In North America's Indian Trade in European Commerce and Imagination, Colpitts offers new perspectives on Europe's contact with America by examining the ideas, debates and questions arising in the trading that linked newcomers with Native people. European capitalization of the Indian Trade, beginning in the 16th century, forced newcomers to confront the meaning and legitimacy of traditional gift economies and assess the vice and virtue of the commerce they pursued in the New World. Making use of French and English colonization texts, published narratives and state colonial papers, the author explores how European capital investments, credit, profits and commercial linkages elaborated and complicated understandings of North American people in the period of colonization.

Study describes in chronological order how the various trade ornaments (material culture) were used from initial contact to circa 1900 by representative tribes of the seven major native groups of Canada. Based on extensive search of published and manuscript sources, supplemented by examination of historical paintings, photographs and ethnographical specimens.

This book is the world's largest compendium of maker marks found on American trade silver between 1682 and 1855. It features over 600 individual marks from hundreds of silversmiths in Colonial America, Canada, Great Britain, and France. This is a color edition featuring a detailed illustrated glossary, index, and many full-color plates.

This comprehensive survey of indigenous languages of the New World introduces students and general readers to the mosaic of American Indian languages and cultures and offers an approach to grasping their subtleties. Authors Silver and Miller demonstrate the complexity and diversity of these languages while dispelling popular misconceptions. Their text reveals the linguistic richness of languages found throughout the Americas, emphasizing those located in the western United States and Mexico while drawing on a wide range of other examples from Canada to the Andes. It introduces readers to such varied aspects of communicating as directionals and counting systems, storytelling, expressive speech, Mexican Kickapoo whistle speech, and Plains sign language. The authors have included the basics of grammar and historical linguistics while emphasizing such issues as speech genres and other sociolinguistic issues and the relation between language and worldview. American Indian Languages: Cultural and Social Contexts is a comprehensive resource that will serve as a text in undergraduate and lower-level graduate courses on Native American languages and provide a useful reference for students of American Indian literature or general linguistics. It also introduces general readers interested in Native Americans to the amazing diversity and richness of indigenous American languages.

Illustrates the development of religious art in northern New Mexico over a period of 150 years through more than three hundred santos.