Category Archives: my own thoughts

My book project – Native American history, 1491 to the present

Posted on February 4, 2024 by Stephen Carr Hampton

Osiyo, relatives! Many of the articles I’ve published and the blog posts I’ve shared in the past few years come from a rather massive book project: a collection of stories, spanning 1491 to the present, coast to coast, hundreds of … Continue reading →

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“White history” on the northern Plains: How the word is not passed

Posted on June 7, 2023 by Stephen Carr Hampton

Full disclosure – I am working on a book. It covers Native history and how it is told today. We can put books about Native history into four categories: 1) older books written by white historians, where Natives are “Indians” … Continue reading →

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The Indigenous Critique: The Dawn of Decolonizing our Minds

Posted on April 22, 2023 by Stephen Carr Hampton

Rather than emanating from the brains of highly-evolved European men, it was actually Native American ideas regarding equality, personal liberty, and leadership accountability that fueled Europe’s Age of Enlightenment, ultimately leading to the American and French Revolutions, as well as … Continue reading →

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Magical realism in Tennessee

Posted on April 8, 2023 by Stephen Carr Hampton

Yesterday the Tennessee legislature put three of their own on trial,    one white woman and two black men – the so-called #TennesseeThree. They did not really consider them their own. The three had been concerned about children killed by … Continue reading →

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I’m not related to Pocahontas and neither are you

Posted on March 19, 2023 by Stephen Carr Hampton

Probably. Right up there next to the my-grandma-says-I’m-descended-from-a-Cherokee-princess thing is an almost-as-farfetched American white people myth: that you’re related to Pocahontas. It’s difficult to go a month in online forums about Native ancestry without someone claiming it. So it came … Continue reading →

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My badass great-grandmothers and the power of Native women

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Stephen Carr Hampton

Women have always occupied positions of strength and respect across Native America. For starters, most tribes were matrilineal. This generally meant that when a couple marries, the husband moved into the woman’s town and joined her family. Her brothers, the … Continue reading →

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Indigenous bird names today

Posted on August 25, 2022 by Stephen Carr Hampton

As the American Ornithological Society (AOS) contemplates changing potentially dozens of English bird names to names more representative of the bird, and more inclusive of our society, many have voiced interest in and support of indigenous bird names. This post … Continue reading →

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I remember when White Evangelicals were Democrats and abortion was a minor issue. I remember what happened next.

Posted on June 25, 2022 by Stephen Carr Hampton

I remember when I was in 5th grade Jimmy Carter had won the election, famously describing himself as a “born again” Christian. He was a Democrat, as were many White Evangelicals. Abortion was a Catholic issue, part of their pro-life … Continue reading →

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The Pioneers were bad guys

Posted on May 29, 2022 by Stephen Carr Hampton

One thing about “the pioneers” as we call them in the US — they were essentially white renegade militias, operating outside of US law, who sought to ethnically cleanse the land for their own acquisition. And that’s the opinion of … Continue reading →

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Double standards: How white bureaucracy ramps up when Native Americans are involved

Posted on September 30, 2021 by Stephen Carr Hampton

It’s often been said that the most powerful people in government are not the leaders, but the low-level bureaucrats that actually run government programs and implement the law. In a settler colonial society dominated by implicit white supremacy – the … Continue reading →

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