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"More than half a century of contact between the author and the Hopi people has resulted in an unusual opportunity for long informative talks with friends from the villages. These conversations in a variety of circumstances have helped to give depth to an understanding and appreciation uncommon among persons not born and raised in the Hopi way. . . . This work gives a comprehensive view of the Hopi as a people, in length of time covered as well as in depth and breadth."—Utah Historical Quarterly

"It is personal yet precise, emotional and involved, yet objective and factual. . . . Readers who know something of Hopi history will be fascinated by the new insights and interpretations presented by James."—Arizona and the West

"The author has been an active supporter of Hopi interests for some fifty years and this book is as much a testimony to his unflagging personal devotion to a small and neglected tribe as it is a history of the Hopis' determination to maintain their identity and self-respect."—Journal of Arizona History

"Harry James writes with sympathy and restraint about a proud people who have suffered unjustly in the past, and who today are seeking an identity. He brings into sharp focus the dreams for tomorrow of the Hopi tribe. Let these dreams be shared by others before it is too late."—The American West

"An amazing and gripping account of a very great and intelligent people, concentrating on fact rather than the fantastic legends that have grown up around this unique culture."—The Masterkey

"The Hopi are indeed a most interesting people, and this authentic account of their way of life is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the Indian tribes of Arizona."—The Book Exchange

"For an excellent account of the history of the Hopi, the Southwest, typical government intervention into tribal affairs and the lives of the people . . . a must for any library."—Whispering Winds

Lavishly illustrated with nearly 400 color images, Painting the Maya Universe is the most thorough study and brilliant display of Classic Maya ceramic painting yet published. Building on twenty years of research and debate, Dorie Reents-Budet and her collaborators Joseph W. Ball, Ronald L. Bishop, Virginia M. Fields, and Barbara MacLeod bring together many perspectives, including the art historical, archaeological, epigraphical, and ethnohistorical, to examine one of the world’s great but overlooked painting traditions. With an emphasis on sixth- to eighth-century pottery featuring both pictorial and hieroglyphic imagery, Painting the Maya Universe presents an extraordinary exploration of the cultural roles and meanings of these Guatemalan, Belizean, and Mexican elite painted ceramics. Maya pottery is discussed both in aesthetic terms and for the important information it reveals about Maya society, artistry, politics, history, religion, and ritual. The range of ceramic painting styles developed during this period is also presented and defined in detail.
Painting the Maya Universe is the first publication to present a definitive translation of the hieroglyphic texts painted on these objects. With many glyphs deciphered here for the first time, this analysis reveals much about how these vessels were perceived and used by the Maya, their owners’ names, and, in several cases, the names of the artists who created them. This information is combined with archaeological and other data, including nuclear chemical analyses, to correlate painting styles with specific Maya sites.
Published in conjunction with Duke University Museum of Art and an exhibition touring the United States, Painting the Maya Universe presents an astonishing visual record as well as a monumental scholarly achievement. With photographs by Justin Kerr, the foremost photographer of pre-Columbian art, it includes over 90 unique full-color rollout photographs, each showing the entire surface of an object in a single frame. The book also addresses the questions and controversy regarding the loss of information that occurs when objects are removed from their archaeological context to become part of public and private collections.
Painting the Maya Universe will energize discussion of Maya pottery, hieroglyphic texts, and iconography. Its photographs, a lasting resource on this great painting tradition, will stimulate and delight the eye. It is a breakthrough in art history and Latin American scholarship that will enrich general readers and scholars alike.

Clara Jean Mosley Hall has inhabited various cultural worlds in her life: Native American, African American, Deaf, and hearing. The hearing daughter of a Deaf Nanticoke man, who grew up in Dover, Delaware’s Black community in the 1950s and 60s, Hall describes the intersections of these identities in Paris in America. By sharing her father’s experiences and relating her own struggles and successes, Hall honors her father’s legacy of hard work and perseverance and reveals the complexities of her own unique background.
​​      Hall was abandoned by her Deaf African American mother at a young age and forged a close bond with her father, James Paris Mosley, who communicated with her in American Sign Language. Although his family was Native American, they—like many other Nanticoke Native Americans of that region—had assimilated over time into Dover’s Black community. Hall vividly recounts the social and cultural elements that shaped her, from Jim Crow to the forced integration of public schools, to JFK and Motown. As a Coda (child of deaf adults) in a time when no accessibility or interpreting services were available, she was her father’s sole means of communication with the hearing world, a heavy responsibility for a child. After her turbulent teenage years, and with the encouragement of her future husband, she attended college and discovered that her skills as a fluent ASL user were a valuable asset in the field of education.
​​      Hall went on to become a college professor, mentor, philanthropist, and advocate for Deaf students from diverse backgrounds. Her memoir is a celebration of her family, her faith, her journey, and her heritage.

Based on extensive research across several disciplines, this book examines the songs and dances involved in public ceremonies of the Wabanaki Confederacy, a coalition of five Algonquian First Nations that figured importantly in the political history of New England and the Maritimes from the seventeenth century on. Ethnomusicologist Ann Morrison Spinney analyzes these ceremonial performances as they have been maintained in one of those nations, the Passamaquoddy community of Maine. She compares historical accounts with forms that have persisted to the present, showing how versions of the same songs, dances, and ritual speeches have continued to play a vital role in Passamaquoddy culture over time. A particular focus of the study is the annual Sipayik Indian Day, a public presentation of the dances associated with the protocols of the Wabanaki Confederacy. Spinney interprets these practices using melodic analysis and cultural contextual frameworks, drawing on a variety of sources, including written documents, sound and video recordings, interviews with singers, dancers, and other cultural practitioners, and her own fieldwork observations. Her research shows that Passamaquoddy techniques of song composition and performance parallel both the structure of the Passamaquoddy language and the political organizations that these ceremonies support.

Pedro Pino, or Lai-iu-ah-tsai-lu (his Zuni name) was for many years the most important Zuni political leader. He served during a period of tremendous change and challenges for his people. Born in 1788, captured by Navajos in his teens, he was sold into a New Mexican household, where he obtained his Spanish name. When he returned to Zuni, he spoke three languages and brought with him a wealth of knowledge regarding the world outside the pueblo. For decades he ably conducted Zuni foreign relations, defending the pueblo's sovereignty and lands, establishing trade relationships, interacting with foreigners-from prominent military and scientific expeditions to common emigrants-and documenting all in a remarkable archive. Steeped in Zuni traditions, he was known among other things for his diplomatic savvy, as a great warrior, for his oratory, and for his honesty and hospitality.

More than a biography, Richard Hart's work provides a history of Zuni during an especially significant period. Also the author of Zuni and the Courts: A Struggle for Sovereign
Land Rights and the co-author of A Zuni Atlas, Hart originally wrote the manuscript in 1979 after a decade of historical work for Zuni Pueblo. He then set it aside but continued to pursue research about and for Zuni. Its publication, at last, inscribes an important contribution to Pueblo history and biography and a testimonial to a remarkable Native American leader. In an afterword written for this publication, Hart discusses his original intentions in writing about Pedro Pino and Zuni and situates the biography in relation to current scholarship.

One of Frank Waters’s most popular novels, People of the Valley takes place high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains where an isolated Spanish-speaking people confront a threatening world of change.

Diverse in their languages and customs, the Native American peoples of the Great Lakes region—the Miamis, Ho-Chunks, Potawatomis, Ojibwas, and many others—shared a tumultuous history. In the colonial era their rich homeland became a target of imperial ambition and an invasion zone for European diseases, technologies, beliefs, and colonists. Yet in the face of these challenges, their nations’ strong bonds of trade, intermarriage, and association grew and extended throughout their watery domain, and strategic relationships and choices allowed them to survive in an era of war, epidemic, and invasion.

In Peoples of the Inland Sea, David Andrew Nichols offers a fresh and boundary-crossing history of the Lakes peoples over nearly three centuries of rapid change, from pre-Columbian times through the era of Andrew Jackson’s Removal program. As the people themselves persisted, so did their customs, religions, and control over their destinies, even in the Removal era. In Nichols’s hands, Native, French, American, and English sources combine to tell this important story in a way as imaginative as it is bold. Accessible and creative, Peoples of the Inland Sea is destined to become a classroom staple and a classic in Native American history.

Philo T. Farnsworth (1906–1971) has been called the "forgotten father of television." He grew up in Utah and southern Idaho, and was described as a genius by those who knew and worked with him. With only a high school education, Farnsworth drew his first television schematic for his high school teacher in Rigby, Idaho. Subsequent claims and litigation notwithstanding, he was the first to transmit a television image.

Farnsworth filed ten patents between 1927 and 1929 for camera tubes (transmitting), circuitry, and the cathode ray tube (viewing). After his early years as an inventor in San Francisco, he worked as an engineer, doing battle with RCA in the 1930s over patent rights, formed the Farnsworth Television Company in the 1940s, and worked for IT&T after their purchase of the Farnsworth enterprises. Every television set sold utilized at least six of his basic patents.

Because of endless legal wrangling with RCA over patent rights, he received very little financial reward for his television patents. Donald Godfrey examines the genius and the failures in the life of Philo Farnsworth as he struggled to be both inventor and entrepreneur.

In the opening story of Geary Hobson’s riveting new collection, Plain of Jars, a young private confides to his friend that he’s trying to leave the Marine Corps. “I am not doing this just because I find the Marine Corps too tough,” Warren Needham says, but because violence is contradictory to his faith. The story’s surprising climax, however, reveals a different side of Needham’s contradictory nature. It’s this acute understanding of conflict that characterizes Plain of Jars, a book populated by bullies, men in combat, abusive spouses, and Native Americans seeking a sense of personal identity in an environment where conformity is law. The U.S. Marine Corps sets the stage for a number of these stories, whose protagonists combat racism, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and the looming reality of the Vietnam War. With pitch perfect dialogue and a sense of the unexpected, Plain of Jars tests the depths of complex lives.

Who owns the past and the objects that physically connect us to history? And who has the right to decide this ownership, particularly when the objects are sacred or, in the case of skeletal remains, human? Is it the museums that care for the objects or the communities whose ancestors made them? These questions are at the heart of Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits, an unflinching insider account by a leading curator who has spent years learning how to balance these controversial considerations.

Five decades ago, Native American leaders launched a crusade to force museums to return their sacred objects and allow them to rebury their kin. Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to help them recover their looted heritage from museums across the country. As senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Chip Colwell has navigated firsthand the questions of how to weigh the religious freedom of Native Americans against the academic freedom of scientists and whether the emptying of museum shelves elevates human rights or destroys a common heritage. This book offers his personal account of the process of repatriation, following the trail of four objects as they were created, collected, and ultimately returned to their sources: a sculpture that is a living god, the scalp of a massacre victim, a ceremonial blanket, and a skeleton from a tribe considered by some to be extinct. These specific stories reveal a dramatic process that involves not merely obeying the law, but negotiating the blurry lines between identity and morality, spirituality and politics.

Things, like people, have biographies. Repatriation, Colwell argues, is a difficult but vitally important way for museums and tribes to acknowledge that fact—and heal the wounds of the past while creating a respectful approach to caring for these rich artifacts of history.
 

The Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona is a peer-reviewed monograph series sponsored by the School of Anthropology. Established in 1959, the series publishes archaeological and ethnographic papers that use contemporary method and theory to investigate problems of anthropological importance in the southwestern United States, Mexico, and related areas.

Not long ago, pottery was a lost art in Chihuahua, Mexico. But in the 1970s, near the ruins of Casas Grandes, an art revolution was born. Inspired by ancient pottery fragments from a tradition that had disappeared before the arrival of the first Europeans, a self-taught woodcutter-turned-artist reinvented an entire ceramic technology. Today Casas Grandes pottery, made by hand from local clays and mineral colors by a handful of artists, claims high prices and sets the standard for contemporary pottery. Photographer Sandra Smith traveled to Mata Ortíz to photograph the potters and to record their reflections on their work. Her portraits document their techniques—collecting and preparing the clay, forming by hand, sanding, and painting. They also capture intimate moments between artists and their art. For anyone who has ever admired Casas Grandes pottery, Portraits of Clay is a beautiful introduction to the potters and their work.

Excavations at Turkey Creek Pueblo, a large thirteenth-century ruin in the Point of Pines region boasting approximately 335 rooms.

This remarkable collection of poems explores the conjoined cultures of Indian and European, the revisions the conquered race must face, and the disruption that results from the attempt to combine divergent cultures in a single being. These poems speak from a four-cornered world: Cherokee and white, Christian and conjuring. They attempt to retrieve fragments of language from a nearly erased culture. At times, they speak in the spirit of the remembered language with the new language that is not fully formed in the understanding of the narrator.

The poems have roots in history, religion, and illiteracy. They are inspired by folk artists who use materials and textures at hand—enamel and cornmeal on plywood, house paint on tar and tin, model airplane paint on corrugated scrap metal. The resulting lyrics walk the boundary between worlds, weaving remnants of the old way of viewing the world with pieces of the new world, such as a clapper that turns lights on and off. The experimental text revisits the gap between past and present. The past is just beneath a newly painted surface. The newly painted surface is not quite dry.