This volume introduces the oral literature of Native American peoples in Puget Salish speaking areas of western Washington. Seven stories told by Lushootseed elders are transcribed and translated into English, accompanied by information on narrative design and cultural background. Upper Skagit elder and cotranslator Vi Hilbert, a 1994 recipient of the NEH National Heritage Fellowship in Folk Arts, includes a cultural welcome and offers childhood reminiscences of the storytellers. Cotranslator Thomas M. Hess, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Victoria, parses the...

This text briefly discusses those aspects of the Comanche, it will be of greatest interest to a reader who has little or no background in the Numic languages.

The Dogrib Indians are one of the Dene people of Western Canadian Subarctic; they speak a language belonging to the widespread Athapaskan family, whose southern relatives include the Navajos and Apaches of the southwestern United States. This study draws on the author s field studies from 1959 to 1974 to present an ethnographic description of Dogrib religion. The first part of the book introduces three prophets who came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. Though they developed from the same tradition and had the same aims, their prophetic styles contrasted dramatically with one another....

An American Indian language belonging to the Muskogean linguistic family, Koasati is spoken today by fewer than five hundred people living in southwestern Louisiana and on the Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation in Texas. Geoffrey D. Kimball has collected material from the speakers of the larger Louisiana community to produce the first comprehensive description of Koasati.

The book opens with a brief history of the Koasati. The chapters that follow describe Koasati phonology, verb conjugation classes and inflectional morphology, verb derivation, noun inflectional and derivational...

The result of over ten years of research, A Dictionary of Creek/Muskogee draws on the expertise of a linguist and a native Creek speaker to yield the first modern dictionary of the Creek language of the southeastern United States. The dictionary contains over seven thousand Creek-English entries, over four thousand English-Creek entries, and over four hundred Creek place-names in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Oklahoma. The volume also includes illustrations, a map, antonyms, dialects, stylistic information, word histories, and other useful reference material. Entries are given in both the...

Koasati Dictionary is one of the first modern dictionaries ever published of a language of the Muskogean language family, whose speakers formerly occupied most of the southeastern United States. When first met by Europeans in the sixteenth century, the Koasati people were living in eastern Tennessee. Early in the eighteenth century they moved to southcentral Alabama and eventually migrated to present-day Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma. Today their language survives in southwestern Louisiana, where it is still spoken by the majority of tribal members living there. Published three years after...