Native Women and Land

Winner of the Beatrice Medicine Award for Scholarship in American Indian Studies from the Native American Literature Symposium

Winner of the 2015 Wordcraft Circle Honor and Award for Academic Book

Dispossession and removal are major subjects in understanding the relationship of American Indians to their ancestral lands. This book is the first treatment of these complex topics to focus on women writers. The author’s emphasis on environmental issues makes her book as important to ecocritics as to students of literary criticism, women’s studies, and Native American studies.

While accounts of Native dispossession such as the Cherokee Removal of 1838–1839 are familiar to many, incremental dispossession caused by thawing permafrost in the Arctic or soil erosion in coastal areas, for example, is virtually ignored.

This book asks how these forms of dispossession, both sudden and gradual, are experienced by Native people. Timely, thoroughly researched, and profoundly interdisciplinary, Fitzgerald’s book is sure to find a wide readership in the academy and beyond.