American Indian Books - Factual - Page 5
We have 100's of factual books about American Indians, tribal history, legends, medicine and herbs, and arts and crafts. We are presently showing a small amount of what we have, so please check back for more book selections.
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The Sacred Ways Of Knowledge - Sources Of Life
- ISBN 0-8061-2577-2
- Condition : Excellent
- 5" x 8" Soft Cover; 214 pages
This book is published by the Navajo Community College Press. The Sacred, Ways of Knowledge, Sources of Life offers an uncommonly wide-ranging consideration of the ways in which Native Americans view the world, their place in it, and their responsibilities to it. This world is not only physical, but spiritual and the Sacred describes the "meaning, role, and function of sacred traditional practices and observances in the lives of The People, individually, and collectively."
$20
The Seminoles
- ISBN 0-8061-1255-7
- Condition : Excellent
- Size 8" x 5" Soft Cover; 394 pages
This is the history of a remarkable nation, the only Indian tribe that has never officially made peace with the United States. General Thomas Sidney Jesup admired the Seminoles as adversaries: "We have, at no former period in our history, had to contend with so formidable an enemy. No Seminole proves false to his country, nor has a single instance occured of a first rate warrior having surrendered." Jesup made those comments in 1837, and they proved true throughout the Seminole-white confrontations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
$20
Mayan Vision Quest
- ISBN 0-06-250565-3
- Condition : Excellent
- Size 8" x 11" Soft Cover; 116 pages
With a stunning sensitivity to her subject, MacAdams vividly captures the Maya's devotion to balance and harmony and their unique integration of time, place, art, science, sexuality, and spirituality. Her use of infra-red film energizes the stones and vegetation as they might have appeared to the Maya priest and priestesses themselves. These amazing ruins are both the emblem and the code of a people who pursued the incredibly complex scientific, mathematical, and cosmological subtleties of the universe and the human psyche.
$17
Pocahontas' People - The Powhatan Indians of Virginia
- ISBN 0-8061-2280-3
- Condition : Excellent
- Size 5.5" x 8.5" Hardback; 404 pages
In this history, Helen Roundtree traces events that shaped the lives of the Powhatan Indians of Virginia, from their first encounter with English colonist, in 1607, to their presentday way of life and relationship to the state of Virginia and the federal government. This book covers 400 years. The author explores the diversity found among the Powhatan people, and those people's relationships with the English, the government of the fledging United States, the Union, and the Confederacy, the U.S. Census Bureau, white supremacist, the U.S. Selective Service, and the civil right movement. In doing so, she brings the reader through the travils and near demise of the Powhatans to an understanding of how they have survived as Indians in Virginia. Social, economic, political and ritual life are examined as they have evolved over the post-contact years.
$40
Moon of Popping Trees
- ISBN 0-8032-9120-5
- Condition : Excellent
- Size 5" x 8" Soft Cover; 219 pages
The last significant clash of arms in the American Indian Wars took place on December 29, 1890, on the banks of Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. Of the 350 Teton Sioux Indians there, two-thirds were women and children. When the smoke cleared, 84 men and 62 women and children lay dead, their bodies scattered along a stretch of more than a mile where they had been trying to flee. Of some 500 soldiers and scouts, about 30 were dead-some probably, from their own crossfire. Wounded Knee has excited contradictory accounts and heated emotions. To answer whether it was a battle or massacre, Rex Alan Smith goes further into the historical records than anyone has gone before. His work is unbiased and accounts for one of the best books on Indian history to be published in this century.
$10
Montezuma's Serpent
- ISBN 1-55778-474-4
- Condition : Excellent
- Size 6" x 9" Hardback; 205 pages
Brad and Sherrie Steiger have lived and studied with the Native Americans for years and have written several books of what they've learned. With the permission of Native Americans, they have shared their stories with us. For several decades they have collected tales of the strange, the unusual and the supernatural. They have noticed that most of their stories happened in the mountains, deserts, and canyons of the American Southwest. If you will travel to the Southwest and stand on the deserts at night; stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon at sunset; look out over the Pacific Ocean at dawn. You will feel an energy, an awesome sense of Oneness with the Earth Mother, a respect for the workings of nature, a passion for the unity of all people of good will that you will experience in no other place. In the Southwest it is easy to believe in the supernatural.
$22.95
Indian Life On The Upper Missouri
- ISBN 0-8061-2141-6
- Condition : Excellent
- Size 9" x 6" Soft Cover; 222 pages
John Ewers was the first curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian on the Blackfoot Reservation in Montana. This book is most interesting for historians as his meticulous analysis of the extent and direction of Indian trade in the area prior to the contact period. He concludes that Indian opposition to white traders was largely focused on keeping out the competition. American cultural historians will appreciate the authors discussion of how the Plains Indians came to symbolize all North American Indians and his abundantly illustrated exploration of white influence on Plains Indian painting. Gun buffs will undoubtedly enjoy the accounts of the Northwest trade gun and Sitting Bull's surrender of his Winchester.
$17.95
Cherokee Dance and Drama
- ISBN 0-8061-2580-2
- Condition : Excellent
- Size 5" x 8" Soft Cover. 112 pages
Traditionally, the Cherokees danced to ensure individual health and social welfare. According to legend, the dance songs bequeathed to them by the Stone Coat monster will assuage all the ills of life that the monster brought. Winter dances are to be given only during times of frost, lest they affect the growth of vegetation by attracting cold and death. The summer dances are associated with crops and vegetation. Other dances are purely for social intercourse and entertainment or are prompted by specific events in the community. Such dances included in this book are, the Mask Dance, Eagle Dance, Bear Dance, Green Corn Ceremony and Dance, Victory or Scalp Dance, Buffalo Dance, Horse Dance, Chicken Dance, Corn Dance and many more.
$20
Fire and the Spirits
- ISBN 0-8061-1619-6
- Condition : Very Good - Front cover slightly bent on top of page
- Size 9" x 6" Soft Cover; 260 pages
This book traces the emergence of the Cherokee system of laws from the ancient spirit decrees to the fusion of tribal law ways with Anglo-American law. The Cherokees enacted their first written law in 1808 in Georgia. In succeeding years the leaders and tribal councils of the south-eastern and Oklahoma groups wrote a constitution, established courts, and enacted laws that were in accord with the old tribal values but reflected and accommodated to the whites' legal system. Thanks to the great gift of Sequoyah - his syllabary - the Cherokees were well versed in their laws, able to read and interpret them from a very early time. The system served the people well. It endured until 1898, when the federal government abolished the tribal government.
$23
The Zapotecs - Princes, Priests and Peasants
- ISBN 0-8061-1914-4
- Condition : Excellent
- Size 8.5" x 6" Soft Cover. 336 pages
For more than 3000 years the Zapotecs have occupied the fertile Valley of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. There during the Classic stage of Mesoamerican culture (ca.A.D. 100-900), Zapotecs princes and priests ruled a complex theocratic state, and the temple city of Monte Albain became one of the greatest cultural centers of Mesoamerica. The decline of Zapotec civilization and of Monte Alban as a civil and religious center began, before A.D. 900, with a shift toward divisive militarism. The decline continued with the arrival of the Mixtecs in the thirteenth century, the rise of the Mixtec-Puebla culture, and the invasion of the tribute-demanding Mexica Indians in the fifteenth century. Ultimately, the Zapotec princely elite and most of their religious and political traditions were ended by the Spanish conquest, which reduced the Zapotecs and Mixtecs to rural peasantry.
$25
