"Red Man's America" meets the great need for a comprehensive study of Indian societies from the first Stone Age hunters to the American citizens of today. Beginning with the first migrations of primitive man from Siberia in the Old World to Alaska in the New, probably during the latter part of the Pleistocene glaciations, and his subsequent migration southward and eastward, the author takes up in turn the tribes and cultures of the various regions of North America.
The material Professor Underhill has gathered from the fields of archaeology, ethnology, and history, together with that...

Among the topics considered in this classic study are world origins and supernatural powers, attitudes toward the dead, the medicine man and shaman, hunting and gathering rituals, war and planting ceremonies, and newer religions, such as the Ghost Dance and the Peyote Religion.

"The distinctive contribution of Red Man's Religion] is the treatment of topics, the insight and the perspective of the author, and her ability to transmit these to the reader. . . . Trais and aspects of religion are not treated as abstract entitites, to be enumerated and summated, assigned a geographic...

Volume 43 in the Civilization of the American Indian Series "A must for every student of the Southwest and fine reading for anyone interested in the history of his country." - American Historical Review "She has brought together, from an amazing variety of sources, a complete history of The People . . .. In detailing what is known of that history, from the time of the Navajos' appearance in the western hemisphere to the present, she has outlined much of material culture, of social relations and organizations, and of ceremonial life . . . Dr. Underhill has afforded her readers gimpses of what...

The Tohono O'odham of southern Arizona, formerly known as the Papago, have made a life in a place that many would consider uninhabitable. These desert people were converted to Catholicism by early Spanish missionaries, yet they retain much of their earlier lifeway as a means of continuing adaptation to their desert environment. This book is a restudy of speeches and ritual information collected by anthropologist Underhill beginning in 1931 and published in her book Papago Indian Religion (1946). It describes the Native--as opposed to the Christian--side of the yearly ritual cycle of...