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I, the Song is an introduction to the rich and complex classical North American poetry that grew out of and reflects Indian life before the European invasion. No generalization can hold true for all the classical poems of North American Indians. They spring from thirty thousand years of experience, five hundred languages and dialects, and ten linguistic groups and general cultures. But the poems from these different cultures and languages belong to poetry unified by similar experiences and shared continent.

Built on early transcriptions of Native American “songs” and arranged by subject, these poems are informed by additional context that enables readers to appreciate more fully their imagery, their cultural basis, and the moment that produced them. They let us look at our continent through the eyes of a wide range of people: poets, hunters, farmers, holy men and women, and children. This poetry achieved its vividness, clarity, and intense emotional powers partly because the singers made their poems for active use as well as beauty, and also because they made them for singing or chanting rather than isolated reading.

Most striking, classical North American Indian poetry brings us flashes of timeless vision and absolute perception: a gull’s wing red over the dawn; snow-capped peaks in the moonlight; a death song. Flowing beneath them is a powerful current: the urge to achieve a selfless attention to the universe and a determination to see and delight in the universe on its own terms.

Ronald J. Mason explores the tension between aboriginal oral traditions and the practice of archaeology in North America. That exploration is necessarily interdisciplinary and set in a global context. Indeed, the issues at stake are universal in the current era of intellectual "decolonization" and multiculturalism.

 

Unless committed to writing, even the most esteemed utterances are inevitably forgotten with the passing of generations, however much the succeeding ones try to reproduce what they think they had heard. Writing shares with archaeo-logical remains a greater, if unequal, durability. Through copious examples across academic and ethnographic spectra and over millennia, Mason examines the disparate functions of traditional "ways of knowing" in contrast to the paradigm of science and critical historiography.

  

In Indian Voices, Alison Owings takes readers on a fresh journey across America, east to west, north to south, and around again. Owings's most recent oral history—engagingly written in a style that entertains and informs—documents what Native Americans say about themselves, their daily lives, and the world around them.

Young and old from many tribal nations speak with candor, insight, and (unknown to many non-Natives) humor about what it is like to be a Native American in the twenty-first century. Through intimate interviews many also express their thoughts about the sometimes staggeringly ignorant, if often well-meaning, non-Natives they encounter—some who do not realize Native Americans still exist, much less that they speak English, have cell phones, use the Internet, and might attend powwows and power lunches.

Indian Voices, an inspiring and important contribution to the literature about the original Americans, will make every reader rethink the past—and present—of the United States.

In 1969 Vine Deloria, Jr., in his controversial book Custer Died for Your Sins, criticized the anthropological community for its impersonal dissection of living Native American cultures. Twenty-five years later, anthropologists have become more sensitive to Native American concerns, and Indian people have become more active in fighting for accurate representations of their cultures. In this collection of essays, Indian and non-Indian scholars examine how the relationship between anthropology and Indians has changed over that quarter-century and show how controversial this issue remains. Practitioners of cultural anthropology, archaeology, education, and history provide multiple lenses through which to view how Deloria's message has been interpreted or misinterpreted. Among the contributions are comments on Deloria's criticisms, thoughts on the reburial issue, and views on the ethnographic study of specific peoples. A final contribution by Deloria himself puts the issue of anthropologist/Indian interaction in the context of the century's end.

CONTENTS
Introduction: What's Changed, What Hasn't, Thomas Biolsi & Larry J. Zimmerman
Part One--Deloria Writes Back
Vine Deloria, Jr., in American Historiography, Herbert T. Hoover
Growing Up on Deloria: The Impact of His Work on a New Generation of Anthropologists, Elizabeth S. Grobsmith
Educating an Anthro: The Influence of Vine Deloria, Jr., Murray L. Wax
Part Two--Archaeology and American Indians
Why Have Archaeologists Thought That the Real Indians Were Dead and What Can We Do about It?, Randall H. McGuire
Anthropology and Responses to the Reburial Issue, Larry J. Zimmerman
Part Three-Ethnography and Colonialism
Here Come the Anthros, Cecil King
Beyond Ethics: Science, Friendship and Privacy, Marilyn Bentz
The Anthropological Construction of Indians: Haviland Scudder Mekeel and the Search for the Primitive in Lakota Country, Thomas Biolsi
Informant as Critic: Conducting Research on a Dispute between Iroquoianist Scholars and Traditional Iroquois, Gail Landsman
The End of Anthropology (at Hopi)?, Peter Whiteley
Conclusion: Anthros, Indians and Planetary Reality, Vine Deloria, Jr.

The art of reconstructing civilizations from the artifacts of daily life demands integrity and imagination. Indians of North America displays both in its description of the enormous variation of culture patterns among Indians from the Arctic to Panama at the high points of their histories—a variation which was greater than that among the nations of Europe.

For this second edition, Harold Driver made extensive revisions in chapter content and organization, incorporating many new discoveries and interpretations in archeology and related fields. He also revised several of the maps and added more than 100 bibliographical items. Since the publication of the first edition, there has been an increased interest in the activities of Indians in the twentieth century; accordingly, the author placed much more emphasis on this period.

Land is key to the operations of coloniality, but the power of the land is also the key anticolonial force that grounds Indigenous liberation. This work is an attempt to articulate the nature of land as a material, conceptual, and ontological foundation for Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and valuing. As a foundation of valuing, land forms the framework for a conceptualization of Indigenous environmental ethics as an anticolonial force for sovereign Indigenous futures. This text is an important contribution in the efforts to Indigenize Western philosophy, particularly in the context of settler colonialism in the United States. It breaks significant ground in articulating Indigenous ways of knowing and valuing to Western philosophy—not as artifact that Western philosophy can incorporate into its canon, but rather as a force of anticolonial Indigenous liberation. Ultimately, Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land shines light on a possible road for epistemically, ontologically, and morally sovereign Indigenous futures.

Focusing on the enactment of identity in dance, Indigenous Dance and Dancing Indian is a cross-cultural, cross-ethnic, and cross-national comparison of indigenous dance practices.

Considering four genres of dance in which indigenous people are represented--K'iche Maya traditional dance, powwow, folkloric dance, and dancing sports mascots--the book addresses both the ideational and behavioral dimensions of identity. Each dance is examined as a unique cultural expression in individual chapters, and then all are compared in the conclusion, where striking parallels and important divergences are revealed. Ultimately, Krystal describes how dancers and audiences work to construct and consume satisfying and meaningful identities through dance by either challenging social inequality or reinforcing the present social order.

Detailed ethnographic work, thorough case studies, and an insightful narrative voice make Indigenous Dance and Dancing Indian a substantial addition to scholarly literature on dance in the Americas. It will be of interest to scholars of Native American studies, social sciences, and performing arts.

Indigenous knowledge has become a catchphrase in global struggles for environmental justice. Yet indigenous knowledges are often viewed, incorrectly, as pure and primordial cultural artifacts. This collection draws from African and North American cases to argue that the forms of knowledge identified as “indigenous” resulted from strategies to control environmental resources during and after colonial encounters.

At times indigenous knowledges represented a “middle ground” of intellectual exchanges between colonizers and colonized; elsewhere, indigenous knowledges were defined through conflict and struggle. The authors demonstrate how people claimed that their hybrid forms of knowledge were communal, religious, and traditional, as opposed to individualist, secular, and scientific, which they associated with European colonialism.

Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment offers comparative and transnational insights that disturb romantic views of unchanging indigenous knowledges in harmony with the environment. The result is a book that informs and complicates how indigenous knowledges can and should relate to environmental policy-making.

Contributors: David Bernstein, Derick Fay, Andrew H. Fisher, Karen Flint, David M. Gordon, Paul Kelton, Shepard Krech III, Joshua Reid, Parker Shipton, Lance van Sittert, Jacob Tropp, James L. A. Webb, Jr., Marsha Weisiger

Spanish missions in North America were once viewed as confining and stagnant communities, with native peoples on the margins of the colonial enterprise. Recent archaeological and ethnohistorical research challenges that notion. Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions considers how native peoples actively incorporated the mission system into their own dynamic existence. The book, written by diverse scholars and edited by Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider, covers missions in the Spanish borderlands from California to Texas to Georgia.

Offering thoughtful arguments and innovative perspectives, the editors organized the book around three interrelated themes. The first section explores power, politics, and belief, recognizing that Spanish missions were established within indigenous landscapes with preexisting tensions, alliances, and belief systems. The second part, addressing missions from the perspective of indigenous inhabitants, focuses on their social, economic, and historical connections to the surrounding landscapes. The final section considers the varied connections between mission communities and the world beyond the mission walls, including examinations of how mission neophytes, missionaries, and colonial elites vied for land and natural resources.

Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions offers a holistic view on the consequences of missionization and the active negotiation of missions by indigenous peoples, revealing cross-cutting perspectives into the complex and contested histories of the Spanish borderlands. This volume challenges readers to examine deeply the ways in which native peoples negotiated colonialism not just inside the missions themselves but also within broader indigenous landscapes. This book will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, tribal scholars, and anyone interested in indigenous encounters with colonial institutions.

Archaeologists with expertise in stratigraphy, ceramic dating, obsidian hydration, and luminescence dating present historical and nontechnical reviews of the growth, development, and application of their techniques.