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In the late 1700s, when Euro-Americans began to visit the Northwest Coast, they reported the presence of vigorous, diverse cultures--among them the Tlingit, Haida, Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl), Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka), Coast Salish, and Chinookans--with a population conservatively estimated at over 180,000. A century later only about 35,000 were left. The change was brought about by the introduction of diseases that had originated in the Eastern Hemisphere, such as smallpox, malaria, measles, and influenza. The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence examines the introduction of infectious diseases among the Indians of the Northwest Coast culture area (present-day Oregon and Washington west of the Ca...
Powerful and poignant, a masterpiece. 'Through the Wheat' depicts the horrors of World War 1: the first modern war fought in trenches with mustard gas, artillery, and tanks. Thomas Boyd brings home the psychological damage done to men under extreme pressure fighting for their livers thousands of miles from home. Unforgettable!
In the past, many Native American cultures have treated women and men as equals. In A Necessary Balance, Lillian A. Ackerman examines the balance of power and responsibility between men and women within each of the eleven Plateau Indian tribes who live today on the Colville Indian Reservation in north-central Washington State. Ackerman analyzes tribal cultures over three historical periods lasting more than a century--the traditional past, the farming phase when Indians were forced onto the reservation, and the twentieth-century industrial present. Ackerman examines gender equality in terms of power, authority, and autonomy in four social spheres: economic, domestic, political, and religious. Although early explorers and anthropologists noted isolated instances of gender equality among Plateau Indians, A Necessary Balance is the first book-length examination of a culture that has practiced such equality from its early days of hunting and gathering to the present day. Ackerman's findings also relate to an examination of European and American cultures, calling into question the current assumption that gender equality ceases to be possible with the advent of industrialization.
People of The Dalles is the story of the Chinookan (Wasco-Wishram) and Sahaptin peoples of The Dalles area of the Columbia River, who encountered the Lewis & Clark expedition in 1805–6. The early history and culture of these communities is reconstructed from the accounts of explorers, travelers, and the early writings of the Methodist missionaries at Wascopam, in particular the papers of Reverend Henry Perkins. Boyd covers early nineteenth century cultural geography, subsistence, economy, social structure, life-cycle rituals, and religion. People of The Dalles also details the changes that occurred to these people's traditional life-ways, including their relationship with Methodism following the devastating epidemics of the early 1830s. Today, descendants of the Chinookan and Sahaptin peoples are enrolled in the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and the Yakama Nation.
In Islands of Truth, Daniel Clayton examines a series of encounters with the Native peoples and territory of Vancouver Island in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although he focuses on a particular region and period, Clayton also meditates on how representations of land and people, and studies of the past, serve and shape specific interests, and how the dawn of Native-Western contact in this part of the world might be studied 200 years later, in the light of ongoing struggles between Natives and non-Natives over land and cultural status. Between the 1770s and 1850s, the Native people of Vancouver Island were engaged by three sets of forces that were of general importance i...