The Mountain was Shaken with Pain Indigenous Americans and the Fight for Survival: An Anthology

A compendium of documents, speeches, essays, letters, and articles about the struggles of Indigenous and Native American peoples in the face of colonialism and climate change.

The Mountain Was Shaken With Pain takes its title from a Paiute folk song and contains such foundational documents as Red Cloud's 1870 speech at Cooper Union and the text of the infamous Fort Laramie treaty. It features in addition contemporary essays and polemics advocating for the return of land rights and urging action against climate change, which disproportionally affects Native and Indigenous communities.

The Mountain Was Shaken With Pain is timed to publish just before Native American Heritage Month (November) and will serve as a document and reference for resistance work among Native and Indigenous communities. Providing a wealth of historical documents with a wide range of Indigenous voices and perspectives, the anthology will be a cultural and political reference for a generation of activists.

Melville House is an independent publisher located in Brooklyn, New York. It was founded in 2001 by sculptor Valerie Merians and fiction writer/journalist Dennis Johnson, in order to publish Poetry After 9/11, a book of material culled from Johnson’s groundbreaking MobyLives book blog. The material consisted of things sent in to the blog by writers and poets in response to the 9/11 attacks, and Johnson and Merians felt it better represented the spirit of New York than the call to war of the Bush administration.