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13 books match the query 'Algonquian Indians'

cover of America's Early Whalemen: Indian Shore Whalers on Long Island, 1650–1750

America's Early Whalemen

Indian Shore Whalers on Long Island, 1650–1750

John A. Strong

University of Arizona Press, 2018

The Indians of coastal Long Island were closely attuned to their maritime environment. They hunted sea mammals, fished in coastal waters, and harvested shellfish. To celebrate the deep-water spirits, they sacrificed the tail and fins of the most powerful and awesome denizen of their maritime world—the whale. These Native Americans were whalemen, integral to the origin and development of the first American whaling enterprise in the years 1650 to 1750.

America’s Early Whalemen examines this early chapter of an iconic American historical experience. John A. Strong’s research draws on exhaustive sources, domestic and international, including little-known documents such as the whaling contracts of 340 Native American whalers, personal accounting books of whaling company owners, London customs records, estate inventories, and court records. Strong addresses labor relations, the role of alcohol and debt, the patterns of cultural accommodations by Native Americans, and the emergence of corporate capitalism in colonial America.

When Strong began teaching at Long Island University in 1964, he found little mention of the local Indigenous people in history books. The Shinnecocks and the neighboring tribes of Unkechaugs and Montauketts were treated as background figures for the celebratory narrative of the “heroic” English settlers. America’s Early Whalemen highlights the important contributions of Native peoples to colonial America.
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cover of Creating New England, Defending the Northeast: Contested Algonquian and English Spatial Worlds, 1500–1700

Creating New England, Defending the Northeast

Contested Algonquian and English Spatial Worlds, 1500–1700

Nathan Braccio

University of Massachusetts Press, 2026

Examining maps and placemaking during negotiations between Indigenous people and colonial settlers
 
Between 1500 and 1700, Indigenous and English mapmakers across the North Atlantic depicted present-day New England in markedly distinct ways, highlighting how differently their communities understood the landscape. While English cartographers relied on new mathematics and other developing scientific knowledge from Europe, as well as an overhead perspective of the world, Algonquian mapmakers drew on deep knowledge of the landscape, derived from their communities’ long history upon it. Nathan Braccio refers to this phenomenon as “parallel landscapes.”

Creating New England, Defending the Northeast asserts that Algonquian knowledge of the landscape represented a powerful and persistent alternative to English surveying and mapmaking in the Northeast. When English colonists and explorers recognized the unsuitability of their techniques for understanding New England’s unfamiliar landscape, they attempted to appropriate Indigenous knowledge and maps. Algonquian sachems used this as an opportunity to control and benefit from their new English neighbors. Later, as the English became insecure in their dependence on Indigenous people, they began to remake and mark the landscape. Algonquians adapted, maintaining control of important spatial knowledge, even in a place no longer entirely of their making. This story complicates narratives of conquest and highlights the Indigenous spatial knowledge too often overlooked.
 
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cover of Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology

Early Native Literacies in New England

A Documentary and Critical Anthology

Kristina Bross

University of Massachusetts Press, 2008

Designed as a corrective to colonial literary histories that have excluded Native voices, this anthology brings together a variety of primary texts produced by the Algonquian peoples of New England during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and very early nineteenth centuries. Included among these written materials and objects are letters, signatures, journals, baskets, pictographs, confessions, wills, and petitions, each of which represents a form of authorship. Together they demonstrate the continuing use of traditional forms of memory and communication and the lively engagement of Native peoples with alphabetic literacy during the colonial period. Each primary text is accompanied by an essay that places it in context and explores its significance. 

Written by leading scholars in the field, these readings draw on recent trends in literary analysis, history, and anthropology to provide an excellent overview of the field of early Native studies. They are also intended to provoke discussion and open avenues for further exploration by students and other interested readers. Above all, the texts and commentaries gathered in this volume provide an opportunity to see Native American literature as a continuity of expression that reflects choices made long before contact and colonization, rather than as a nineteenth—or even twentieth-century invention.

Contributors include Heidi Bohaker, Heather Bouwman, Joanna Brooks, Kristina Bross, Stephanie Fitzgerald, Sandra Gustafson, Laura Arnold Leibman, Kevin McBride, David Murray, Laura Murray, Jean O'Brien, Ann Marie Plane, Philip Round, Jodi Schorb, David Silverman, and Hilary E. Wyss.

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cover of Making Pictures in Stone: American Indian Rock Art of the Northeast

Making Pictures in Stone

American Indian Rock Art of the Northeast

Edward J. Lenik

University of Alabama Press, 2008

A full range of rock art appearances, including dendroglyphs, pictographs, and a selection of portable rock objects

The Indians of northeastern North America are known to us primarily through reports and descriptions written by European explorers, clergy, and settlers, and through archaeological evidence. An additional invaluable source of information is the interpretation of rock art images and their relationship to native peoples for recording practical matters or information, as expressions of their legends and spiritual traditions, or as simple doodling or graffiti. The images in this book connect us directly to the Indian peoples of the Northeast, mainly Algonkian tribes inhabiting eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland and the lower Potomac River Valley, New York, New Jersey, the six New EnglandStates, and Atlantic Canada. Lenik provides a full range of rock art appearances in the study area, including some dendroglyphs, pictographs, and a selection of portable rock objects. By providing a full analysis and synthesis of the data, including the types and distribution of the glyphs, and interpretations of their meaning to the native peoples, Lenik reveals a wealth of new information on the culture and lifeways of the Indians of the Northeast.

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cover of Papers of the Fiftieth Algonquian Conference

Papers of the Fiftieth Algonquian Conference

Monica Macaulay

Michigan State University Press, 2021

Papers of the Algonquian Conference is a collection of peer-reviewed scholarship from an annual international forum that focuses on topics related to the languages and cultures of Algonquian peoples. This series touches on a variety of subject areas, including anthropology, archaeology, education, ethnography, history, Indigenous studies, language studies, literature, music, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology. Contributors often cite never-before-published data in their research, giving the reader a fresh and unique insight into the Algonquian peoples and rendering these papers essential reading for those interested in studying Algonquian society.
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cover of Papers of the Fifty-Fifth Algonquian Conference: Actes du Cinquante-Cinquième Congrès des Algonquinistes

Papers of the Fifty-Fifth Algonquian Conference

Actes du Cinquante-Cinquième Congrès des Algonquinistes

Inge Genee

Michigan State University Press, 2026

Papers of the Algonquian Conference is a collection of peer-reviewed scholarship from an annual international forum that focuses on topics related to the languages and cultures of Algonquian peoples. This series touches on a variety of subject areas, including anthropology, archaeology, education, ethnography, history, Indigenous studies, language studies, literature, music, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology. Contributors often cite never-before-published data in their research, giving the reader a fresh and unique insight into the Algonquian peoples and rendering these papers essential reading for those interested in studying Algonquian society

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cover of Papers of the Fifty-First Algonquian Conference

Papers of the Fifty-First Algonquian Conference

Monica Macaulay

Michigan State University Press, 2022

Papers of the Algonquian Conference is a collection of peer-reviewed scholarship from an annual international forum that focuses on topics related to the languages and cultures of Algonquian peoples. This series touches on a variety of subject areas, including anthropology, archaeology, education, ethnography, history, Indigenous studies, language studies, literature, music, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology. Contributors often cite never before published data in their research, giving the reader a fresh and unique insight into the Algonquian peoples and rendering these papers essential reading for those interested in studying Algonquian society.
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cover of Papers of the Fifty-Fourth Algonquian Conference: Actes du cinquante-quatrième Congrès des Algonquinistes

Papers of the Fifty-Fourth Algonquian Conference

Actes du cinquante-quatrième Congrès des Algonquinistes

Inge Genee

Michigan State University Press, 2025

Papers of the Algonquian Conference is a collection of peer-reviewed scholarship from an annual international forum that focuses on topics related to the languages and cultures of Algonquian peoples. This series touches on a variety of subject areas, including anthropology, archaeology, education, ethnography, history, Indigenous studies, language studies, literature, music, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology. Contributors often cite never-before-published data in their research, giving the reader a fresh and unique insight into the Algonquian peoples and rendering these papers essential reading for those interested in studying Algonquian society.
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cover of Papers of the Forty-Eighth Algonquian Conference

Papers of the Forty-Eighth Algonquian Conference

Monica Macaulay

Michigan State University Press, 2019

Papers of the Algonquian Conference is a collection of peer-reviewed scholarship from an annual international forum that focuses on topics related to the languages and cultures of Algonquian peoples. This series touches on a variety of subject areas, including anthropology, archaeology, education, ethnography, history, Indigenous studies, language studies, literature, music, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology. Contributors often cite never-before-published data in their research, giving the reader a fresh and unique insight into the Algonquian peoples and rendering these papers essential reading for those interested in studying Algonquian society.
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cover of Papers of the Forty-Seventh Algonquian Conference

Papers of the Forty-Seventh Algonquian Conference

Monica Macaulay

Michigan State University Press, 2018

Papers of the Algonquian Conference is a collection of peer-reviewed presentations from an annual international forum that focuses on topics related to the languages and cultures of Algonquian peoples. This series touches on a variety of subject areas, including anthropology, archaeology, education, ethnography, history, Indigenous studies, language studies, literature, music, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology. Contributors often cite never-before-published data in their research, giving the reader a fresh and unique insight into the Algonquian peoples and rendering these papers essential reading for those interested in studying Algonquian society.
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cover of Papers of the Forty-Sixth Algonquian Conference

Papers of the Forty-Sixth Algonquian Conference

Monica Macaulay

Michigan State University Press, 2017

Papers of the Algonquian Conference is a collection of peer-reviewed presentations from an annual international forum that focuses on topics related to the languages and cultures of Algonquian peoples. This series touches on a variety of subject areas, including anthropology, archaeology, education, ethnography, history, Indigenous studies, language studies, literature, music, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology. Contributors often cite never-before-published data in their research, giving the reader a fresh and unique insight into the Algonquian peoples and rendering these papers essential reading for those interested in studying Algonquian society. 
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cover of The Deadly Politics of Giving: Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoke, and Jamestown

The Deadly Politics of Giving

Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoke, and Jamestown

Seth Mallios

University of Alabama Press, 2006

A clash of cultures on the North American continent.
 
With a focus on indigenous cultural systems and agency theory, this volume analyzes Contact Period relations between North American Middle Atlantic Algonquian Indians and the Spanish Jesuits at Ajacan (1570–72) and English settlers at Roanoke Island (1584–90) and Jamestown Island (1607–12). It is an anthropological and ethnohistorical study of how European violations of Algonquian gift-exchange systems led to intercultural strife during the late 1500s and early 1600s, destroying Ajacan and Roanoke, and nearly destroying Jamestown.
 
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cover of Visions of Sound: Musical Instruments of First Nation Communities in Northeastern America

Visions of Sound

Musical Instruments of First Nation Communities in Northeastern America

Beverley Diamond, M. Sam Cronk, and Franziska von Rosen

University of Chicago Press, 1995

The most comprehensive study ever undertaken of the musical instruments of native people in Northeastern North America, Visions of Sound focuses on interpretations by elders and consultants from Iroquois, Wabanati, Innuat, and Anishnabek communities. Beverley Diamond, M. Sam Cronk, and Franziska von Rosen present these instruments in a theoretically innovative setting organized around such abstract themes as complementarity, twinness, and relationship. As sources of metaphor—in both sound and image—instruments are interpreted within a framework that regards meaning as "emergent" and that challenges a number of previous ethnographic descriptions. Finally, the association between sound and "motion"—an association that illuminates the unity of music and dance and the life cycles of individual musical instruments—is explored.

Featuring over two hundred photographs of instruments, dialogues among the coauthors, numerous interviews with individual music makers, and an appended catalogue of over seven hundred instrument descriptions, this is an important book for all ethnomusicologists and students of Native American culture as well as general readers interested in Native American mythology and religious life.
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