As this book shows, a fascinating chapter of the human evolutionary history has been written in the American continent. In pre-Columbian times, America was inhabited by hunter-gatherer peoples, although, in some places, new technological innovations arose, resulting in the emergence of organized states and cities larger than some important European counterparts. The arrival of the European conquerors and settlers and African slaves dramatically changed the course of this history, however. Despite the turmoil in this post-contact period, some small and isolated communities maintaining hunter-gatherer lifestyles and speaking rare Native languages remained, indicating a scenario that had undergone few changes in thousands of years. This volume constitutes a rich source of information on several topics related to Native American history that will be of interest for professionals in several academic and scientific fields. In addition to demographic, evolutionary, and cultural perspectives, this book considers the revolutionary development of sophisticated laboratory and bioinformatic approaches, using both whole genomes and specific genetic regions to understand classical questions of the past, present, and future not only of Native Americans and their descendants, but of all of humankind.

Thoreau turned toward Indians in his writing as well as in his life, and this book traces the long and arduous process by which his ideas about Indians evolved from savagist stereotypes to attitudes of greater originality. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"In olden days, in a village peopled by animal creatures, lived Wild Cat (another name for Lynx). He was old and mangy, and he was constantly scratching himself with his cane. From time to time, a young girl who lived in the same cabin would grab the cane, also to scratch herself. In vain Wild Cat kept trying to talk her out of it. One day the young lady found herself pregnant; she gave birth to a boy. Coyote, another inhabitant of the village, became indignant. He talked all of the population into going to live elsewhere and abandoning the old Wild Cat, his wife, and their child to their fate . . . " So begins the Nez Percé myth that lies at the heart of The Story of Lynx, Claude Lévi-Strauss's most accessible examination of the rich mythology of American Indians. In this wide-ranging work, the master of structural anthropology considers the many variations in a story that occurs in both North and South America, but especially among the Salish-speaking peoples of the Northwest Coast. He also shows how centuries of contact with Europeans have altered the tales. Lévi-Strauss focuses on the opposition between Wild Cat and Coyote to explore the meaning and uses of gemellarity, or twinness, in Native American culture. The concept of dual organization that these tales exemplify is one of non-equivalence: everything has an opposite or other, with which it coexists in unstable tension. In contrast, Lévi-Strauss argues, European notions of twinness—as in the myth of Castor and Pollux—stress the essential sameness of the twins. This fundamental cultural difference lay behind the fatal clash of European and Native American peoples. The Story of Lynx addresses and clarifies all the major issues that have occupied Lévi-Strauss for decades, and is the only one of his books in which he explicitly connects history and structuralism. The result is a work that will appeal to those interested in American Indian mythology.

This book makes a wide, conceptual challenge to the theory that the English of the colonial period thought of Native Americans as irrational and subhuman, dismissing any intimations to the contrary as ideology or propaganda. It makes a controversial intervention by demonstrating that the true tragedy of colonial relations was precisely the genuineness of benevolence, and not its cynical exploitation or subordination to other ends that was often the compelling force behind conflict and suffering. It was because the English genuinely believed that the Indians were their equals in body and mind that they fatally tried to embrace them. From an intellectual exploration of the abstract ideas of human rights in colonial America and the grounded realities of the politics that existed there to a narrative of how these ideas played out in relations between the two peoples in the early years of the colony, this book challenges and subverts current understanding of English colonial politics and religion.

Comprehensive survey of American Indian religion and Tribal religions.