Fossil Legends of the First Americans

Fossil Legends of the First AmericansThe burnt red badlands of Montana's Hell Creek are a vast graveyard of the Cretaceous dinosaurs that lived 68 million years ago. Those hills were, much later, also home to the Sioux, the Crows, and the Blackfeet, the first people to encounter the dinosaur fossils exposed by the elements. What did Native Americans make of these stone skeletons, and how did they explain the teeth and claws of gargantuan animals no one had seen alive? Did they speculate

Looking for a little mischief after finding an old flare gun

and particularly queer and non-cis gender articulations

as Weeks does in this book

all experienced enormous changes in their lifetimes

But these variations and changes have always followed a distinct path

the common threads of historical violence against Indigenous people

It presents the Sicangu dialect using an orthography developed by Lakota in 1982 and which is now supplanting older systems provided by linguists and missionaries

published in association with the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian

Hernandez makes the case that if we're to recover the health of our planet--for everyone--we need to stop the eco-colonialism ravaging Indigenous lands and restore our relationship with Earth to one of harmony and respect

and jingle-dress dancers-all with telltale ears and paws and tails

code talking originated in World War I among Native soldiers whose extraordinary service resulted

Sasha offers up an unblinking reckoning with personal traumas amplified by the collective historical traumas of colonialism and genocide that continue to haunt native peoples