Bøger i Studies in the Anthropology of North American Indians serien

Edited by Catharine Mason, Clackamas Chinook Performance Art pairs performances with biographical, family, and historical content that reflects Victoria Howard's ancestry, personal and social life, education, and worldview.

Lakota Texts is a treasure trove of stories told in the original language by modern Lakota women who make their home in Denver. Sometimes witty, often moving, and invariably engaging and fascinating, these stories are both autobiographical and cultural.

Examines how myths and narratives about the past have enabled a Northern Athabaskan community to understand and confront challenges and opportunities in the present. This book focuses on the special power of the past for the Chilcotin people of the Nemiah Valley Indian Reserve.

Sherman Sage (ca 1844-1943) was an Arapaho man who witnessed profound change in his community and was one of the last to see the Plains black with buffalo. The author gathered information about Sage's life from archives, interviews, recollections, and published sources and has here woven it into a biography.

For more than a century, the Northern Arapaho people lived on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming - the fourth largest reservation in the country. This book draws together aspects of the Northern Arapahos' world - myth, language, art, ritual, identity, and history - to offer a vivid picture of a culture that has endured and changed over time.

The Yuchis are one of the least known yet most distinctive of the Native groups in the American southeast. The famous naturalist William Bartram visited a Yuchi town in 1775, at a time when the Yuchis had moved near and become allied with Creek communities in Georgia. This title examines the significance of community ceremonies for the Yuchis.

The interest of nineteenth-century Lakotas in the sun, moon, and stars was an essential part of their never-ending quest to understand the universe. The Spirit and the Sky presents a survey of the ethnoastronomy of the nineteenth-century Lakota and relates Lakota astronomy to their cultural practices and beliefs.

The Canadian Sioux are descendants of Santees, Yanktonais, and Tetons from the United States who sought refuge in Canada during the 1860s and 1870s. This book helps fill that gap in the literature and remains relevant even in the twenty-first century.

A modern dictionary of the Creek language of the southeastern United States. It 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.

During much of the nineteenth century, paintings functioned as the Plains Indians¿ equivalent to written records. The majority of their paintings documented warfare, focusing on specific war deeds. These pictorial narratives¿appearing on hide robes, war shirts, tipi liners, and tipi covers¿were maintained by the several dozen Plains Indians tribes, and they continue to expand historical knowledge of a people and place in transition.War Paintings of the Tsuu T¿ina Nation is a study of several important war paintings and artifact collections of the Tsuu T¿ina (Sarcee) that provides insight into the changing relations between the Tsuu T¿ina, other plains tribes, and non-Native communities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Arni Brownstone has meticulously created renderings of the paintings that invite readers to explore them more fully. All known Tsuu T¿ina paintings are considered in the study, as are several important collections of Tsuu T¿ina artifacts, with particular emphasis on five key works. Brownstone¿s analysis furthers our understanding of Tsuu T¿ina pictographic war paintings in relation to the social, historical, and artistic forces that influenced them and provides a broader understanding of pictographic painting, one of the richest and most important Native American artistic and literary genres.

Joseph Hillaire (Lummi, 1894-1967) is recognized as one of the great Coast Salish artists, carvers, and tradition-bearers of the twentieth century. In A Totem Pole History, his daughter Pauline Hillaire, who is herself a well-known cultural historian and conservator, tells the story of her father's life and the traditional and contemporary Lummi narratives that influenced his work.

A complex and fascinating picture of a woman questioning the cultural and gender expectations of nineteenth-century America while insightfully portraying rapidly changing reservation life.

The Red Road and Other Narratives of the Dakota Sioux presents the Red Road and the Holy Dance (also called the Medicine Dance), two of the most important traditions of the Dakota people, as told by Samuel I. Mniyo and Robert Goodvoice, two Dakota men from the Wahpeton Dakota Nation near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada.

The Haida people make their home on the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia and on Prince of Wales Island off the coast of southern Alaska. This book offers a description of the syntax of two Haida dialects.

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 morphology, grammatical particles, and syntax and semantics. A discussion of Koasati speech styles illustrated with texts concludes the book. Because examples of grammatical construction are drawn from native speakers in naturally occurring discourse, they authoritatively document aspects of a language that is little known.

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. Helm situates the prophetic movement in relation to tribal and Christian traditions and shows the determining importance of the prophets personalities in shaping their teachings.The second part of the book examines the traditional Dogrib concept of power (ink’on), drawing on information given over the course of the years by Vital Thomas, a religious leader who collaborated closely with Helm. This firsthand material, told in Thomas’s own words, is noteworthy for its personal perspective and for the understanding it provides of the differing sources and uses of power. This concept of power is so pervasive in daily life that it forms the key for understanding the dynamics of Dogrib culture. The book concludes with a brief autobiography related by Vital Thomas.Prophecy and Power among the Dogrib Indians is important for documenting the prophet movement among the Dene people in the late twentieth century and for situating it historically in the context of Dogrib traditional culture.June Helm is a professor of anthropology at the University of Iowa. She is the editor of the Subarctic volume of the Smithsonian's Handbook of North American Indians.

An account of the early years of the Jamestown colony.

Tells the story of Bennett County, using snapshots of community events and crises, past and present, to reveal the complexity of race relations and identities there

Until the late eighteenth century the Arikaras were one of the largest and most influential Indian groups on the northern plains. For centuries they have lived along the Missouri River, first in present South Dakota, later in what is now North Dakota. Today they share the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota with the Mandans and Hidatsas. Although their postcontact history and aspects of their culture are well documented, Douglas R. Parks's monumental four-volume work Traditional Narratives of the Arikara Indians represents the first comprehensive attempt to describe and record their language and literary traditions. Volumes 1 and 2 present transcriptions of 156 oral narratives in Arikara and include literal interlinear English translations. Volumes 3 and 4 contain free English translations of those narratives, making available for the first time a broad, representative group of Arikara oral traditions that will be invaluable not only to anthropologists and folklorists but to everyone interested in American Indian life and literature.The narratives cover the entire range of traditional stories found in the historical and literary tradition of the Arikara people, who classify their stories into two categories, true stories and tales. Here are myths of ancient times, legends of power bestowed, historical narratives, and narratives of mysterious incidents that affirm the existence today of supernatural power in the world, along with tales of the trickster Coyote and stories of the risque Stuwi and various other animals. In addition, there are accounts of Arikara ritualism: prayers and descriptions of how personal names are bestowed and how the Death Feast originated.

Until the late eighteenth century the Arikaras were one of the largest and most influential Indian groups on the northern plains. For centuries they have lived along the Missouri River, first in present South Dakota, later in what is now North Dakota. Today they share the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota with the Mandans and Hidatsas. Although their postcontact history and aspects of their culture are well documented, Douglas R. Parks's monumental four-volume work Traditional Narratives of the Arikara Indians represents the first comprehensive attempt to describe and record their language and literary traditions. Volumes 1 and 2 present transcriptions of 156 oral narratives in Arikara and include literal interlinear English translations. Volumes 3 and 4 contain free English translations of those narratives, making available for the first time a broad, representative group of Arikara oral traditions that will be invaluable not only to anthropologists and folklorists but to everyone interested in American Indian life and literature.The narratives cover the entire range of traditional stories found in the historical and literary tradition of the Arikara people, who classify their stories into two categories, true stories and tales. Here are myths of ancient times, legends of power bestowed, historical narratives, and narratives of mysterious incidents that affirm the existence today of supernatural power in the world, along with tales of the trickster Coyote and stories of the risque Stuwi and various other animals. In addition, there are accounts of Arikara ritualism: prayers and descriptions of how personal names are bestowed and how the Death Feast originated.

A collection of previously unpublished Algonquian oral traditions featuring historical narratives, traditional stories, and legends that were gathered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They are presented in their original languages with new English-language translations. Accompanying essays explain the importance of the original texts.

Offers traditional cultural information on Comanches. This work presents the Comanches' earlier world - religious stories, historical accounts, autobiographical remembrances, cosmology, the practice of war, everyday games, birth rituals, funerals, kinship relations, the organization of camps, material culture, and relations with other tribes.

A comprehensive reference grammar of Choctaw, an American Indian language spoken by approximately eleven thousand people located primarily in Mississippi and Oklahoma. It contains the most complete description to date of the morphology of the language as well as a thorough treatment of phrase structure, word order, case marking, and complementation.

Provides an in-depth historical study of Comanche social and political groups. Using the ethnohistorical method, the author traces the changes and continuities in Comanche politics from their earliest interactions with Europeans to their settlement on a reservation in Oklahoma.

Introduces the oral literature of Native American peoples in Puget Salish-speaking areas of western Washington. This work provides information on the processes of language translation and of rendering oral traditions into written form.

Presents a study of kinship relations and household organization among the modern Cayugas, located in Ontario, Canada, that aims to fill a gap in our knowledge of modern Cayuga culture and history and make a significant contribution to our understanding of Iroquoian social organization.