A forest of time : American Indian ways of history

Summary: Introduces undergraduate and graduate students, Western and Indian history scholars and buff, and general readers to the notion that American Indian societies transmitted and interpreted their own histories in their own ways for their own reasons. Through discussions of legends and oral histories, creation stories and folktales, illustrates how various Indian peoples related and commented on their changing times. Drawing on his own research as well as recent scholarship from ethnohistory, anthropology, folklore and Indian studies, the author offers examples of how the American Indian historical imagination has put rituals and material culture, landscape, prophecies, and the English language to the service of keeping the past alive and vibrant.