These nine essays blend documentary history, oral history, and ethnographic observation to shed light on the complex world of grandmothering in Native America. The cultural and emotional resources of their ethnic traditions help grandmothers grapple with the myriad social, economic, cultural, and political challenges they faced in the late twentieth century. Indian grandmothers are almost universally occupied with child care and child rearing at some time, but such variables as lineal descent, clan membership, kinship patterns, individual behavior, and cultural ideology change the definition, role, and status of a grandmother from tribe to tribe. Although late-twentieth-century society often impoverishes and marginalizes them, many Indian grandmothers provide grandchildren with social stability and a cultural link to native indentity, history and wisdom. The contributors' case studies explore grandmothering among Navajos, Puget Sound Salish, Tewas, Hopis, Otoes, Choctaws, and Sioux. In addition to Marjorie Schweitzer, volume contributors include Karen Ritts Benally, Ann Lane Hedlund, Pamela Amoss, Bruce G. Miller, Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Alice Schlegel, Joan Weibel-Orlando, and Pat McCabe. The royalties from this book are donated to the Native American Scholarship Fund, Inc., based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

When Europeans first arrived in North America, between five and eight million indigenous people were already living there. But how did they come to be here? What were their agricultural, spiritual, and hunting practices? How did their societies evolve and what challenges do they face today? Eminent historians Theda Perdue and Michael Green begin by describing how nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers followed the bison and woolly mammoth over the Bering land mass between Asia and what is now Alaska between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago, settling throughout North America. They describe hunting practices among different tribes, how some made the gradual transition to more settled, agricultural ways of life, the role of kinship and cooperation in Native societies, their varied burial rites and spiritual practices, and many other features of Native American life. Throughout the book, Perdue and Green stress the great diversity of indigenous peoples in America, who spoke more than 400 different languages before the arrival of Europeans and whose ways of life varied according to the environments they settled in and adapted to so successfully. Most importantly, the authors stress how Native Americans have struggled to maintain their sovereignty--first with European powers and then with the United States--in order to retain their lands, govern themselves, support their people, and pursue practices that have made their lives meaningful. Going beyond the stereotypes that so often distort our views of Native Americans, this Very Short Introduction offers a historically accurate, deeply engaging, and often inspiring account of the wide array of Native peoples in America. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

Urban India has been in transition for centuries but, perhaps, never more so than since the last decade of the twentieth century when the national economy was opened wide to international trade and competition. Indian Cities in Transition seeks to understand the nature of change that Indian cities are undergoing from a multidisciplinary perspective. There are seventeen essays in the volume encompassing the work of urban planners, geographers, demographers, social anthropologists, economists and political scientists. They examine the processes of demographic, environmental, economic, political and social change and their impact on Indian cities. Based on different aspects of change, the articles are categorised under five sub-themes: globalisation and urban restructuring; environmental impacts of liberalisation; economic dimensions of the post-1990s reforms; political economy of change in the planning and management of Indian cities; and, liberalisation and its micro-level impacts.