This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made (Penguin History American Life)
Hoxie—author, professor, and trustee of the National  Museum of the American Indian—focuses on Native American figures who, for the last 200 years, have sought to define a place for Native communities within the institutions of the U.S. He begins with James McDonald, the first Indian lawyer, who, in the 1820s, was the first Native activist to make the case for Indian rights directly to American political leaders. One of his successors, William Potter Ross, testified before Congress and was an active defender of American Indian nationalism until his death, in 1891. Sarah Winnemucca was a Paiute author and activist who wrote forcefully about the western expansion into her homeland. Hoxie examines in meticulous detail the successful 20-year Ojibwe struggle to stay on their land at Mille Lac, Minnesota, and the 1911 formation of the Society of American Indians, whose founders  focused on the extension of American citizenship to all Native peoples. He concludes this enlightening volume, the latest in the Penguin History of American Life, with Vine Deloria, who encouraged “re-tribalization”—the return of young educated Indians from cities back to their tribes. --Deborah Donovan