Now back in print after more than thirty years, The Zunis: Self-Portrayals offers forty-six stories of myth, prophecy, and history from the great oral literature of the Zuni Indians of New Mexico. Selected by the Zuni people themselves, the tales told here preserve their cultural traditions—from the Zuni creation myth and the rituals of masked dances to farming and hunting practices and battles with Navajos and Apaches. There are tales about ghosts and personified animals, and fables told to discipline children or to warn them against foolhardy bravery and braggadocio. Some of the stories are moral fables, and some are intended as entertainment pure and simple, tales told by a skillful narrator to pass a long evening.

The twenty-five myths offered here were recorded for a 1891 Bureau of American Ethnology report. They have been edited and annotated to present Zuni thought on cosmology, ethics and social order.

More than a guide to technique and design, this insiders' view of Zuni silverwork offers a fascinating window into Zuni culture. The authors examine Zuni silversmithing as an expression of cultural values and aesthetics and explore the relationships between jewelers and traders. They trace the history of jewelry at Zuni since Anasazi times. Using examples by more than twenty contemporary Zuni artists, they describe the techniques of casting, clusterwork, petitpoint, needlepoint, mosaic, overlay, and inlay for which Zuni jewelry is famous as well as nontraditional styles using new materials and techniques. Also included are several interviews in which Zunis discuss the aesthetics and history of silversmithing. Published in cooperation with the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, University of New Mexico

Now back in print after more than thirty years, The Zunis: Self-Portrayals offers forty-six stories of myth, prophecy, and history from the great oral literature of the Zuni Indians of New Mexico. Selected by the Zuni people themselves, the tales told here preserve their cultural traditions--from the Zuni creation myth and the rituals of masked dances to farming and hunting practices and battles with Navajos and Apaches. There are tales about ghosts and personified animals, and fables told to discipline children or to warn them against foolhardy bravery and braggadocio. Some of the stories are moral fables, and some are intended as entertainment pure and simple, tales told by a skillful narrator to pass a long evening.

The Zuni society existed for centuries before there was a United States, and it still exists in its New Mexico desert pueblo. In 1879, three anthropologists--Matilda Stevenson, Frank Hamilton Cushing, and Stewart Culin--came to study Zuni and, fearing it might be destroyed, to salvage what they could of its tangible culture. Though their methods are now disparaged and ignored, their work vividly imprinted Zuni on the American imagination. The complex relationship between the Zuni as they were and are, and as they were imagined by these three remarkable, eccentric pioneers, is at the heart of Eliza McFeely's important book. Stevenson, Cushing, and Culin found professional and psychological satisfaction in submerging themselves in an alien world and in displaying Zuni artifacts in America's new museums and exhibit halls. McFeely puts their intellectual and personal adventures into perspective; she enlightens us about America, about the Zuni, and about how we understand each other.

More than a biography, Richard Hart's work provides a history of Zuni during an especially significant period. Also the author of Zuni and the Courts: A Struggle for Sovereign.

"A fascinating account of both the historical and current struggle of Native Americans to recover sacred objects that have been plundered and sold to museums. Museum curator and anthropologist Chip Colwell asks the all-important question: Who owns the past? Museums that care for the objects of history or the communities whose ancestors made them?"--Provided by the publisher