Kategoria BISAC: History >> Indigenous Peoples of the Americas

"Plains Indian History and Culture," an engaging collection of articles and essays, reflects John C. Ewers multifaceted approach to Indian history, an approach that combines his far-reaching interest in American history generally, his professional training in anthropology, and his many decades of experience as a field-worker and museum curator.

The author has drawn on interviews collected during a quarter-century of fieldwork with Indian elders, who in recalling their own experiences during the buffalo days, revealed unique insights into Plains Indian life. Ewers use his expertise in...

One of the great tribes of the Southwest Plains, the Kiowas were militantly defiant toward white intruders in their territory and killed more during seventy-five years of raiding than any other tribe. Now settled in southwestern Oklahoma, they are today one of the most progressive Indian groups in the area. In Bad Medicine and Good, Wilbur Sturtevant Nye collects forty-four stories covering Kiowa history from the 1700s through the 1940s, all gleaned from interviews with Kiowas (who actually took part in the events or recalled them from the accounts of their elders), and from the notes of...

Apaches: A History and Culture Portrait, James L. Haley's dramatic saga of the Apaches' doomed guerrilla war against the whites, was a radical departure from the method followed by previous histories of white-native conflict. Arguing that "you cannot understand the history unless you understand the culture," Haley begins by discussing the lifeway of the Apaches--their mythology and folklore, religious customs, everyday life, and social mores. Haley then explores the tumultuous decades of trade and treaty and of betrayal and bloodshed that preceded the Apaches' final military...

For the past twenty-five years, our country's last Indian war has been raging in the Joint Use Area around Big Mountain and Coal Mine Mesa, Arizona. There Navajos are pitted against their Hopi neighbors--and against a United States government that has divided the land between the two tribes and then decreed that Indians living on the "wrong" side must move. With the narrative sweep and emotional veracity of a great novel, Emily Benedek recounts the tortuous progress of the Navajo-Hopi land dispute and portrays the lives it has consumed.

In keeping with the Nim's traditional life-style, Lee's memoir takes us through their annual seasonal cycle. He describes communal activities, such as food gathering, hunting and fishing, the processing of acorn (the Nim's staple food),...

In Let Me Be Free, David Lavender tells the tragic story of the Nez Perce struggle against annihilation. Encroaching settlers and violent disputes resulted in the Nez Perce War of 1877, a desperate attempt by Chief Joseph and his small band of Nez Perce Indians from the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon to elude strong forces of U.S. Cavalry and civilian volunteers and escape to Canada.

In this book, John Monaghan explores the culture of the Mixtecs, today one of the largest Native American groups in Mexico. Focusing on the community of Santiago Nuyoo, located in the mountainous Mixteca Alta region, he describes Nuyooteco marriage practices, gift exchange, kinship systems, land tenure, cosmology, ritual, and feasting.

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Edwin Thompson Denig entered the fur trade on the Upper Missouri River in 1833. As husband to the daughter of an Assiniboine headman and as a bookkeeper stationed at Fort Union, Denig became knowledgeable about the tribal groups of the Upper Missouri and was consulted by several noted investigators of Indian culture. When Denig was asked to respond to a circular by Schoolcraft, he didn't simply rely on his own knowledge, but instead interviewed "in company with the Indians for an entire year" until he had obtained satisfactory answers.

Denig's manuscript was unpublished until 1930, when...

examines relations between Southeastern Indians who were removed to Indian Territory in the early nineteenth century and Southern Plains Indians who claimed this area as their own.

These two Indian groups viewed the world in different ways. The Southeastern Indians, primarily Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Seminoles, were agricultural peoples. By the nineteenth century they were adopting American "civilization": codified laws, Christianity, market-driven farming, and a formal, Euroamerican style of education. By contrast, the hunter-gathers of the Southern Plains-the...

Who is an Indian? Who is a Native American?

What are Indian self-determination and sovereignty?

What defines an Indian tribe?

These and more than one hundred other questions are asked and answered in this critically acclaimed overview of Indian country. The second edition of Jack Utter's classic work covers the hottest issues facing American Indians today--tribal sovereignty, gaming, water rights, treaty rights, cultural rights, and the evolving history of federal Indian policy. Revised and updated with many new questions, eight new illustrations, historical and contemporary...

Based on papers delivered at the 1976 meeting of the American Ethnological Society, "American Indian Intellectuals of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries" offers biographical sketches of major American Indian scholars and historians between 1828 and 1975.

Edited by Margot Liberty, this book includes important individuals from throughout the United States, including the Northwest Coast (William Beynon), the Great Basin(Sarah Winnemucca), the Southwest(Flora Zuni), the Northeast (Jesse Cornplanter, Alexander General, Arthur Parker, and Ely Parker), and the Plains (George...

In "Navajo Land, Navajo Culture," Robert S. McPherson presents an intimate history of the Dine, or Navajo people, of southeastern Utah. Moving beyond standard history by incorporating Native voices, the author shows how the Dine's culture and economy have both persisted and changed during the twentieth century.

As the dominant white culture increasingly affected their worldview, these Navajos adjusted to change, took what they perceived as beneficial, and shaped or filtered outside influences to preserve traditional values. With guidance from Navajo elders, McPherson describes varied...

Chief Daniel Bread (1800-1873) played a key role in establishing the Oneida Indians' presence in Wisconsin after their removal from New York, yet no monument commemorates his deeds as the community's founder. Laurence M. Hauptman and L. Gordon McLester, III, redress that historical oversight, connecting Bread's life story with the nineteenth-century history of the Oneida Nation.

Bread was often criticized for his support of acculturation and missionary schools as well as for his working relationship with Indian agents; however, when the Federal-Menominee treaties slashed Oneida lands, he...