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Hey, I'm in the same shoes as you! My family is also from Michoacan, and I was looking for resources online concerning learning Purepecha, but there aren't many, and some that are there are pretty stale.

I was asking my family, and my sister in Mexico told me of this app called Vamos a aprender Purepucha. It's on the google play store, I don;t know about about App store. But the app is pretty neat, it teaches Purepucha differently than say Duolingo. Rather than tests or quizzes, the app has this artsy style showing around a drawn Purepecha community, and you go around engaging with it. I haven't gone so far into the app, but starting off its great. The application isn't in English, only in Spanish for translation. In my case, Spanish is my second language and as long you can read Spanish passingly it'll be fine.

As for learning history, there's a lot of books..... in Spanish. Yeah I know, but on the bright side, now we're exercising two languages at once. I don't know what in history you want, be culture or political history, but there's a hefty about online too. There's this book about the former Purepucha capital Tzintzuntzán. And there this giving some summations on Purepecha history. I'm also beginning this too, so I don't have much to show now, but there's a lot more we haven't found yet. Keep on.

On the issue of the genocide in particular, since you request that, I recommend American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World by David E. Stannard. I found it very interesting. It is very much source and historical account aware and documented. He covers quite a bit of the religious motivations and justifications involved, which is upsetting to many people and provokes a several denialist response, so be forewarned. The truth is very different from the so-called (re-) education I received as a youth in state run schools, promoting stories that I later found were myths. I mention this only because your post suggests you have had a similar awakening. I don't find this topic to be easy or comfortable reading, and I commend your interest in pursuing the truth.

I have a rather large library myself at my home so I can list hundreds of titles that I have found interesting, so any list I give will be necessarily truncated. It's helpful that you specify the specific area you are interested in. I feel you might also find Peter Nabokov's Native American Testimony of interest, since it contains nothing but first person accounts, one after another, and gives a lot of insight into our perspectives and the way we view things.

There is also the exceptionally well produced 500 Nations documentary which was hosted by Kevin Costner, and the excellent companion book by Alvin Josephy. The film documentary you can purchase on amazon, or watch on youtube, it's several hours long in multiple parts, and exceptional. The book fills in the details and contains a much more accurate history than we have been used to seeing presented.

Thank you for your interest in digging deeper.

I've posted this before, and I wonder to what extent Chicagoans know this. Chicago is an anglo version of our original placename Zhgaagong, meaning 'the place of the skunk' or 'place of the wild onion' in Anishinaabemowin (Ojibway). We still call it that.

Yes, you could look into the Illini, the Potawatomi (part of the 3 Fires Alliance along with the Odawa and Ojibway), the Miami, the Hocak*, and others. A lot of Algonquian speaking people in that area (though Hocak are Siouan speaking peoples)... Zhgaagong was a large trading centre before white encroachment.

Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History is a favorite of mine, I love it because it's highly visual and gives meaning to a lot of the places you most likely frequent today.

Edit: Another one this is a great text to introduce you to the subject of Native American history, and it's written in columns alongside world history. It was one of the intro texts in my indigenous studies courses. It's an accessible read that may introduce you to subjects about indigenous Nations you'd be more interested in.

Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock: Treaty Rights and Indian Law at the End of the Nineteenth Century is an important case personally brought to the Supreme Court in 1903 by a great man from my nation to determine whether an unratified treaty was valid. Result was the Supreme Court clarified that treaties with indian nations are considered meaningless in the eyes of the US government and have no legal standing since indians are imbecilic "wards of the state" and we aren't real nations. This case hasn't been overturned.

American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court : The Masking of Justice covers the Supreme Court's schizophrenic views on Indians, which bear absolutely no similarity to their rulings on non-Indians, are inconsistent, and make no sense other than the general rule is still "Indians lose".

Johnson v. M'Intosh is a critical early case that established that the legal justification for the taking of our lands was the "Doctrine of Discovery", invented by the Catholic Church, which purports that the first christian to set eyes upon land owned by non-christians seizes it permanently for his nation because non-christians are incapable of owning property and are fit only to be slaves or farm animals since Indian claims on land are comparable to a fish claiming to own the ocean (an actual example they use). Still hasn't been overturned and is still being cited as the ruling authority for 21st century cases.

For a really interesting ethnobotanical perspective on the way California people lived, check out the book Tending the Wild by M. Kat Anderson. https://www.amazon.com/Tending-Wild-Knowledge-Management-Californias/dp/0520280431

"John Muir was an early proponent of a view we still [unfortunately] hold today— that much of California was pristine, untouched wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. But as this groundbreaking book demonstrates, what Muir was really seeing when he admired the grand vistas of Yosemite and the gold and purple flowers carpeting the Central Valley were the fertile gardens of the Sierra Miwok and Valley Yokuts Indians, modified and made productive by centuries of harvesting, tilling, sowing, pruning, and burning. "

Check this book out. I really enjoyed it. I'm from another tribe and our language does similar things, but the author does a fantastic job at showing the power of stories through Native languages. Here it is.

The catalog was fantastic; can't wait to see the show.

I'm really glad people have stopped describing him as one of the first Native American photographers, since Natives have been photographing at least since 1887. Kiowa linguist Parker MacKenzie and his wife Nettie Odlety both bought cameras in 1913 while at the Phoenix Indian School.

Curtis' images are incredibly flawed documents. He did a fair amount of artistic editing of the clothing his subjects wore and the environments they were photographed in. His focus was on photographing what he believed to be the "true" Native that he believed was going extinct. In doing so, he created a large documentary record filled with false truths. The "history" he created was of his own creation, not of those he was photographing.

Curtis' work has been used as the definitive record of that period's Native life by many people who do not know about his photo staging. Often, they are used as documents against modern Indians as a way to delegitimize our cultural authenticity. This has lead to a lot of resentment towards his work. If he had photographed Indian peoples in their real contexts, there would not only be less resentment, but there would be a better modern understanding of the interactions between Indian cultures and Western technology over time by the general public.

As it stands, Curtis' photographs are a staged romantic view of historical Indians that can be described as little more than a stereotype.

To see an opposite example, check out Phil Deloria's Indians in Unexpected Places.

i've always like this one, since I grew up with karuk coyote creation stories.

The first few are Chahta but there are various tribes depicted, some available in both English and the given tribal language!

• The Cloud Artist
  
• Crossing Bok Chitto
  
• When Turtle Grew Feathers
  
• When We Were Alone
  
• Grandmother’s Dreamcatcher
  
• Buffalo Bird Girl
  
• Stolen Words
  
• I Am Not A Number
  
• A Day With Yayah
  
• You Hold Me Up
  
• Wild Berries
  
  Some tribes have lists online or books available in their online stores, as well, so if you’re looking for anything specific you might try that.

The American Heritage Book of Indians.

Those old dictionaries are missing soooo much. Check out Chinuk Wawa, How Our Elders Teach UsTi Speak It.

I haven't read this one but it's written by two academics who used to work in this "industry".

http://www.amazon.com/Disrobing-Aboriginal-Industry-Indigenous-Preservation/dp/0773534210/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422652643&sr=8-1&keywords=disrobing+the+aboriginal+industry

Here's a short video clip of the authors on a talk show, debating with some Natives. One Native, now disgraced, former Canadian Senator Patrick Brazeau is also in this talk, and he basically agrees with it. And for that he was branded a traitor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05kdCzIXIDo

I don't want to be adversarial, but the following statement could use some documentation: "Some estimates put the count at 118 million natives killed by direct involvement (from obvious negligence(seeing that their presence is killing people off via disease, but continuing to invade their territory) to deliberate extermination (trail of tears, etc), which is substantially more than the combined genocides that have at least minimum recorded numbers throughhout history perpatrated by all other groups/countries."

I'm interested in where you learned that the US perpetrated the greatest genocide in history because there are many scholars who estimate that the entire population of the Americas was below 118 million prior to contact with Europeans. This scholar, for example, documents the attempts to develop an accurate measure of Native American populations, and how many writers and historians have used unreliable methods for calculating population density.

So, without being smug or dismissive, I just really want to know what your sources are? Thanks!

Hi,

Totally-out-of-my-depth-and-curious non-native here.

I read All The Real Indians Died Off recently. In it, the authors mention that (as of a 2014 Pew Research poll) 1 in 4 Native Americans still lives in poverty. According to a quick google link, this is a problem with First Nations people as well. The same link says, "Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde called for a meeting between Indigenous, federal and provincial leaders next year to work on closing the economic gap with the wider population."

My question is, seeing as poverty is a serious problem, do First Nations universities teach with a collective vision/idea of how future generations should act to close this gap, and is it the same as or different from that of the wider First Nation community?

Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask this kind of question.