A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History

by Peter Nabokov

• ISBN13: 9780521568746
• ISBN10: 0521568749
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-02-25
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

A Forest of Time is the first introduction for undergraduates, graduates and general readers to the notion that American Indian societies had vital interests in interpreting and transmitting their own histories in their own ways, for themselves. Drawing upon his own varied research as well as sampling the latest in scholarship from ethnohistory, anthropology, folklore and Indian studies, Dr Nabokov offers dramatic examples of how native peoples also put rituals and material culture, landscape, prophecies, and even the English language to the urgent service of keeping the past alive and relevant. Throughout these lively chapters, we also witness the American Indian historical imagination deployed as a coping skill and survival strategy. This book surveys the latest integrating ideas while offering a useful bibliography that opens up, and demands that we engage with, alternative chronicles for America's multi-cultural past.

Table of Contents

Preface	vi
Introduction: Short History of American Indian Historicity	1	(28)
Some Dynamics of American Indian Historicity	29	(29)
Within Reach of Memory: Oral Traditions, Legends, and History	58	(27)
Almost Timeless Truths: Myth and History	85	(20)
Commentaries and Subversions: Memorates, Jokes, Tales, and History	105	(21)
Anchoring the Past in Place: Geography and History	126	(24)
Memories in Things: Material Culture and Indian Histories	150	(22)
Renewing, Remembering, and Resisting: Rituals and History	172	(20)
Old Stories, New Ways: Writing, Power, and Indian Histories	192	(26)
Futures of Indian Pasts: Prophecy and History	218	(23)
Index	241