Description: In “The Threshold of Manifest Destiny,” Laurel Clark Shire illuminates the vital role women played in national expansion and shows how gender ideology was a key mechanism in U.S. settler colonialism. Among the many contentious frontier zones in nineteenth-century North America, Florida was an early and important borderland where the United States worked out […]

Abstract: This chapter reads anthropologist Laura Peers’ Playing Ourselves (2007) through the lens of Homi Bhabha’s theory of cultural performance. Playing Ourselves showcases First Nations interpreters playing their historic ancestors in living history sites run by North American state-owned heritage agencies. This focus on First Nations performers highlights the ‘toured’ rather than the tourist, inverting […]

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Abstract: A ghetto land pedagogy begins with two axioms that align it with land education more broadly, and that distinguish it from the general umbrella of environmental education. First, ghetto colonialism is a specialization of settler colonialism. Second, land justice requires decolonization, not just environmental justice. A ghetto land pedagogy thus attends to an analysis […]

Excerpt: Like the pictograph we feature on our cover, which speaks to ties among peoples and places in the region, this special issue of the Middle West Review explores a diverse range of Indigenous experiences in a variety of locations in what has come to be known as the American Midwest. “The Midwest,” however, is […]

Excerpt: East Franklin Avenue emerged as one of South Minneapolis’ principal commercial corridors at the end of the nineteenth century. Early residents tend to remember the area affectionately. One who spent her youth on East Franklin in the first decades of the twentieth century described it as the attractive center of a tightly knit urban […]

Excerpt: The geographic and economic setting of the nineteenth century Upper Great Lakes region created unique challenges to American settler colonialism and encounters with the Indigenous people of this land of lakes and forests. Many Anishinaabeg bands responded creatively through the use of Christianity, education, and American law in an attempt to fortify their presence […]

Excerpt: In 1929 Bertha C. Ball and her children placed a life-size copy of Cyrus Dallin’s statue, Appeal to the Great Spirit, in a small park at the intersection of Walnut Street and Granville Avenue in Muncie, Indiana. The figure—a generalized Great Plains warrior on horseback with outstretched arms and head tilted toward the heavens—may […]

Excerpt: To local Detroiters and throughout the United States, the name Pontiac holds many meanings. Most know about the name of the now discontinued General Motors automobile. A quick Google search of “Pontiac” reveals, first, the General Motors brand and, then, the city Pontiac, Michigan. The third “Pontiac” subject that emerges is the Odawa war […]

Excerpt: Our proximity to the sesquicentennial of the U.S.-Dakota War provides an opportunity to examine how this conflict is remembered by the descendants of those most impacted by it—the Dakota Oyate, the confederation of large extended family groupings that claimed Minnesota as traditional territory and homeland for thousands of years. Dr. Kim TallBear (Dakota), whose […]