Spirits Of The Plains

This is a multi-title review: titles include Creators of the Plains, Peoples of the Plains, Spirits of the Plains, and Warriors of the Plains - HIST A specialist in Northern Plains culture, Mails is known for large-format works, made especially distinctive by his own illustrations (e.g., Mystic Warriors of the Plains, 1973), which are now collected as art items and have also been reissued in paperback. As short, handy treatments of the Plains Indian culture for general readers, these four slim texts the first in a series are good compilations of accurate information on art, anthropology, religion, and history. Those who most appreciate Mails's previous work for its beautifully crafted art displayed in a generous format will be disappointed by these books (despite the instructive black-and-white illustrations), but sensitivity, accuracy, thoroughness, and even enthusiasm for the interesting lives of Native peoples survive. Recommended for public and school libraries. Margaret W. Norton, Morton West H.S., Berwyn Ill.-

An examination of the role of windigo narratives among the Algonquian peoples of North American and how those narratives were influenced through colonialism.

Sydney Long (1871--1955) was Australias foremost Art Nouveau painter and one of our major symbolist artists. He created haunting scenes of the Australian landscape. His Art Nouveau works are like reveries, an escape from the everyday. He populated the prosaic Australian bush with nymphs and fauns whose poetic world was paralled in the literature of Australian writers.Seeking an imagery which conveyed the lonely and primitive feelings of the country,he captured the soul and tenor of the Australian bush. Long also painted many delightful landscapes and cityscapes in Australia and Britain, in which he continued to demonstrate his interest in strong form. And from 1918 he became a leading printmaker, devotoing much of his time to printmaking in the succeeding twenty years.

In arresting, but harrowing, prose, James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics--the politics of ethnocide--played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of aboriginal people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald's "National Dream." It was a dream that came at great expense: the present disparity in health and economic well-being between First Nations and non-Native populations, and the lingering racism and misunderstanding that permeates the national consciousness to this day. " Clearing the Plains is a tour de force that dismantles and destroys the view that Canada has a special claim to humanity in its treatment of indigenous peoples. Daschuk shows how infectious disease and state-supported starvation combined to create a creeping, relentless catastrophe that persists to the present day. The prose is gripping, the analysis is incisive, and the narrative is so chilling that it leaves its reader stunned and disturbed. For days after reading it, I was unable to shake a profound sense of sorrow. This is fearless, evidence-driven history at its finest." -Elizabeth A. Fenn, author of Pox Americana "Required reading for all Canadians." -Candace Savage, author of A Geography of Blood "Clearly written, deeply researched, and properly contextualized history...Essential reading for everyone interested in the history of indigenous North America." -J.R. McNeill, author of Mosquito Empires

First Published in 1999. For This Land, edited and with an introduction by James Treat, brings together over thirty years of the work of Vine Deloria, Jr., regarded as one of the most important living Native American figures. For three decades, Deloria has offered substantive and persistent contributions to understanding the complexity of religion in America. In uis writings he recognizes the spiritual desperation and religious breakdown in the contemporary situation, and provides the groundwork to get people to examine what they actually believe and how they must put those beliefs into practice. The essays in this collection express Deloria's concern for the religious dimensions and implications of human existence. His writings are engaged within a theoretical system of physical, not ideological, space, and ultimately give voice to this intellectual passion by calling into question our controversial religious institutions, commitments, worldviews, freedoms and experiences. For This Land offers a distinctive approach to comprehending human existence from one of the leading critics of mainstream American thought.

The interest of nineteenth-century Lakotas in the Sun, the Moon, and the stars was an essential part of their never-ending quest to understand their world. The Spirit and the Sky presents a survey of the ethnoastronomy of the nineteenth-century Lakotas and relates Lakota astronomy to their cultural practices and beliefs. The center of Lakota belief is the incomprehensible, extraordinary, and sacred nature of the world in which they live. The earth beneath and the stars above constitute their holistic world. Mark Hollabaugh offers a detailed analysis of aspects of Lakota culture that have a bearing on Lakota astronomy, including telling time, their names for the stars and constellations as they appeared from the Great Plains, and the phenomena of meteor showers, eclipses, and the aurora borealis. Hollabaugh’s explanation of the cause of the aurora that occurred at the death of Black Elk in 1950 is a new contribution to ethnoastronomy.

"A fascinating account of both the historical and current struggle of Native Americans to recover sacred objects that have been plundered and sold to museums. Museum curator and anthropologist Chip Colwell asks the all-important question: Who owns the past? Museums that care for the objects of history or the communities whose ancestors made them?"--Provided by the publisher