The Dine


Book Description

Smithsonian Institution, Bureau Of American Ethnology, Bulletin No. 163.




The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southwest


Book Description

"A terrific guide for the novice that offers a wealth of valuable information. This book is academic, yet written in an approachable style. Maureen T. Schwarz, author of Blood and Voice: The Life Courses of Navajo Women Ceremonial Practitioners The Columbia Guide to American Indians History and Culture Also Includte: The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Lorella Fowler The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green A major work on the history and culture of Southwest Indians, The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southwest tells a remarkable story of cultural continuity in the face of migration, displacement, violence, and loss. The Native peoples of the American Southwest are a unique group, for while the arrival of Europeans forced many Native Americans to leave their land behind, those who lived in the Southwest held their ground. Many still reside in their ancestral homes, and their oral histories, social practices, and material artifacts provide revelatory insight into the history of the region and the country as a whole. Trudy Griffin-Pierce incorporates her lifelong passion for the people of the Southwest, especially the Navajo, into an absorbing narrative of pre-and postcontact Native experiences. She finds that, even though the policies of the U.S. government were meant to promote assimilation. Native peoples formed their own response to outside pressures, choosing to adapt rather than submit to external change. Griflin-Pierce provides a chronology of instances that have shaped present-day conditions in the region, as well as an extensive glossary of significant people, places, and events. Setting a precedent for ethical scholarship, she describes different methods for researching the Southwest and cites sources for further archaeological and comparative study. Completing the volume is a selection of key primary documents, literary works, films, Internet resources, and contact information for each Native community, enabling a more thorough investigation into specific tribes and nations.




Handbook of Native American Literature


Book Description

The Handbook of Native American Literature is a unique, comprehensive, and authoritative guide to the oral and written literatures of Native Americans. It lays the perfect foundation for understanding the works of Native American writers. Divided into three major sections, Native American Oral Literatures, The Historical Emergence of Native American Writing, and A Native American Renaissance: 1967 to the Present, it includes 22 lengthy essays, written by scholars of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures. The book features reports on the oral traditions of various tribes and topics such as the relation of the Bible, dreams, oratory, humor, autobiography, and federal land policies to Native American literature. Eight additional essays cover teaching Native American literature, new fiction, new theater, and other important topics, and there are bio-critical essays on more than 40 writers ranging from William Apes (who in the early 19th century denounced white society's treatment of his people) to contemporary poet Ray Young Bear. Packed with information that was once scattered and scarce, the Handbook of NativeAmerican Literature -a valuable one-volume resource-is sure to appeal to everyone interested in Native American history, culture, and literature. Previously published in cloth as The Dictionary of Native American Literature




Native Peoples of the Southwest


Book Description

A comprehensive guide to the historic and contemporary indigenous cultures of the American Southwest, intended for college courses and the general reader.




Native Peoples A to Z


Book Description

A current reference work that reflects the changing times and attitudes of, and towards the indigenous peoples of all the regions of the Americas. --from publisher description.




Voices of the American Indian Experience [2 volumes]


Book Description

In a single source, this comprehensive two-volume work provides the entire history of American Indians, as told by Indians themselves. Voices of the American Indian Experience provides unique insights into American Indian history by focusing on Indian accounts instead of on relying on other sources. As a result, their voices are clearer, and readers learn more about Indians directly from Indians, rather than through accounts that are filtered, diluted, and possibly even misinterpreted by an outsider's perspective. The volumes comprise a vast and fascinating variety of sources that span creation stories from Native American prehistory, to Indians who met the earliest Europeans to visit the Americas, all the way through to American Indians who served in recent foreign conflicts in the U.S. Armed Forces. This work provides information that is essential to fully understanding the history of the United States, and will be a valuable resource for advanced high school students and college students as well as general audiences with an interest in history or Native American culture.




Origins of the Gods


Book Description

• Explores how our ancestors used shamanic rituals at sacred sites to create portals for communication with nonhuman intelligences • Shares supporting evidence from the spiritual and shamanic beliefs of more than 100 Native American tribes • Shows how the earliest forms of shamanism began at sites like Qesem Cave in Israel more than 400,000 years ago From Göbekli Tepe in Turkey to the Egyptian pyramids, from the stone circles of Europe to the mound complexes of the Americas, Andrew Collins and Gregory L. Little show how, again and again, our ancestors built permanent sites of ceremonial activity where geomagnetic and gravitational anomalies have been recorded. They investigate how the earliest forms of animism and shamanism began at sites like the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia and Qesem Cave in Israel more than 400,000 years ago. They explain how shamanic rituals and altered states of consciousness combine with the natural forces of the earth to create portals for contact with otherworldly realms—in other words, the gods of our ancestors were the result of an interaction between human consciousness and transdimensional intelligence. The authors show how the spiritual and shamanic beliefs of more than 100 Native American tribes align with their theory, and they reveal how some of these shamanic transdimensional portals are still active, sharing vivid examples from Skinwalker Ranch in Utah and Bempton in northern England. Ultimately, Collins and Little show how our modern disconnection from nature and lack of a fully visible night sky makes the manifestations from these ultraterrestrial intelligences seem random. If we can restore our spiritual connections, perhaps we can once again communicate with the higher dimensional beings who triggered the advancements of our earliest ancestors.




Living the Sky


Book Description

Imagine the North American Indians as astronomers carefully watching the heavens, charting the sun through the seasons, or counting the sunrises between successive lumar phases. Then imagine them establishing observational sites and codified systems to pass their knowledge down through the centuries and continually refine it. A few years ago such images would have been abruptly dismissed. Today we are wiser. Living the Sky describes the exciting archaeoastronomical discoveries in the United States in recent decades. Using history, science, and direct observation, Ray A. Williamson transports the reader into the sky world of the Indians. We visit the Bighorn Medicine Wheel, sit with a Zuni sun priest on the winter solstice, join explorers at the rites of the Hopis and the Navajos, and trek to Chaco Canyon to make direct on-site observations of celestial events.




Tribal Epistemologies


Book Description

First published in 1998, this collection of ten essays transforms our understanding of both the role of philosophical anthropology in modern world philosophy and the origins of tribal knowledge in their relation to contemporary assessments of cognition and consciousness. Ethnographic data from geographically distant cultures - such as the Maori of New Zealand, the Fore of New Guinea, the Sea Nomads of the Andaman, the Cowlitz of North America, the Maya, Australian Aborigines, Siberian Shamans - are carefully crafted toward an empirical basis for discussing a variety of phenomena traditional labelled in Western thought as transcendent or metaphysical. This anthology is a valuable source of information relevant for any theories of knowledge and a solid challenge for reductionist models of consciousness. The essays enhance our recognition and appreciation of fundamental similarities as well as differences in world views and cultural perspectives related to knowledge claims. This anthology illustrates unplumbed depths of human consciousness, reveals experiential understandings beyond linguistic thought, and stands aside from the view that behaviour and intelligence can be understood by deterministic principles. This volume of essays should be read with stereoscopic vision: one lens focusing on the rich ethnographic material of folk societies, the other focusing on the wider awareness of how we come to know what we know. It features specialists in philosophy, ethnology and comparative sociology, comparative religion, cross-cultural psychology, physical anthropology, environmental and marine scientists, Indian affairs, anthropology, comparative literature, shamanism and theoretical biology. These contributors explore issues including individuality in relational cultures, Maori epistemology, shamanistic knowledge and cosmology and images of conduct, character and personhood in the Native American tradition.




Fossil Legends of the First Americans


Book Description

The burnt-red badlands of Montana's Hell Creek are a vast graveyard of the Cretaceous dinosaurs that lived 68 million years ago. Those hills were, much later, also home to the Sioux, the Crows, and the Blackfeet, the first people to encounter the dinosaur fossils exposed by the elements. What did Native Americans make of these stone skeletons, and how did they explain the teeth and claws of gargantuan animals no one had seen alive? Did they speculate about their deaths? Did they collect fossils? Beginning in the East, with its Ice Age monsters, and ending in the West, where dinosaurs lived and died, this richly illustrated and elegantly written book examines the discoveries of enormous bones and uses of fossils for medicine, hunting magic, and spells. Well before Columbus, Native Americans observed the mysterious petrified remains of extinct creatures and sought to understand their transformation to stone. In perceptive creation stories, they visualized the remains of extinct mammoths, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine creatures as Monster Bears, Giant Lizards, Thunder Birds, and Water Monsters. Their insights, some so sophisticated that they anticipate modern scientific theories, were passed down in oral histories over many centuries. Drawing on historical sources, archaeology, traditional accounts, and extensive personal interviews, Adrienne Mayor takes us from Aztec and Inca fossil tales to the traditions of the Iroquois, Navajos, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Pawnees. Fossil Legends of the First Americans represents a major step forward in our understanding of how humans made sense of fossils before evolutionary theory developed.