In this edited volume, Theda Perdue, a nationally known expert on Indian history and southern women's history, offers a rich collection of biographical essays on Native American women. From Pocahontas, a Powhatan woman of the seventeenth century, to Ada Deer, the Menominee woman who headed the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1990s, the essays span four centuries. Each one recounts the experiences of women from vastly different cultural traditions--the...

Documents the 1830s policy shift of the U.S. government through which it discontinued efforts to assimilate Native Americans in favor of forcibly relocating them west of the Mississippi, and traces the decision's specific effect on the Cherokee Nation.