library of Congress to update its controlled subject heading vocabulary to provide an authentic representation of Native Americans' lived experiences. As the transition from older to newer terminology is accomplished, we find many resources have a blend of older and newer subject headings. Newer subject headings include

This section on Library of Congress Subject Headings is adapted from the Franklin Pierce University Library guide, Native American Literature: Library of Congress Subject Headings.

Selected books from our collection

Why You Can't Teach United States History Without American Indians by Susan Sleeper-Smith, Juliana Barr, Jean M. O'Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning Stevens (Editors)
Call Number: ebook and O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library E76.6 .W49 2015
This book illuminates the unmistakable centrality of American Indian history to the full sweep of American history. The nineteen essays gathered in this collaboratively produced volume, written by leading scholars in the field of Native American history, reflect the newest directions of the field and are organized to follow the chronological arc of the standard American history survey. Contributors reassess major events, themes, groups of historical actors, and approaches--social, cultural, military, and political--consistently demonstrating how Native American people, and questions of Native American sovereignty, have animated all the ways we consider the nation's past.
Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians but Were Afraid to Ask by Anton Treuer
Call Number: O'Shaughnessy-Frey library E77 .T795 2012
What have you always wanted to know about Indians? Do you think you should already know the answers--or suspect that your questions may be offensive? Ojibwe scholar and cultural preservationist Anton Treuer gives a frank, funny, and sometimes personal matter-of-fact responses to over 120 questions.
What Does Justice Look Like? by Waziyatawin
Call Number: O'Shaughnessy-Frey and Schoenecker Law Libraries E78.M7 W553 2008
During the past 150 years, the majority of Minnesotans have not acknowledged the immense and ongoing harms suffered by the Dakota People ever since their homelands were invaded over 200 years ago. Written by Wahpetunwan Dakota scholar and activist Waziyatawin of Pezihutazizi Otunwe, What Does Justice Look Like? offers an opportunity now and for future generations to learn the long-untold history and what it has meant for the Dakota People.
Mni Sota Makoce: the land of the Dakota by Gwen Westerman; Bruce White
Call Number: ebook and O'Shaughnessy-Frey library E99.D1 W63 2012
ISBN: 9780873518697
Drawing on oral history interviews, archival work, and painstaking comparisons of Dakota, French, and English sources, Mni Sota Makoce tells the detailed history of the Dakota people in their traditional homelands for at least hundreds of years prior to exile.
An Infinity of Nations by Michael Witgen
Call Number: ebook and O'Shaughnessy-Frey library E91 .W58 2012
An Infinity of Nations explores the formation and development of a Native New World in North America. Through use of both Native language and European documents, historian Michael Witgen recreates the world of the indigenous peoples who ruled the western interior of North America, the Anishinaabe and Dakota peoples of the Great Lakes and Northern Great Plains.
The Relentless Business of Treaties by Martin Case
Call Number: O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library E98.T75 C37 2018
The story of "western expansion" is a familiar one: U.S. government agents, through duplicity and force, persuaded Native Americans to sign treaties that gave away their rights to the land. But this framing, argues Martin Case, hides a deeper story. Land cession treaties were essentially the act of supplanting indigenous kinship relationships to the land with a property relationship. And property is the organizing principle upon which U.S. society is based. U.S. signers represented the relentless interests that drove treaty making: corporate and individual profit, political ambition, and assimilationist assumptions of cultural superiority. The lives of these men illustrate the assumptions inherent in the property system-and the dynamics by which it spread across the continent. In this book, for the first time, Case provides a comprehensive study of the treaty signers, exposing their business ties and multigenerational interrelationships through birth and marriage. Taking Minnesota as a case study, he describes the groups that shaped U.S. treaty making to further their own interests: interpreters, traders, land speculators, bureaucrats, officeholders, missionaries, and mining, timber, and transportation companies. Odds are, the deed to the land under your home rests on this system.
Through Dakota Eyes by Gary Clayton Anderson (Editor); Alan R. Woolworth (Editor)
Call Number: O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library E83.86 .T48 1988
This volume brings together an invaluable collection of vivid eyewitness accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862 and its aftermath. Of greatest interest is the fact that all the narratives assembled here come from Dakota mixed-bloods and full-bloods. Speaking from a variety of viewpoints and enmeshed in complex webs of allegiances to Indian, white, and mixed-blood kin, these witnesses testify not only to the terrible casualties they all suffered, but also to the ways in which the events of 1862 tore at the social, cultural, and psychic fabrics of their familial and community lives. This rich contribution to Minnesota and Dakota history is enhanced by careful editing and annotation .
Ojibwe in Minnesota by Anton Treuer
Call Number: O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library E99.C6 T74 2010
With insight and candor, noted Ojibwe scholar Anton Treuer traces thousands of years of the complicated history of the Ojibwe people--their economy, culture, and clan system and how these have changed throughout time, perhaps most dramatically with the arrival of Europeans into Minnesota territory.
Warrior Nation by Anton Treuer
Call Number: O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library E99.C6 T76 2015
The Red Lake Nation has a unique and deeply important history. Unlike every other reservation in Minnesota, Red Lake holds its land in common--and, consequently, the tribe retains its entire reservation land base. The people of Red Lake developed the first modern indigenous democratic governance system in the United States, decades before any other tribe, but they also maintained their system of hereditary chiefs. The tribe never surrendered to state jurisdiction over crimes committed on its reservation. The reservation is also home to the highest number of Ojibwe-speaking people in the state. Warrior Nation covers four centuries of the Red Lake Nation's forceful and assertive tenure on its land.