The Mammoth Book of Native Americans

Horses, buffalo, warbonnets and war paint, peace pipes, tepees, totem poles, and powwows—they epitomize what most people know of native American culture. Yet America’s native people can trace their origins back thousands of years, to an age when mammoths still thrived in North America, and in the millennia before the arrival of European explorers they had evolved a vast variety of social and religious rituals in settlements. Four centuries of warfare, though, would ultimately decimate most of America’s five hundred tribes, and the vitality of their traditions would survive largely as a memory on the reservations to which they were consigned in modern times. The Mammoth Book of Native Americans rethinks the historical cliches long associated with the Indian nations. This volume focuses on the stories, songs, customs, tribal organization, dress, and arts of the first Americans. It does not ignore some of the more uncomfortable facts of the American Indian past, like the practice of cannibalism among some of the tribes or the part played by the native peoples themselves in the extinction of the buffalo. From the Arch of Heaven to Wounded Knee to Foxwood Casino, this is a story filled with magic and beauty, wisdom and tragedy.