Frisbie examines how jish are assembled, used, and protected, and how they are circulated among Navajos and others such as esoteric art dealers, gallery owners, an museums ... -- from inside cover.

Chronicles the advent of so-called "western" or "scientific" medicine in the modern era, and how Navajos adapted, but did not compromise their traditional healings ways.

Designed for ease of use with maps, a detailed subject index, an extensive bibliography, and cross references, this book is sure to fascinate anyone interested in Native American culture and heritage.

The most comprehensive study ever undertaken of the musical instruments of native people in Northeastern North America, Visions of Sound focuses on interpretations by elders and consultants from Iroquois, Wabanati, Innuat, and Anishnabek communities. Beverley Diamond, M. Sam Cronk, and Franziska von Rosen present these instruments in a theoretically innovative setting organized around such abstract themes as complementarity, twinness, and relationship. As sources of metaphor—in both sound and image—instruments are interpreted within a framework that regards meaning as "emergent" and that challenges a number of previous ethnographic descriptions. Finally, the association between sound and "motion"—an association that illuminates the unity of music and dance and the life cycles of individual musical instruments—is explored. Featuring over two hundred photographs of instruments, dialogues among the coauthors, numerous interviews with individual music makers, and an appended catalogue of over seven hundred instrument descriptions, this is an important book for all ethnomusicologists and students of Native American culture as well as general readers interested in Native American mythology and religious life.

In works of silver and wool, the Navajos have established a unique brand of American craft. And when their artisans were integrated into the American economy during the late nineteenth century, they became part of a complex cultural and economic framework in which their handmade crafts conveyed meanings beyond simple adornment. As Anglo tourists discovered these crafts, the Navajo weavings and jewelry gained appeal from the romanticized notion that their producers were part of a primitive group whose traditions were destined to vanish. Erika Bsumek now explores the complex links between Indian identity and the emergence of tourism in the Southwest to reveal how production, distribution, and consumption became interdependent concepts shaped by the forces of consumerism, race relations, and federal policy. Bsumek unravels the layers of meaning that surround the branding of "Indian made." When Navajo artisans produced their goods, collaborating traders, tourist industry personnel, and even ethnologists created a vision of Navajo culture that had little to do with Navajos themselves. And as Anglos consumed Navajo crafts, they also consumed the romantic notion of Navajos as "primitives" perpetuated by the marketplace. These processes of production and consumption reinforced each other, creating a symbiotic relationship and influencing both mutual Anglo-Navajo perceptions and the ways in which Navajos participated in the modern marketplace. Examining varied sites of production-artisans' workshops, museums, trading posts, Bsumek shows how the market economy perpetuated "Navaho" stereotypes and cultural assumptions. She takes readers into the hogans where men worked silver and women wove rugs and into the outlets where middlemen dictated what buyers wanted and where Navajos influenced inventory. Exploring this process over seven decades, she describes how artisans' increasing use of modern tools created controversy about authenticity and how the meaning of the "Indian made" label was even challenged in court. Ultimately, Bsumek shows that the sale of Indian-made goods cannot be explained solely through supply and demand. It must also reckon with the multiple images and narratives that grew up around the goods themselves, integrating consumer culture, tourism, and history to open new perspectives on our understanding of American Indian material culture.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, New Mexico Territory endured painful years of hardship and ongoing strife. During this turbulent period, a U.S. military officer stationed in the territory assembled an album of photographs, a series of still shots taken by one or more anonymous photographers. Now, some 150 years later, Hardship, Greed, and Sorrow reproduces the anonymous officer’s “souvenir album” in its totality. Offering an important glimpse of the American Southwest in the mid-1860s, the book opens with a thoughtful foreword by Jennifer Nez Denetdale, who considers the varied and lingering effects that settlement, conquest, and nineteenth-century photography had on the Apaches and Navajos. In her insightful introduction accompanying the photographs, curator and scholar Devorah Romanek places the photographs in historical context and explains their unusual provenance. As she points out, the 1866 album integrates a number of important themes in connection to the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, including the French intervention in New Mexico and the internment of Navajos at the Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation. The story of the album’s provenance reads like a mystery: some loose ends remain untied and some questions remain unanswered. In addition to containing what may be the earliest extant photographs of Navajo Indians, the album features both studio and field images of U.S. Army officers, Mexican politicians, and various sites throughout New Mexico. According to Romanek, a number of the album’s photographs have appeared in other publications but with scant attention to their original context or purpose. This compelling book reveals what we know about the collection, its compiler, and the photographer—or photographers—who captured such a fraught and complex moment in the history of the American Southwest.