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National parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier preserve some of this country's most cherished wilderness landscapes. While visions of pristine, uninhabited nature led to the creation of these parks, they also inspired policies of Indian removal. By contrasting the native histories of these places with the links between Indian policy developments and preservationist efforts, this work examines the complex origins of the national parks and the troubling consequences of the American wilderness ideal. The first study to place national park history within the context of the early reservation era, it details the ways that national parks developed into one of the most important arenas of contention between native peoples and non-Indians in the twentieth century.
In 1879, a Canadian Blackfoot known as Spopee, or Turtle, shot and killed a white man. Captured as a fugitive, Spopee narrowly escaped execution, instead landing in an insane asylum in Washington, D.C., where he fell silent. Spopee thus “disappeared” for more than thirty years, until a delegation of American Blackfeet discovered him and, aided by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, exacted a pardon from President Woodrow Wilson. After re-emerging into society like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, Spopee spent the final year of his life on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, in a world that had changed irrevocably from the one he had known before his confinement. Blackfoot Redemption is the riveting account of Spopee’s unusual and haunting story. To reconstruct the events of Spopee’s life—at first traceable only through bits and pieces of information—William E. Farr conducted exhaustive archival research, digging deeply into government documents and institutional reports to build a coherent and accurate narrative and, through this reconstruction, win back one Indian’s life and identity. In revealing both certainties and ambiguities in Spopee’s story, Farr relates a larger story about racial dynamics and prejudice, while poignantly evoking the turbulent final days of the buffalo-hunting Indians before their confinement, loss of freedom, and confusion that came with the wrenching transition to reservation life.
Sheer cliffs, avalanches, turbulent rivers, cold lakes, severe weather, grizzly bears - these are just a few of the ways you can die while visiting Glacier National Park. Since 1910 when the park was established, 296 people have perished within Glacier's boundaries, and many more somehow survived close calls with death. Death & Survival in Glacier National Park recounts their true tales, as well as stories of the brave and often heroic search-and-rescue professionals who put their lives on the line so that others might live.

  • Written by a local Glacier National Park experts.
  • Jam-packed with gripping stories of courage and survival against all odds.
  • Featuring the most complete chronology of all 296 deaths in Glacier National Park, including names, ages, locations, and causes.
A rich and varied tapestry, Montana Legacy looks at the people, cultures, places, and events that shaped present-day Montana from Plentywood to Butte, Great Falls to Virginia City, and Billings to Browning. Designed to make you think about Montana history in a new way, this anthology features sixteen essays chosen for their relevance, readability, and scholarship. The volume's editors carefully selected topics that range across two centuries from the fur trade to power deregulation - and expose Montana's cultural and geographical diversity. Join them in this exploration of Montana's past and gain a better understanding of Montana's future. (6 x 9, 392 pages, b&w photos)
Placing American Indians in the center of the story, Restoring a Presence relates an entirely new history of Yellowstone National Park. Although new laws have been enacted giving American Indians access to resources on public lands, Yellowstone historically has excluded Indians and their needs from its mission. Each of the other flagship national parks—Glacier, Yosemite, Mesa Verde, and Grand Canyon—has had successful long-term relationships with American Indian groups even as it has sought to emulate Yellowstone in other dimensions of national park administration. In the first comprehensive account of Indians in and around Yellowstone, Peter Nabokov and Lawrence Loendorf seek to correct this administrative disparity. Drawing from archaeological records, Indian testimony, tribal archives, and collections of early artifacts from the Park, the authors trace the interactions of nearly a dozen Indian groups with each of Yellowstone’s four geographic regions. Restoring a Presence is illustrated with historical and contemporary photographs and maps and features narratives on subjects ranging from traditional Indian uses of plant, mineral, and animal resources to conflicts involving the Nez Perce, Bannock, and Sheep Eater peoples. By considering the many roles Indians have played in the complex history of the Yellowstone region, authors Nabokov and Loendorf provide a basis on which the National Park Service and other federal agencies can develop more effective relationships with Indian groups in the Yellowstone region.
Prato and Fagre offer the first systematic, multi-disciplinary assessment of the challenges involved in managing the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem (CCE), an area of the Rocky Mountains that includes northwestern Montana, southwestern Alberta, and southeastern British Columbia. The spectacular landscapes, extensive recreational options, and broad employment opportunities of the CCE have made it one of the fastest growing regions in the United States and Canada, and have lead to a shift in its economic base from extractive resources to service-oriented recreation and tourism industries. In the process, however, the amenities and attributes that draw people to this 'New West' are under threat. Pastoral scenes are disappearing as agricultural lands and other open spaces are converted to residential uses, biodiversity is endangered by the fragmentation of fish and wildlife habitats, and many areas are experiencing a decline in air and water quality. Sustaining Rocky Mountain Landscapes provides a scientific basis for communities to develop policies for managing the growth and economic transformation of the CCE without sacrificing the quality of life and environment for which the land is renowned. The book begins with a natural and economic history of the CCE. It follows with an assessment of current physical and biological conditions in the CCE. The contributors then explore how social, economic, demographic, and environmental forces are transforming ecosystem structure and function. They consider ecosystem change in response to changing patterns of land use, pollution, and drought; the increasing risk of wildfire to wildlife and to human life and property; and the implications of global climate change on the CCE. A final, policy-focused section of the book looks at transboundary issues in ecosystem management and evaluates the potential of community-based and adaptive approaches in ecosystem management.
Native American reservations on the Northern Plains were designed like islands, intended to prevent contact or communication between various Native peoples. For this reason, they seem unlikely sources for a sense of pan-Indian community in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. But as Frank Rzeczkowski shows, the flexible nature of tribalism as it already existed on the Plains subverted these goals and enabled the emergence of a collective "Indian" identity even amidst the restrictiveness of reservation life. Rather than dividing people, tribalism on the Northern Plains actually served to bring Indians of diverse origins together. Tracing the development of pan-Indian identity among once-warring peoples, Rzeczkowski seeks to shift scholars' attention from cities and boarding schools to the reservations themselves. Mining letters, oral histories, and official documents-including the testimony of native leaders like Plenty Coups and Young Man Afraid of His Horses-he examines Indian communities on the Northern Plains from 1800 to 1925. Focusing on the Crow, he unravels the intricate connections that linked them to neighboring peoples and examines how they reshaped their understandings of themselves and each other in response to the steady encroachment of American colonialism. Rzeczkowski examines Crow interactions with the Blackfeet and Lakota prior to the 1880s, then reveals the continued vitality of intertribal contact and the covert-and sometimes overt-political dimensions of "visiting" between Crows and others during the reservation era. He finds the community that existed on the Crow Reservation at the beginning of the twentieth century to be more deeply diverse and heterogeneous than those often described in tribal histories: a multiethnic community including not just Crows of mixed descent who preserved their ties with other tribes, but also other Indians who found at Crow a comfortable environment or a place of refuge. This inclusiveness prevailed until tribal leaders and OIA officials tightened the rules on who could live at-or be considered-Crow. Reflecting the latest trends in scholarship on Native Americans, Rzeczkowski brings nuance to the concept of tribalism as long understood by scholars, showing that this fluidity among the tribes continued into the early years of the reservation system. Uniting the Tribes is a groundbreaking work that will change the way we understand tribal development, early reservation life, and pan-Indian identity.
Winner • National Outdoor Book Award (History/Biography) Longlisted • PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Before Rachel Carson, there was George Bird Grinnell—the man whose prophetic vision did nothing less than launch American conservation. George Bird Grinnell, the son of a New York merchant, saw a different future for a nation in the thrall of the Industrial Age. With railroads scarring virgin lands and the formerly vast buffalo herds decimated, the country faced a crossroads: Could it pursue Manifest Destiny without destroying its natural bounty and beauty? The alarm that Grinnell sounded would spark America’s conservation movement. Yet today his name has been forgotten—an omission that John Taliaferro’s commanding biography now sets right with historical care and narrative flair. Grinnell was born in Brooklyn in 1849 and grew up on the estate of ornithologist John James Audubon. Upon graduation from Yale, he dug for dinosaurs on the Great Plains with eminent paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh—an expedition that fanned his romantic notion of wilderness and taught him a graphic lesson in evolution and extinction. Soon he joined George A. Custer in the Black Hills, helped to map Yellowstone, and scaled the peaks and glaciers that, through his labors, would become Glacier National Park. Along the way, he became one of America’s most respected ethnologists; seasons spent among the Plains Indians produced numerous articles and books, including his tour de force, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life. More than a chronicler of natural history and indigenous culture, Grinnell became their tenacious advocate. He turned the sportsmen’s journal Forest and Stream into a bully pulpit for wildlife protection, forest reserves, and national parks. In 1886, his distress over the loss of bird species prompted him to found the first Audubon Society. Next, he and Theodore Roosevelt founded the Boone and Crockett Club to promote “fair chase” of big game. His influence among the rich and the patrician provided leverage for the first federal legislation to protect migratory birds—a precedent that ultimately paved the way for the Endangered Species Act. And in an era when too many white Americans regarded Native Americans as backwards, Grinnell’s cries for reform carried from the reservation, through the halls of Congress, all the way to the White House. Drawing on forty thousand pages of Grinnell’s correspondence and dozens of his diaries, Taliaferro reveals a man whose deeds and high-mindedness earned him a lustrous peerage, from presidents to chiefs, Audubon to Aldo Leopold, John Muir to Gifford Pinchot, Edward S. Curtis to Edward H. Harriman. Throughout his long life, Grinnell was bound by family and sustained by intimate friendships, toggling between the East and the West. As Taliaferro’s enthralling portrait demonstrates, it was this tension that wound Grinnell’s nearly inexhaustible spring and honed his vision—a vision that still guides the imperiled future of our national treasures.