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This volume is a collection of the most important essays written by Franz Boas on the science of anthropology.

"Franz Boas is the father of American anthropology and one of the founders of the field of modern anthropology. The book, Race, Language, and Culture, is a collection of some of his most important essays."—David Schneider, University of Chicago

"An exceptional book. Exceptional because it brings into one volume sixty-two papers written by the most influential figure in American anthropology. . . . Exceptional in that it exhibits the wide range of interests and scientific exactness which made it possible for one man to exert such a profound influence on the growing science of anthropology. . . . This is a volume every student of anthropology will wish to possess; it will also have a wide distribution among other students of the social sciences, and all interested in the problems of race."—Fay-Cooper Cole, American Anthropologist

Son of a Cherokee-English father and an Irish mother, Ralph Salisbury grew up among storytellers and has shared his family's tales and experiences in seven previous books of prose and poetry. Now in Rainbows of Stone he returns with a striking collection of poems that interweaves family tales with personal and tribal history.

Salisbury conjures images that define his life, from the vanishing farming and hunting traditions with which he was raised to his experiences in World War II as a member of a bomber crew. He writes of himself and of Indian people as Vanishing Americans—vanishing into the mingling of races—and sees himself as a pacifistic patriot concerned that we not continue the destructive reliance on war that marks our history.

Writing as one who is "not part Indian, part white, but wholly both," Salisbury has produced a haunting, powerful work that expresses his devotion to the Cherokee religion, its fidelity to its forebears, and its harmony with the forces of Nature. For all concerned with ecology, social justice, and peace, Rainbows of Stone conveys a growing awareness of the world and a sense of how each individual connects with the universal and timeless realities of every other human being.

This selection of works -- many by Native American scholars -- introduces selected topics in federal Indian law. Readings in American Indian Law covers contemporary issues of identity and tribal recognition; reparations for historic harms; the valuation of land in land claims; the return to tribal owners of human remains, sacred items, and cultural property; tribal governance and issues of gender, democracy informed by cultural awareness, and religious freedom.

Courses in federal Indian law are often aimed at understanding rules, not cultural conflicts. This book expands doctrinal discussions into understandings of culture, strategy, history, identity, and hopes for the future. Contributions from law, history, anthropology, ethnohistory, biography, sociology, socio-legal studies, and fiction offer an array of alternative paradigms as strong antidotes to our usual conceptions of federal Indian law.

Each selection reveals an aspect of how federal Indian law is made, interpreted, implemented, or experienced. Throughout, the book centers on the ever present and contentious issue of identity. At the point where identity and law intersect lies an important new way to contextualize the legal concerns of Native Americans.

This eagerly anticipated follow-up to the breakout memoir How to Be an Indian in the 21st Century delves more deeply into the themes of family, community, grief, and the struggle to make a place in the world when your very identity is considered suspect. In Rebel Poet: More Stories from a 21st Century Indian, author Louis Clark examines the effects of his mother's alcoholism and his young sister's death, offers an intimate recounting of the backlash he faced as an Indian on the job, and celebrates the hard-fought sense of home he and his wife have created. Rebel Poet continues the author's tradition of seamlessly mixing poetry and prose, and is at turns darker and more nuanced than its predecessor.

A revolution is underway among the Indigenous nations of North America. It is a quiet revolution, largely unnoticed in society at large. But it is profoundly important. From High Plains states and Prairie Provinces to southwestern deserts, from Mississippi and Oklahoma to the northwest coast of the continent, Native peoples are reclaiming their right to govern themselves and to shape their future in their own ways. Challenging more than a century of colonial controls, they are addressing severe social problems, building sustainable economies, and reinvigorating Indigenous cultures. In effect, they are rebuilding their nations according to their own diverse and often innovative designs.

Produced by the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy at the University of Arizona and the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, this book traces the contours of that revolution as Native nations turn the dream of self-determination into a practical reality. Part report, part analysis, part how-to manual for Native leaders, it discusses strategies for governance and community and economic development being employed by American Indian nations and First Nations in Canada as they move to assert greater control over their own affairs.

Rebuilding Native Nations provides guidelines for creating new governance structures, rewriting constitutions, building justice systems, launching nation-owned enterprises, encouraging citizen entrepreneurs, developing new relationships with non-Native governments, and confronting the crippling legacies of colonialism. For nations that wish to join that revolution or for those who simply want to understand the transformation now underway across Indigenous North America, this book is a critical resource.

CONTENTS
Foreword by Oren Lyons
Editor's Introduction


Part 1
Starting Points

1. Two Approaches to the Development of Native Nations: One Works, the Other Doesn't
Stephen Cornell and Joseph P. Kalt
2. Development, Governance, Culture: What Are They and What Do They Have to Do with Rebuilding Native Nations?
Manley A. Begay, Jr., Stephen Cornell, Miriam Jorgensen, and Joseph P. Kalt

Part 2
Rebuilding the Foundations

3. Remaking the Tools of Governance: Colonial Legacies, Indigenous Solutions
Stephen Cornell
4. The Role of Constitutions in Native Nation Building: Laying a Firm Foundation
Joseph P. Kalt
5 . Native Nation Courts: Key Players in Nation Rebuilding
Joseph Thomas Flies-Away, Carrie Garrow, and Miriam Jorgensen
6. Getting Things Done for the Nation: The Challenge of Tribal Administration
Stephen Cornell and Miriam Jorgensen

Part 3
Reconceiving Key Functions

7. Managing the Boundary between Business and Politics: Strategies for Improving the Chances for Success in Tribally Owned Enterprises
Kenneth Grant and Jonathan Taylor
8. Citizen Entrepreneurship: An Underutilized Development Resource
Stephen Cornell, Miriam Jorgensen, Ian Wilson Record, and Joan Timeche
9. Governmental Services and Programs: Meeting Citizens' Needs
Alyce S. Adams, Andrew J. Lee, and Michael Lipsky
10. Intergovernmental Relationships: Expressions of Tribal Sovereignty
Sarah L. Hicks

Part 4
Making It Happen

11. Rebuilding Native Nations: What Do Leaders Do?
Manley A. Begay, Jr., Stephen Cornell, Miriam Jorgensen, and Nathan Pryor
12. Seizing the Future: Why Some Native Nations Do and Others Don't
Stephen Cornell, Miriam Jorgensen, Joseph P. Kalt, and Katherine Spilde Contreras

Afterword by Satsan (Herb George)
References
About the Contributors
Index

This book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series represents a period-by-period synthesis of southeastern prehistory designed for high school and college students, avocational archaeologists, and interested members of the general public. It also serves as a basic reference for professional archaeologists worldwide on the record of a remarkable region.

Indigenous students remain one of the least represented populations in higher education. They continue to account for only one percent of the total post-secondary student population, and this lack of representation is felt in multiple ways beyond enrollment. Less research money is spent studying Indigenous students, and their interests are often left out of projects that otherwise purport to address diversity in higher education. 

Recently, Native scholars have started to reclaim research through the development of their own research methodologies and paradigms that are based in tribal knowledge systems and values, and that allow inherent Indigenous knowledge and lived experiences to strengthen the research. Reclaiming Indigenous Research in Higher Education highlights the current scholarship emerging from these scholars of higher education. From understanding how Native American students make their way through school, to tracking tribal college and university transfer students, this book allows Native scholars to take center stage, and shines the light squarely on those least represented among us.  
 

In Recognition Odysseys, Brian Klopotek explores the complicated relationship between federal tribal recognition policy and American Indian racial and tribal identities. He does so by comparing the experiences of three central Louisiana tribes that have petitioned for federal acknowledgment: the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe (recognized in 1981), the Jena Band of Choctaws (recognized in 1995), and the Clifton-Choctaws (currently seeking recognition). Though recognition has acquired a transformational aura, seemingly able to lift tribes from poverty and cultural decay to wealth and revitalization, these three cases reveal a more complex reality.

Klopotek describes the varied effects of the recognition process on the social and political structures, community cohesion, cultural revitalization projects, identity, and economic health of each tribe. He emphasizes that recognition policy is not the only racial project affecting Louisiana tribes. For the Tunica-Biloxis, the Jena Band of Choctaws, and the Clifton-Choctaws, discourses around blackness and whiteness have shaped the boundaries of Indian identity in ways that have only begun to be explored. Klopotek urges scholars and officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to acknowledge the multiple discourses and viewpoints influencing tribal identities. At the same time, he puts tribal recognition in broader perspective. Indigenous struggles began long before the BIA existed, and they will continue long after it renders any particular recognition decision.

In the prehistoric Southwest, if you traveled from one community to another, you would have observed tremendous diversity in how people looked and spoke. This volume is the first to look at how prehistoric people’s appearance and speech conveyed their identities. Previously, Southwest archaeologists have studied identity using architecture, ceramics, textiles, and jewelry. This book uses a holistic, comparative approach to consider all aspects of appearance. Advocating a people-centered perspective for studying the past, Neitzel and her colleagues show how these characteristics conveyed information about an individual’s social status, cultural affiliation, inter-group connections, religious beliefs, and ceremonial roles.

Contributors: Ann L. W. Stodder, Museum of New Mexico, and Department of Anthropology, The University of New Mexico; Laurie Webster, University of Arizona; and Jane H. Hill, School of Anthropology, University of Arizona (emerita) 

Reconstructing Tascalusa’s Chiefdom is an archaeological study of political collapse in the Alabama River Valley following the Hernando de Soto expedition.

Recording is central to the musical lives of contemporary powwow singers yet, until now, their aesthetic practices when recording have been virtually ignored in the study of Native American expressive cultures. Recording Culture is an exploration of the Aboriginal music industry and the powwow social world that supports it. For twelve years, Christopher A. Scales attended powwows—large intertribal gatherings of Native American singer-drummers, dancers, and spectators—across the northern Plains. For part of that time, he worked as a sound engineer for Arbor Records, a large Aboriginal music label based in Winnipeg, Canada. Drawing on his ethnographic research at powwow grounds and in recording studios, Scales examines the ways that powwow drum groups have utilized recording technology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the unique aesthetic principles of recorded powwow music, and the relationships between drum groups and the Native music labels and recording studios. Turning to "competition powwows," popular weekend-long singing and dancing contests, Scales analyzes their role in shaping the repertoire and aesthetics of drum groups in and out of the recording studio. He argues that the rise of competition powwows has been critical to the development of the powwow recording industry. Recording Culture includes a CD featuring powwow music composed by Gabriel Desrosiers and performed by the Northern Wind Singers.

In Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors, Kyle Boggs chronicles the struggle between Indigenous peoples who have rooted religious and cultural ties to outdoor sites across the US and elsewhere and the settlers who claim the right to freely recreate in those same places. Synthesizing theories of rhetoric, environmental studies, and settler colonialism, Boggs confronts the ways that settler colonial experiences and expectations have been narrated through rhetorical practices on these so-called public lands. Fusing journalism and personal narrative with scholarly research, Boggs’s argument comes to bear on his central case study of a northern Arizona ski development on a mountain held sacred by at least thirteen Indigenous tribes. In illuminating the striking ways that settler imaginaries are accommodated, performed, and sustained in the everyday, Boggs offers a powerful reminder that even during leisure activities (in this case, sports such as ultrarunning, rock climbing, and skiing), complex webs of power control who can access resources and land and who has the right to protect histories and cultures.

In lucid narrative prose, Sean Kicummah Teuton studies the stirring literature of “Red Power,” an era of Native American organizing that began in 1969 and expanded into the 1970s. Teuton challenges the claim that Red Power thinking relied on romantic longings for a pure Indigenous past and culture. He shows instead that the movement engaged historical memory and oral tradition to produce more enabling knowledge of American Indian lives and possibilities. Looking to the era’s moments and literature, he develops an alternative, “tribal realist” critical perspective to allow for more nuanced analyses of Native writing. In this approach, “knowledge” is not the unattainable product of disinterested observation. Rather it is the achievement of communally mediated, self-reflexive work openly engaged with the world, and as such it is revisable. For this tribal realist position, Teuton enlarges the concepts of Indigenous identity and tribal experience as intertwined sources of insight into a shared world.

While engaging a wide spectrum of Native American writing, Teuton focuses on three of the most canonized and, he contends, most misread novels of the era—N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968), James Welch’s Winter in the Blood (1974), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977). Through his readings, he demonstrates the utility of tribal realism as an interpretive framework to explain social transformations in Indian Country during the Red Power era and today. Such transformations, Teuton maintains, were forged through a process of political awakening that grew from Indians’ rethought experience with tribal lands and oral traditions, the body and imprisonment, in literature and in life.

Red Man's America meets the great need for a comprehensive study of Indian societies from the first Stone Age hunters to the American citizens of today. Beginning with the first migrations of primitive man from Siberia in the Old World to Alaska in the New, probably during the latter part of the Pleistocene glaciations, and his subsequent migration southward and eastward, the author takes up in turn the tribes and cultures of the various regions of North America.

The material Professor Underhill has gathered from the fields of archaeology, ethnology, and history, together with that drawn from her own experience in the United States Indian Service, produces a fascinating narrative. Red Man's America is an important contribution to our heritage of Indian life and lore.

"A work for which both sociologist and historian will be forever grateful. The author has combined a long period of study with actual field work in the service of the Indian to produce a work that gives a brief, but well written and accurate, sketch of the origins, backgrounds, and customs of the various North American tribes. . . . There is no other modern single volume that contains as much information on the subject."—E.R. Vollmar, The Historical Bulletin

"Liveliness in style and illustration, together with perspicacity in content, makes this book a useful introduction to the civilization of the original inhabitants of the land."—Pacific Historical Review

Among the topics considered in this classic study are world origins and supernatural powers, attitudes toward the dead, the medicine man and shaman, hunting and gathering rituals, war and planting ceremonies, and newer religions, such as the Ghost Dance and the Peyote Religion.

"The distinctive contribution of [Red Man's Religion] is the treatment of topics, the insight and the perspective of the author, and her ability to transmit these to the reader. . . . Trais and aspects of religion are not treated as abstract entitites, to be enumerated and summated, assigned a geographic distribution, and then abandoned. No page is a dry recital; each is an illumination. Insight and wisdom are framed in poetic prose. An offering of information in such a medium merits gratitude."—American Anthropologist

Patrisia Gonzales addresses "Red Medicine" as a system of healing that includes birthing practices, dreaming, and purification rites to re-establish personal and social equilibrium. The book explores Indigenous medicine across North America, with a special emphasis on how Indigenous knowledge has endured and persisted among peoples with a legacy to Mexico. Gonzales combines her lived experience in Red Medicine as an herbalist and traditional birth attendant with in-depth research into oral traditions, storytelling, and the meanings of symbols to uncover how Indigenous knowledge endures over time. And she shows how this knowledge is now being reclaimed by Chicanos, Mexican Americans and Mexican Indigenous peoples.

For Gonzales, a central guiding force in Red Medicine is the principal of regeneration as it is manifested in Spiderwoman. Dating to Pre-Columbian times, the Mesoamerican Weaver/Spiderwoman—the guardian of birth, medicine, and purification rites such as the Nahua sweat bath—exemplifies the interconnected process of rebalancing that transpires throughout life in mental, spiritual and physical manifestations. Gonzales also explains how dreaming is a form of diagnosing in traditional Indigenous medicine and how Indigenous concepts of the body provide insight into healing various kinds of trauma.

Gonzales links pre-Columbian thought to contemporary healing practices by examining ancient symbols and their relation to current curative knowledges among Indigenous peoples. Red Medicine suggests that Indigenous healing systems can usefully point contemporary people back to ancestral teachings and help them reconnect to the dynamics of the natural world.
 

 

Neva Greene is seeking answers.

 

The daughter of American Indian activists, Neva hasn’t seen or heard from her parents since they vanished a decade earlier, after planning an act of resistance that went terribly wrong. Discovering a long-overlooked clue to their disappearance, Neva follows their trail to Central America, leaving behind an uncaring husband, an estranged brother, and a life of lukewarm commitments.

 

Determined to solve the mystery of her parents’ disappearance, Neva finds work teaching English in the capital city of tiny Coatepeque, a country torn by its government’s escalating war on its Indigenous population. As the violence and political unrest grow around her, Neva meets a man whose tenderness toward her seems to contradict his shadowy political connections.

 

Against the backdrop of Central American politics, this suspenseful first novel from award-winning poet Janet McAdams explores an important chapter in American Indian history. Through finely drawn, compelling characters and lucidly beautiful prose, Red Weather explores the journey from loss to possibility, from the secrets of the past to the longings of the present.

The Maine Woods, vast and largely unsettled, are often described as unchanged since Henry David Thoreau's journeys across the backcountry, in spite of the realities of Indian dispossession and the visible signs of logging, settlement, tourism, and real estate development. In the summer of 2014 scholars, activists, members of the Penobscot Nation, and other individuals retraced Thoreau's route.

Inspired partly by this expedition, the accessible and engaging essays here offer valuable new perspectives on conservation, the cultural ties that connect Native communities to the land, and the profound influence the geography of the Maine Woods had on Thoreau and writers and activists who followed in his wake. Together, these essays offer a rich and multifaceted look at this special place and the ways in which Thoreau's Maine experiences continue to shape understandings of the environment a century and a half later.

Contributors include the volume editor, Kathryn Dolan, James S. Finley, James Francis, Richard W. Judd, Dale Potts, Melissa Sexton, Chris Sockalexis, Stan Tag, Robert M. Thorson, and Laura Dassow Walls.

 

All the money spent by the United States space program is not spent looking at the stars. NASA is composed of a vast and varied network of scientists across the academic spectrum involved in research and development programs that have wide application on planet Earth. Several of the leaders in the field of remote sensing and archaeology were recently brought together for a NASA-funded workshop in Biloxi, Mississippi. The workshop was organized specifically to show these archaeologists and cultural resource managers how close we are to being able to “see” under the dirt in order to know where to excavate before ever putting a shovel in the ground. As the book that resulted from this workshop demonstrates, this fantasy is quickly becoming a reality.

In this volume, eleven archaeologists reveal how the broad application of remote sensing, and especially geophysical techniques, is altering the usual conduct of dirt archaeology. Using case studies that both succeeded and failed, they offer a comprehensive guide to remote sensing techniques on archaeological sites throughout North America. Because this new technology is advancing on a daily basis, the book is accompanied by a CD intended for periodic update that provides additional data and illustrations.

 

with contributions by: R. Berle Clay, Lawrence B. Conyers, Rinita A. Dalan, Marco Giardino, Thomas J. Green, Michael L. Hargrave, Bryan S. Haley, Jay K. Johnson, Kenneth L. Kvamme, J. J. Lockhart, Lewis Somers

A valuable resource for anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and western historians who wish to better understand ritual life in the Plains region. —Western Historical Quarterly

"Harrod's discussion of kinship and reciprocity in Northwest Plains cosmology contains valuable insight into Native American worldview, and his emphasis on the moral dimension of ritual process is a major addition to the too-often ignored subject of Native American moral life." —Journal of Religion

"Includes the major works on Blackfoot, Crow, Cheyennes, and Arapaho religion, the works to which anyone who wishes to understand the religious life of these tribes must continue to turn." —Choice

"Plains people, Harrod suggests, refracted nature and conceived an environmental ethic through a metaphor of kinship. He is particularly skillful in characterizing the ambiguity Plains people expressed at the necessity of killing and eating their animal kin. Renewing the World also contributes to another new and uncultivated science we might call 'ecology of mind'." —Great Plains Quarterly
 

Arij Ouweneel’s Resilient Memories: Amerindian Cognitive Schemas in Latin American Art takes a cognitive approach to the mediation of collective memory by works of art. In looking at cultural production of Amerindians—the transnational mnemonic community comprised of indígenas, originarios, mestizos, and cholos—Ouweneel argues that cultural memories and identity are not simply the sum total of individuals’ expressions of self, but that some cultural artifacts become privileged to inform the heart of the mnemonic community. Ouweneel seeks to identify a series of cognitive schemas as the foundation of an Amerindian Cognitive Unconsciousness as a viable alternative to the Freudian Dynamic Unconscious. Art, then, serves to trigger the cognitive schemas embedded within the Amerindian community and act as the mediator of collective memory. 
 
Exploring works ranging in popularity, from Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También to the paintings of Peruvian artists Claudia Coca and Jorge Miyagui, and from Mexican Zapatistas to hip-hop, Ouweneel details the ways in which artists interact with the embodied memory of the community but also assert their own place within it as crucial, furthering their audiences’ understanding of and interaction with existing cultural schemas. In this way, Ouweneel shows that memories must serve the present or they will be forgotten.

Retelling Trickster in Naapi’s Language is an examination of Nitsitapiisinni (Blackfoot) origin stories about one of the most powerful and unpredictable of the early creators in Niitsitapii consciousness and chronology: Naapi. Through in-depth linguistic analysis, Nimachia Howe reinterprets the earliest references to Naapi, offering a more authentic understanding of his identity and of the meanings and functions of the stories in which he appears.
 
Naapi is commonly and inaccurately categorized by Western scholars as a trickster figure. Research on him is rife with misnomers and repeated misinterpretations, many resulting from untranslatable terms and concepts, comparisons with the binary tenets of “good” vs. “bad,” and efforts by Niitsitapii storytellers to protect the stories. The five stories included in their entirety in this volume present Naapi’s established models of reciprocity, connection, kinship, reincarnation, and offerings, shown in descriptions of, and predictions for, the balance between life and death, the rising and setting of planets, wind directions and forces, and the cyclical nature of animals, birds, plants, glaciers, and rivers.
 
Retelling Trickster in Naapi’s Language will be of interest to students and scholars of Native American studies, ethnography, folklore, environmental philosophy, and Indigenous language, literature, and religion.
 

Winner Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award

For thousands of years, humans have lived on the sprawling escarpment in Arizona known as the Mogollon Rim, a stretch that separates the valleys of central Arizona from the mountains of the north. A vast portion of this dramatic landscape is the traditional home of the Dilzhe’e (Tonto Apache) and the Yavapai. Now Daniel Herman offers a compelling narrative of how—from 1864 to 1934—the Dilzhe’e and the Yavapai came to central Arizona, how they were conquered, how they were exiled, how they returned to their homeland, and how, through these events, they found renewal.

Herman examines the complex, contradictory, and very human relations between Indians, settlers, and Federal agents in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arizona—a time that included Arizona’s brutal Indian wars. But while most tribal histories stay within the borders of the reservation, Herman also chronicles how Indians who left the reservation helped build a modern state with dams, hydroelectricity, roads, and bridges. With thoughtful detail and incisive analysis, Herman discusses the complex web of interactions between Apache, Yavapai, and Anglos that surround every aspect of the story.

Rim Country Exodus is part of a new movement in Western history emphasizing survival rather than disappearance. Just as important, this is one of the first in-depth studies of the West that examines race as it was lived. Race was formulated, Herman argues, not only through colonial and scientific discourses, but also through day-to-day interactions between Indians, agents, and settlers. Rim Country Exodus offers an important new perspective on the making of the West.

The Rock Art of Utah is a guide to the many varieties of rock art found in the state. Through dozens of high-quality photographs and drawings from the Donald Scott Collection, all made during the 1920s and 30s, author Polly Schaafsma provides a fascinating, comprehensive tour of this unique legacy. Now in an updated edition, it will engage anyone with an interest in the ancient peoples of the Colorado Plateau.

The narrator in this latest collection of poems by Ray Young Bear is alter ego and spiritual seeker Edgar Bearchild, who balances the hapless polarities of life in the Black Eagle Child Settlement with wry humor, a powerful intelligence, and the occasional designer drug. Bearchild is forever infused with revelations both modern and ancient, forever influenced by tribal history, animism, supernaturalism, religion, and mythology.

Whether faced with tragedy or comedy, Bearchild lives in a world replete with signs and portents, from the Lazy-Boy recliner that visually accesses a faraway crime to the child's handprint that mysteriously appears on a frosty ladder. Edgar and his wife, Selene Buffalo Husband, and the other members of the Black Eagle Child Settlement create and recreate prophecies that “quietly wait and glow” in the “mythical darkness that would follow the stories.”

Poet, novelist, and performing artist Ray Young Bear is a tribal member of the Meskwaki Nation of central Iowa. He is the author of Winter of the Salamander, The Invisible Musician, Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives (Iowa, 1992), and Remnants of the First Earth.

Just as the Rudo Ensayo is more an historic document than a mere history, so this new translation of it is more a documented interpretation than simply a new translation. The translator/editors bring their expert knowledge of the area, the language, and the history to every page of Nentvig's manuscript. Pradeau and Rasmussen have clarified many of the ambiguities of earlier translations by Smith (1863) and Guiteras (1894), and have added substantial annotations to the author's accounts of fauna and flora, native culture, and Spanish outposts. An incomparable record of a twelve-year mission in 18th century Sonora, the Rudo Ensayo as rendered in modern English is also a fascinating travelogue through an untamed land.