Product Description: Native Americans along the coasts of southern New England and Long Island have had close ties to whales for thousands of years. They made a living from the sea and saw in the world's largest beings special power and meaning. After English settlement in the early seventeenth century, the region's natural bounty of these creatures drew Natives and colonists alike to develop whale hunting on an industrial scale...read more

The relationship between American Indians and Europeans on America's frontiers is typically characterized as a series of cultural conflicts and misunderstandings based on a vast gulf of difference. Nancy Shoemaker turns this notion on its head, showing that Indians and Europeans shared common beliefs about their most fundamental realities--land as national territory, government, record-keeping, international alliances, gender, and the human body. Before they even met, Europeans and Indians shared perceptions of a landscape marked by mountains and rivers, a physical world in which the sun rose and set every day, and a human body with its own distinctive shape. They also shared in their ability to make sense of it all and to invent new, abstract ideas based on the tangible and visible experiences of daily life. Focusing on eastern North America up through the end of the Seven Years War, Shoemaker closely reads incidents, letters, and recorded speeches from the Iroquois and Creek confederacies, the Cherokee Nation, and other Native groups alongside British and French sources, paying particular attention to the language used in cross-cultural conversation. Paradoxically, the more American Indians and Europeans came to know each other, the more they came to see each other as different. By the end of the 18th century, Shoemaker argues, they abandoned an initial willingness to recognize in each other a common humanity and instead developed new ideas rooted in the conviction that, by custom and perhaps even by nature, Native Americans and Europeans were peoples fundamentally at odds. In her analysis, Shoemaker reveals the 18th century roots of enduring stereotypes Indians developed about Europeans, as well as stereotypes Europeans created about Indians. This powerful and eloquent interpretation questions long-standing assumptions, revealing the strange likenesses among the inhabitants of colonial North America.

Product Description: Clearing a Path offers new models and ideas for exploring Native American history, drawing from disciplines like history, anthropology, and creative writing making this a must-read for anyone interested in the history of indigenous peoples. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This collection brings together the best recent essays covering over five hundred years of American Indian history. Attached to each essay are primary historical documents that deal with issues of survival, resistance, accommodation, and adaptation, all of which illuminate the complexity and diversity of American Indian experiences...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Studies the reasons why the Native American population has returned to 1492 levels since 1900, and compares the social and cultural patterns in five tribes in different regions--the Senecas, the Cherokees, the Ojibways, the Yakamas, and the Navajos (view table of contents)