First published in 1839, this landmark study offers scholars and general readers alike an enchanting compilation of authentic myths and legends from the native peoples of northeastern and central North America. Tales include "Manabozho: or The Great Incarnation of the North" (Algic legend), "The Summer-Maker" (Ojibwa), "The Celestial Sisters" (Shawnee), many more.

Myths of Hiawatha, Oneata, the red race in America.

For more than four centuries, Europeans and Euroamericans have been making written records of the spoken words of American Indians. While some commentators have assumed that these records provide absolutely reliable information about the nature of Native American oral expression, even its aesthetic qualities, others have dismissed them as inherently unreliable. In Native American Verbal Art: Texts and Contexts, William Clements offers a comprehensive treatment of the intellectual and cultural constructs that have colored the textualization of Native American verbal art. Clements presents six case studies of important moments, individuals, and movements in this history. He recounts the work of the Jesuits who missionized in New France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and textualized and theorized about the verbal expressions of the Iroquoians and Algonquians to whom they were spreading Christianity. He examines in depth Henry Timberlake’s 1765 translation of a Cherokee war song that was probably the first printed English rendering of a Native American "poem." He discusses early-nineteenth-century textualizers and translators who saw in Native American verbal art a literature manqué that they could transform into a fully realized literature, with particular attention to the work of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an Indian agent and pioneer field collector who developed this approach to its fullest. He discusses the "scientific" textualizers of the late nineteenth century who viewed Native American discourse as a data source for historical, ethnographic, and linguistic information, and he examines the work of Natalie Curtis, whose field research among the Hopis helped to launch a wave of interest in Native Americans and their verbal art that continues to the present. In addition, Clements addresses theoretical issues in the textualization, translation, and anthologizing of American Indian oral expression. In many cases the past records of Native American expression represent all we have left of an entire verbal heritage; in most cases they are all that we have of a particular heritage at a particular point in history. Covering a broad range of materials and their historical contexts, Native American Verbal Art identifies the agendas that have informed these records and helps the reader to determine what remains useful in them. It will be a welcome addition to the fields of Native American studies and folklore.

As well as providing vivid and sympathetic accounts of geography, peoples, and cultures, three women writers use their books to chart their own historical and social positions. In Maps of Difference Wendy Roy explores the ways in which Anna Jameson, Mina Hubbard, and Margaret Laurence were attuned to the cultural imperialism underlying their travel writing. Roy considers the connections Jameson makes between feminism and anti-racism in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838), Hubbard's insights in A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador (1908) into her relationship with First Nations men who had both more and less power than she, and Laurence's awareness of colonial and patriarchical oppression in her African memoir, The Prophet's Camel Bell (1963). Roy also examines archival and First Nations accounts of these women's travels, and the sketches, photos, and maps that accompany their writing, to examine contradictions in and question the implied objectivity of travel narratives. She concludes by looking at the myth of "getting there first" and the ways in which new technologies of representation, including cameras, allow travellers and writers to claim new travel "firsts."

This carefully created collection presents works of Henry Schoolcraft. This book has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Contents: Memoirs & Explorations: Narrative of an Expedition Through the Upper Mississippi to Itasca Lake Personal Memoirs of a Residence of Thirty Years with The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers Scenes and Adventures in the Semi-Alpine Region of the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas Ethnographical & Historical Works: The American Indians The Myth of Hiawatha and Other Oral Legends The Indian Fairytale Book Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793 – 1864) was an American geographer, geologist, and ethnologist, noted for his early studies of Native American cultures, as well as for his 1832 expedition to the source of the Mississippi River. He is also noted for his major six-volume study of Native Americans published in the 1850s.