Most Americans won’t know the names of the Native Americans in Frederick Hoxie’s new book, “This Indian Country,” but they’re the ones who persisted through years of history to make a place for Indians and give them their rights.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Frederick Hoxie starts each of his courses asking students to list three American Indians, and their answers are almost always the same: Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and Geronimo. All defeated warrior chiefs. All in the distant past. And all in keeping with Americans' historic tendency to see Indians mostly as "brave, exotic and dead," says Hoxie , a Swanlund professor of history , law and American Indian studies at the University of Illinois. There's a different list that Hoxie wants us to know about, filled with American Indian lawyers, lobbyists, writers, politicians and activists. Through their stories, Hoxie aims in a new book to tell how American Indians over two centuries persisted in claiming their rights in a country that once thought them irrelevant.
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