The Ohlone, formerly known as Costanoans, are a Native American people of the Northern California coast. When Spanish explorers and missionaries arrived in the late 18th century, the Ohlone inhabited the area along the coast from San Francisco Bay through Monterey Bay to the lower Salinas Valley. At that time they spoke a variety of related languages. The Ohlone languages make up a sub-family of the Utian language family. Older proposals place Utian within the Penutian language phylum, while newer proposals group it as Yok-Utian.
Leslie Marmon Silko is an American writer. A woman of Laguna Pueblo descent, she is one of the key figures in the First Wave of what literary critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.
Gerald Robert Vizenor is an American writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.
The Esselen are a Native American people belonging to a linguistic group in the hypothetical Hokan language family, who are Indigenous to the Santa Lucia Mountains of a region south of the Big Sur River in California. Prior to Spanish colonization, they lived seasonally on the coast and inland, surviving off the plentiful seafood during the summer and acorns and wildlife during the rest of the year.
The Tübatulabal are an indigenous people of Kern River Valley in the Sierra Nevada range of California. They may have been the first people to make this area their permanent home. Today many of them are enrolled in the Tule River Indian Tribe. They are descendants of the people of the Uto-Aztecan language group, separating from Shoshone people about 3000 years ago.
Deborah A. Miranda is an American writer, poet, and professor of English at Washington and Lee University.
Mission Indians are the Indigenous peoples of California who lived in Southern california and were forcibly relocated from their traditional dwellings, villages, and homelands to live and work at 15 Franciscan missions in Southern California and the Asistencias and Estancias established between 1769 and 1823 in the Las Californias Province of the Viceroyalty of New Spain.
The Lake Miwok are a branch of the Miwok, a Native American people of Northern California. The Lake Miwok lived in the Clear Lake basin of what is now called Lake County. While they did not have an overarching name for themselves, the Lake Miwok word for people, Hotsa-ho, was suggested by A. L. Kroeber as a possible endonym, keeping with a common practice among tribal groups and the ethnographers studying them in the early 20th Century and with the term Miwok itself, which is the Central Sierra Miwok word for people.
Isabel Meadows was an Ohlone ethnologist and the last fluent speaker of the Rumsen Ohlone language. She also spoke Esselen. She worked closely with the anthropologists from the Smithsonian Institution for more than five years in order to document her culture and language. Her work is considered fundamental in the study of Ohlone languages.
Indigenous peoples of California, commonly known as Indigenous Californians or Native Californians, are a diverse group of nations and peoples that are indigenous to the geographic area within the current boundaries of California before and after European colonization. There are currently 109 federally recognized tribes in the state and over forty self-identified tribes or tribal bands that have applied for federal recognition. California has the second-largest Native American population in the United States.
The Rumsen are one of eight groups of the Ohlone, an indigenous people of California. Their historical territory included coastal and inland areas within what is now Monterey County, California, including the Monterey Peninsula.
Trace A. DeMeyer is an American multi-genre author, artist, poet and journalist of Shawnee and Cherokee descent. Her writing is mainly focused on Native Americans and Native American adoption issues.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer, musician, and academic from Canada. She is also known for her work with Idle No More protests. Simpson is a faculty member at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning. She lives in Peterborough.
Susan A. Miller is an American Indian historian and past faculty member at Arizona State University within the American Indian Studies Program. She currently lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. She is member of the Tiger Clan and Tom Palmer Band of the Seminole Nation and attended the University of Nebraska. She has made important contributions to academia in respect to Native American history. As a historian, she has written pieces that look to educate the masses in America about the myths and lies that have been taught about Native Americans since colonization. She has helped to retell history as well as study how other academics have contributed to countering the falsities about Native American History. Some of her works are:
The Light People is a 1994 novel written by Gordon Henry. The book won the American Book Award in 1995. The Light People is a work of Native American fiction, composed of many distinct but ultimately interconnected stories happening in and around an Ojibwe village in northern Minnesota, and the Twin Cities.
Inconvenient Indian is a 2020 Canadian documentary film, directed by Michelle Latimer. It is an adaptation of Thomas King's non-fiction book The Inconvenient Indian, focusing on narratives of indigenous peoples of Canada. King stars as the documentary's narrator, with Gail Maurice and other indigenous artists appearing.
Debbie Reese is a Nambé Pueblo scholar and educator. Reese founded American Indians in Children's Literature, which analyzes representations of Native and Indigenous peoples in children's literature. She co-edited a young adult adaptation of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States with Jean Mendoza in 2019.
A Radiant Curve is a compilation of poems and stories written by professor Luci Tapahonso. It is one of six collective poetry works by Tapahonso. A Radiant Curve is a work with basis in daily life, which is closely related to Luci Tapahonso's Navajo culture. These stories include memories of her family, generational teachings, and her perspective as a Navajo person living in modern times. A Radiant Curve tries to emphasize storytelling in order to speak to the commonality of the shared human experience across cultures as evidenced by the double use of both Navajo and English. The book was published in 2008 by The University of Arizona Press.
Land Back, also referred to with hashtag #LandBack, is a decentralised campaign that emerged in the late 2010s among Indigenous Australians, Indigenous peoples in Canada, Native Americans in the United States, other indigenous peoples and allies who seek to reestablish Indigenous sovereignty, with political and economic control of their ancestral lands. Activists have also used the Land Back framework in Mexico, and scholars have applied it in New Zealand and Fiji. Land Back is part of a broader Indigenous movement for decolonization.
Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is a 2018 biographical anthology compiled and edited by Anita Heiss and published by Black Inc. It includes 52 short written pieces by Aboriginal Australians from many walks of life and discusses issues like Australian history of colonisation and assimilation, activism, significance of country, culture and language, identity and intersectionality, family, and racism. Notable contributors include poet Tony Birch, singer Deborah Cheetham, Australian rules footballer Adam Goodes, and actress Miranda Tapsell. The book won the 2019 Small Publishers' Adult Book of the Year award at the Australian Book Industry Awards.
