Although founders of the state like Rufus Putnam pointed to the remaining prehistoric earthworks at Marietta as evidence that the architects were a people of “ingenuity, industry, and elegance,” their words did not prevent a rivalry with the area’s Indian inhabitants that was settled only through decades of warfare and treaty-making.
Native American armies managed to win battles with Josiah Harmar and Arthur St. Clair, but not the war with Anthony Wayne. By the early nineteenth century only a few native peoples remained, still hoping to retain their homes. Pressures from federal and state governments as well as the settlers‘ desire for land, however, left the earlier inhabitants no refuge. By the mid-1840s they were gone, leaving behind relatively few markers on the land.
Ohio’s First Peoples depicts the Native Americans of the Buckeye State from the time of the well-known Hopewell peoples to the forced removal of the Wyandots in the 1840s.
Professor James O’Donnell presents the stories of the early Ohioans based on the archaeological record. In an accessible narrative style, he provides a detailed overview of the movements of Fort Ancient peoples driven out by economic and political forces in the seventeenth century. Ohio’s plentiful game and fertile farmlands soon lured tribes such as the Wyandots, Shawnees, and Delawares, which are familiar to observers of the historic period.
In celebrating the bicentennial of Ohio, we need to remember its earliest residents. Ohio’s First Peoples recounts their story and documents their contribution to Ohio’s full heritage.
The origin stories of the O’odham (Pima) Indians of Arizona are renowned for their beauty and complexity but have been collected in only a handful of books. This volume—the third full O’odham telling of ancientness to appear in print—brings together dozens of stories collected in 1927 by anthropologist Ruth Benedict during her only visit to the Pimas. Never before published, they helped inspire Benedict to write her groundbreaking book Patterns of Culture.
The Pimas represented a way of life that Benedict at first called “Dionysian” after hearing the stories, narratives, songs, and oratory collected from various tellers during her three-month stay. The oral literature concerns the creation of the world and its transformations over time, the creation of the O’odham people, and other cultural traditions. Featuring a pair of man-gods, a female monster born of woman, and a conquest of Pimas by Pimas, they serve to mark the O’odham as a people distinct from their neighbors near and far.
The present volume contains more stories than any other source of Pima tales, plus more of the songs and orations that accompanied a telling. It includes “The Rafter,” a host of ancillary stories, numerous Coyote tales, and additional speeches tied to the narratives of ancientness. One long story, “The Feud,” found only in this collection, shows similarities to the Maya Popol Vuh.
Donald Bahr, a preeminent authority on the O’odham, has not only clarified the text but has also written an introduction that provides the background to the collection and analyzes Benedict’s probable reasons for never having published it. He has also included a previously unpublished text by Benedict, “Figures of Speech among the Pima.” O’odham Creation and Related Events represents an invaluable sourcebook of a people’s oral literature as well as a tribute to a singular scholar’s dedication and vision.
In this deeply researched volume, Stephen Dow Beckham brings together commentary by Native Americans about the events affecting their lives in Oregon. Now available in paperback for the first time, this volume presents first-person accounts of events threatening, changing, and shaping the lives of Oregon Indians, from “first encounters” in the late eighteenth century to modern tribal economies.
The book's seven thematic sections are arranged chronologically and prefaced with introductory essays that provide the context of Indian relations with Euro-Americans and tightening federal policy. Each of the nearly seventy documents has a brief introduction that identifies the event and the speakers involved. Most of the book's selections are little known. Few have been previously published, including treaty council minutes, court and congressional testimonies, letters, and passages from travelers’ journals.
Oregon Indians opens with the arrival of Euro-Americans and their introduction of new technology, weapons, and diseases. The role of treaties, machinations of the Oregon volunteers, efforts of the US Army to protect the Indians but also subdue and confine them, and the emergence of reservation programs to “civilize” them are recorded in a variety of documents that illuminate nineteenth-century Indian experiences.
Twentieth-century documents include Tommy Thompson on the flooding of the Celilo Falls fishing grounds in 1942, as well as Indian voices challenging the "disastrous policy of termination," the state's prohibition on inter-racial marriage, and the final resting ground of Kennewick Man. Selections in the book's final section speak to the changing political atmosphere of the late twentieth century, and suggest that hope, rather than despair, became a possibility for Oregon tribes.
Siouan peoples who migrated from the Atlantic coastal region and settled in the central portion of the North American continent long before the arrival of Europeans are now known as Osage. Because the Osage did not possess a written language, their myths and cultural traditions were handed down orally through many generations. With time, only those elements deemed vital were preserved in the stories, and many of these became highly stylized. The resulting verbal recitations of the proper life of an Osage—from genesis myths to body decoration, from star songs to child-naming rituals, from war party strategies to medicinal herbs—constitute this comprehensive volume.
Osage myths differ greatly from the myths of Western Civilization, most obviously in the absence of individual names. Instead, “younger brother,” “the messenger,” “Little Old Men,” or a clan name may serve as the allegorical embodiment of the central player. Individual heroic feats are also missing because group life took precedence over individual experience in Osage culture.
Supplementing the work of noted ethnographer Francis La Flesche who devoted most of his professional life to recording detailed descriptions of Osage rituals, Louis Burns’s unique position as a modern Osage—aware of the white culture’s expectations but steeped in the traditions himself is able to write from an insider’s perspective.
A bestselling, up-to-date evaluation of a legendary Indian leader. Named Outstanding Book by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights. "Osceola's Legacy is significant for its geneology and archaeological study of this Native American and his interaction with the federal government during the 1800s. The catalog of photographs of Osceola portraits and his personal possessions makes this a worthwhile reference book as well." --Georgia Historical Quarterly
Our People, Our Journey is a landmark history of the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, a Michigan tribe that has survived to the present day despite the expansionist and assimilationist policies that nearly robbed it of an identity in the late nineteenth century.
In his thoroughly researched chronicle, McClurken documents in words and images every major lineage and family of the Little River Ottawas. He describes the Band's struggles to find land to call its own over several centuries, including the hardships that began with European exploration of what is now the upper Midwest. Although the Little River Ottawas were successful at integrating their economic and cultural practices with those of Europeans, they were forced to cede land in the face of American settlements.
McClurken explains how the Little River Band was forced, in 1858, onto a reservation on the Pere Marquette and Manistee Rivers where they settled with a number of other Ottawa bands. However, the very treaty intended to provide the Grand River Ottawas with a permanent reservation "homeland" eventually allowed non-Indians to acquire title to nearly two-thirds of the land within the reservation by 1880.
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