Kategoria BISAC: History >> Indigenous Peoples of the Americas

Of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians the Cherokees were early recognized as the greatest and the most civilized. Indeed, between 1540 and 1906 they reached a higher peak of civilization than any other North American Indian tribe. They invented a syllabary and developed an intricate government, including a system of courts of law. They published their own newspaper in both Cherokee and English and became noted as orators and statesmen.

At the beginning the Cherokees conquest of civilization was agonizingly slow and uncertain. Warlords of the southern Appalachian Highlands, they...

"A long association with the Cheyennes has given me a special interest in them, and a special wish that they should be allowed to speak for themselves. What the Indians saw in the battles here described, I have learned during years of intimate acquaintance with those who took part in them."-George Bird Grinnell.

Without critical comment or biased judgement, George Bird Grinnell-one of the truly great historians of the American Indian-has recorded the major battles that the Cheyennes fought. In this account the entire gallery of the heroic Cheyenne chiefs and warriors-Roman Nose and Black...

Beginning with the founding of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670, the fur trade dominated the development of the Canadian west. Although detailed accounts of the fur-trade era have appeared, until recently the rich social history has been ignored. In this book, the fur trade is examined not simply as an economic activity but as a social and cultural complex that was to survive for nearly two centuries.

The author traces the development of a mutual dependency between Indian and European traders at the economic level that evolved into a significant cultural exchange as well. Marriages of...

In 1906 when the Creek Indian Chitto Harjo was protesting the United States government's liquidation of his tribe's lands, he began his argument with an account of Indian history from the time of Columbus, "for, of course, a thing has to have a root before it can grow." Yet even today most intelligent non-Indian Americans have little knowledge of Indian history and affairs those lessons have not taken root.

This book is an in-depth historical survey of the Indians of the United States, including the Eskimos and Aleuts of Alaska, which isolates and analyzes the problems which have beset...

The massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in the December snows of 1890 was the last formal military encounter between the United States and Indian tribes. It is also the event with which most studies of Indian history conclude. Histories of Indian life since then are, as Vine Deloria, Jr., has stressed, sorely needed.

With this pioneering anthology Peter Iverson clears the way for future studies of twentieth-century Plains Indian life. He begins with a capsule history and introduces eleven articles by leading scholars in the field. Iverson's collection emphasizes the ability of Plains...

The fierce bands of Comanche Indians, on the testimony of their contemporaries, both red and white, numbered some of the most splendid horsemen the world has ever produced. Often the terror of other tribes, who, on finding a Comanche footprint in the Western plains country, would turn and go in the other direction, they were indeed the Lords of the South Plains.

For more than a century and a half, since they had first moved into the Southwest from the north, the Comanches raided and pillaged and repelled all efforts to encroach on their hunting grounds. They decimated the pueblo of...

The Potawatomi Indians were the dominant tribe in the region of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and southern Michigan during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Active participants in the fur trade, and close friends with many French fur traders and government leaders, the Potawatomis remained loyal to New France throughout the colonial period, resisting the lure of the inexpensive British trade goods that enticed some of their neighbors into alliances with the British. During the colonial wars Potawatomi warriors journeyed far to the south and east to fight alongside their...

More than one hundred Indian tribes in fifteen language groups inhabited the area of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Western Montana in the nineteenth century. This important work, the first composite history of the region s native inhabitants, covers the period roughly from 1750 to 1900, from the first white contacts to the aftermath of the Dawes Act. It is a valuable resource both for the serious scholars and general readers.

The cultures of the Pacific Northwest tribes were as diverse as their lands. Coastal peoples, such as the Makahs, hunted whales in huge wooden canoes thirty-five...

For many people the Sioux, as warriors and as buffalo hunters, have become the symbol of all that is Indian colorful figures endowed with great fortitude and powerful vision. They were the heroes of the Great Plains, and they were the villains, too.

Royal B. Hassrick here attempts to describe the ways of the people, the patterns of their behavior, and the concepts of their imagination. Uniquely, he has approached the subject from the Sioux's own point of view, giving their own interpretation of their world in the era of its greatest vigor and renown -the brief span of years from about...

Beginning with the birth of the Cherokee patriarch Major Ridge in the 1770 s, Thurman Wilkins tells the events that led to the Trail of Tears, through the eyes of the illustrious Ridge family. Major Ridge and his Connecticut-educated son John were willing to abandon the rich tribal homelands in North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia and emigrate west to the Indian Territory to escape the white invaders.

During the decades of fruitless negotiations that culminated in the infamous Treaty of New Echota, Georgia, in 1835, the Ridges and their relatives Elias Boudinot and Stand...

In this definitive work-a product of more than half a century of research and close observation-the noted anthropologist Omer C. Stewart provides a sweeping reconstruction of the rise of peyotism and the Native American Church. Although it is commonly known that the modern peyote religion became formalized around 1880 in western Oklahoma, it had roots in precontact American Indian ritual. Today it is practiced by thousands upon thousands of American Indians throughout the West.

Long a subject of controversy, peyotism has become a unifying influence in Indian life, providing the basis for...

Before their massacre by Massachusetts Puritans in 1637, the Pequots were preeminent in southern New England. Their location on the eastern Connecticut shore made them important producers of the wampum required to trade for furs from the Iroquois. They were also the only Connecticut Indians to oppose the land-hungry English. For those reasons, they became the first victims of white genocide in colonial America.

Despite the Pequot War of 1637, and the greed and neglect of their white neighbors and "overseers," the Pequots endured in their ancestral homeland. In 1983 they achieved federal...

Before European incursions began in the seventeenth century, the Western Abenaki Indians inhabited present-day Vermont and New Hampshire, particularly the Lake Champlain and Connecticut River valleys. This history of their coexistence and conflicts with whites on the northern New England frontier documents their survival as a people-recently at issue in the courts-and their wars and migrations, as far north as Quebec, during the first two centuries of white contacts.

Written clearly and authoritatively, with sympathy for this long-neglected tribe, Colin G. Calloway's account of the...