American Indian affairs are much in the public mind today—hotly contested debates over such issues as Indian fishing rights, land claims, and reservation gambling hold our attention. While the unique legal status of American Indians rests on the historical treaty relationship between Indian tribes and the federal government, until now there has been no comprehensive history of these treaties and their role in American life. Francis Paul Prucha, a leading authority on the history of American Indian affairs, argues that the treaties were a political anomaly from the very beginning. The term "treaty" implies a contract between sovereign independent nations, yet Indians were always in a position of inequality and dependence as negotiators, a fact that complicates their current attempts to regain their rights and tribal sovereignty. Prucha's impeccably researched book, based on a close analysis of every treaty, makes possible a thorough understanding of a legal dilemma whose legacy is so palpably felt today.

"For more than two hundred years, members of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of t he American government have had a hand in shaping the course of federal Indian policy, or the legal relationship between the American federal government and the now more than 570 federally recognized tribal governments in the United States. Since 1824, it has been the responsibility of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (called the United States Indian Service until 1947) to support, enact, and administer the executive orders, congressional legislation, an d Supreme Court rulings relevant to Indian Country. In that time, a handful of policies, shaped by various, sometimes competing, and always changing attitudes toward Indians in the United States, have determined how and to what ends the BIA has approached its mission. Policies of civilization, emigration, reservations, assimilation, acculturation, termination, and consumerism, have and continue to dictate the terms and means by which the federal government administers Indian affairs in fulfillment of its constitutional and treaty obligations. In "A Most Anonymous Position," David H. DeJong has written the first comprehensive history of federal Indian policy based on these policy strands and their enforcement by BIA commissioners and their assistant secretaries. BIA commissioners have always had enormous power to dictate the fate of Indians and their lands, a power that DeJong shows has been wielded in different ways and has changed with policy through the years"--

"One of the best tribal histories . . . the product of decades of study by a layman archeologist-historian. With a rich blend of archeology, anthropology, Indian oral traditions (he gives us one of the best accounts of the Walum Olum, the fascinating hieroglyphics depicting the tribal origins of the Delaware), and documentary research, Weslager writes for the general reader as well as the scholar."--American Historical Review In the seventeenth century white explorers and settlers encountered a tribe of Indians calling themselves Lenni Lenape along the Delaware River and its tributaries in New Jersey, Delaware, eastern Pennsylvania, and southeastern New York. Today communities of their descendants, known as Delawares, are found in Oklahoma, Kansas, Wisconsin, and Ontario, and individuals of Delaware ancestry are mingled with the white populations in many other states. The Delaware Indians is the first comprehensive account of what happened to the main body of the Delaware Nation over the past three centuries. C. A. Weslager puts into perspective the important events in United States history in which the Delawares participated and he adds new information about the Delawares. He bridges the gap between history and ethnology by analyzing the reasons why the Delawares were repeatedly victimized by the white man.