This eBook has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Over the period of two years author has devoted the intervals between official duties to collecting and collating materials for the study of sign language. As the few publications on the general subject, possessing more than historic interest, are meager in details and vague in expression, original investigation has been necessary. The high development of communication by gesture among the tribes of North America, and its continued extensive use by many of them, naturally directed the first researches to that continent, with the result that a large body of facts procured from collaborators and by personal examination has now been gathered and classified.

Describes a unique case of sign language that served as an international language among numerous Native American nations not sharing a common spoken language. The book contains the most current descriptions of all levels of the language from phonology to discourse, as well as comparisons with other sign languages.

This unique book teaches children the hand signals that Native American tribes used to communicate with one another: How to ask a question, how to express past, present and future, and more.

This book provides an authoritative survey of the several hundred languages indigenous to North America. These languages show tremendous genetic and typological diversity, and offer numerous challenges to current linguistic theory. Part I of the book provides an overview of structural features of particular interest, concentrating on those that are cross-linguistically unusual or unusually well developed. These include syllable structure, vowel and consonant harmony, tone, and sound symbolism; polysynthesis, the nature of roots and affixes, incorporation, and morpheme order; case; grammatical distinctions of number, gender, shape, control, location, means, manner, time, empathy, and evidence; and distinctions between nouns and verbs, predicates and arguments, and simple and complex sentences; and special speech styles. Part II catalogues the languages by family, listing the location of each language, its genetic affiliation, number of speakers, major published literature, and structural highlights. Finally, there is a catalogue of languages that have evolved in contact situations.

Learn to communicate without words with these authentic signs. Learn over 525 signs, developed by the Sioux, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and others. Book also contains 290 pictographs of the Sioux and Ojibway tribes.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers and anthropologists believed that the world’s primitive races were on the brink of extinction. They also believed that films, photographs, and phonographic recordings—modern media in their technological infancy—could capture lasting relics of primitive life before it vanished into obscurity. For many Americans, the promise of media and the problem of race were inextricably linked. While professional ethnologists tried out early recording machines to preserve the sounds of authentic indigenous cultures, photographers and filmmakers hauled newfangled equipment into remote corners of the globe to document rituals and scenes that seemed destined to vanish forever. In Savage Preservation, Brian Hochman shows how widespread interest in recording vanishing races and disappearing cultures influenced audiovisual innovation, experimentation, and use in the United States. Drawing extensively on seldom-seen archival sources—from phonetic alphabets and sign language drawings to wax cylinder recordings and early color photographs—Hochman uncovers the parallel histories of ethnography and technology in the turn-of-the-century period. While conventional wisdom suggests that media technologies work mostly to produce ideas about race, Savage Preservation reveals that the reverse has also been true. During this period, popular conceptions of race constructed the authority of new media technologies as reliable archives of the real. Brimming with nuanced critical insights and unexpected historical connections, Savage Preservation offers a new model for thinking about race and media in the American context—and a fresh take on a period of accelerated technological change that closely resembles our own.

This is the stirring, epic story of the hundreds of Indian nations that have inhabited North America for more than 15,000 years and of their centuries-long struggle with the Europeans. It is a story of friendship, treachery, courage and war, beginning when Columbus disembarked at Hispaniola among the Arawaks in 1492, and comes to a climax when the last groups of Sioux were moved onto a reservation following the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.We meet men and women, heroes and villains through their own words, their lives recreated from memory, memoir, and ancient documents: Massasoit, whose greeting to the Mayflower pilgrims - 'Welcome, Englishmen' - was given in their own language; Pocahontas, whose father's intervention on behalf of John Smith ironically changed the course of her life; Deganawida, known as the Peace Maker, whose Great Law laid the foundation for the confederacy among the five nations of the Iroquois, which in turn may have influenced the colonists' fledging efforts at confederation; Sequoyah, inventor of the Cherokee alphabet; Tecumseh, the charismatic Shawnee leader; Satanta, who led the Kiowa resistance; Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce; Cochise and Geronimo of the Apaches; Red Cloud, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse of the Sioux...Written by the celebrated historian Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., lavishly illustrated with nearly 500 paintings, woodcuts, drawings, photographs, and Indian artifacts, this thrilling and beautiful book shows us the many worlds of North America's Indians, as we have never seen them before.