Elias Johnson's 'Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians' offers a window into the reality behind the legends, stories, and traditions of the Six Nations. Johnson's motive for this work is to establish a kinder relationship between white people and Native Americans, by revealing the domestic and civil life of the Six Nations and their capabilities for future elevation. The book sheds light on the Tuscarora Indians, who were once a powerful and gifted nation but are now subject to the guardianship and supervision of a people who displaced their forefathers. Johnson encourages readers to cast away prejudices and take a closer look at the social life, condition, and wants of Native Americans.

The folktales and myths of the Iroquois and their Algonquian neighbors rank among the most imaginatively rich and narratively co-herent traditions in North America. Inspired by these wondrous tales, Anthony Wonderley explores their significance to Iroquois and Algonquian religions and worldviews. Mostly recorded around 1900, these oral narratives preserve the voice and something of the outlook of autochthonous Americans from a bygone age, when storytelling was an important facet of daily life. Grouping the stories around shared themes and motifs, Wonderley analyzes topics ranging from cannibal giants to cultural heroes, and from legends of local places to myths of human origin. Approached comparatively and historically, these stories can enrich our understanding of archaeological remains, ethnic boundaries, and past cultural interchanges among Iroquois and Algonquian peoples.

In the early years of the republic, the United States government negotiated with Indian nations because it could not afford protracted wars politically, militarily, or economically. Maureen Konkle argues that by depending on treaties, which rest on the equal standing of all signatories, Europeans in North America institutionalized a paradox: the very documents through which they sought to dispossess Native peoples in fact conceded Native autonomy. As the United States used coerced treaties to remove Native peoples from their lands, a group of Cherokee, Pequot, Ojibwe, Tuscarora, and Seneca writers spoke out. With history, polemic, and personal narrative these writers countered widespread misrepresentations about Native peoples' supposedly primitive nature, their inherent inability to form governments, and their impending disappearance. Furthermore, they contended that arguments about racial difference merely justified oppression and dispossession; deriding these arguments as willful attempts to evade the true meanings and implications of the treaties, the writers insisted on recognition of Native peoples' political autonomy and human equality. Konkle demonstrates that these struggles over the meaning of U.S.-Native treaties in the early nineteenth century led to the emergence of the first substantial body of Native writing in English and, as she shows, the effects of the struggle over the political status of Native peoples remain embedded in contemporary scholarship.

Essays on approximately 150 culture groups of the U.S., from Acadians to Yupiats, covering their history, acculturation and assimilation, family and community dynamics, language and religion.

Essays on approximately 150 culture groups of the U.S., from Acadians to Yupiats, covering their history, acculturation and assimilation, family and community dynamics, language and religion.