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.

Scholars have long worked to identify the names of tribes and other groupings in the Americas, a task made difficult by the sheer number of indigenous groups and the many names that have been passed down only through oral tradition. This book is a compendium of tribal names in all their variants--from North, Central and South America--collected from printed sources. Because most of these original sources reproduced words that had been encountered only orally, there is a great deal of variation. Organized alphabetically, this book collates these variations, traces them to the spellings and forms that have become standardized, and supplies see and see also references. Each main entry includes tribal name, the "parent group" or ancestral tribe, original source for the tribal name, and approximate location of the name in the original source material.