Yuma Public Library

A poignant look at the pain inflicted upon one child by a dominant culture's heavy-handed attempt to "help." Near the turn of the century, a Cheyenne boy, Young Bull, is forced to attend the off-reservation Indian school so that he can learn to become a part of the white world.

"Leah Myers may be the last member of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe in her family line, due to her tribe's strict blood quantum laws. In this unflinching and intimate memoir, Myers excavates the stories of four generations of women in order to leave a record of her family. Beginning with her great-grandmother, the last full-blooded Native member in their lineage, she connects each woman with her totem to construct her family's totem pole: protective...

Chung investigates the mysteries and complexities of her transracial adoption in this chronicle of unexpected family for anyone who has struggled to figure out where they belong.

The received idea of Native American history--as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee--has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U. S. Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching...

"When we first meet Ruby, a Metis woman in her 30s, she's a mess. She's angling to sleep with her therapist while also rekindling an old relationship with a man who was - let's just say - a mistake. As we will soon learn, however, Ruby's story is far broader and deeper than its rollicking, somewhat lighthearted first chapter. This is the story of a woman in search of herself, in every sense. Given up for adoption as an infant, Ruby was raised by a...

Masuo Yasui's family struggled to adjust, endure, and triumph in their new country as they fought racism.

"Drawing on a rich family archive as well as the anthropological work of her late great-grandmother, LaPointe explores themes ranging from indigenous identity and stereotypes to cultural displacement and environmental degradation to understand what our experiences teach us about the power of community, commitment, and conscientious honesty. Unapologetically punk, the essays in Thunder Song segue between the miraculous and the mundane, the spiritual...

"Sondra Jones traces the metamorphosis of the Ute people from a society of small, interrelated bands of mobile hunter-gatherers to sovereign, dependent nations, modern tribes who run extensive business enterprises and government services. Weaving together the history of all Ute groups in Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. the narrative describes their traditional culture, including all the facets that have continued to define them as a people. Jones...

"Young Latinos across the United States are redefining their identities, pushing boundaries, and awakening politically in powerful and surprising ways. Many of them--Afrolatino, indigenous, Muslim, queer and undocumented, living in large cities and small towns--are voices who have been chronically overlooked in how the diverse population of almost sixty million Latinos in the U.S. has been represented. No longer. In this empowering cross-country travelogue,...