The Night Chant is one of the great nine-day, Navajo winter healing ceremonies. During its course, nearly all the important characters of the Navajo pantheon are mentioned in legends, depicted in sand paintings, and impersonated with the use of masks and other ritual objects. Originally published in 1902, Washington Matthews's The Night Chant ......
Environmental law and philosophy assume the existence of a fundamental state of nature: Before the arrival of Columbus, the Americas were a wilderness untouched by human hand, teeming with wildlife and almost void of native peoples. In Wilderness and Political Ecology Charles Kay and Randy Simmons state that this "natural" view of pre-European ......
A Buck Soldier's View of Indian Country, 1863-1866
Hervey Johnson's letters offer a fascinating first-person account of the critical Indian War years on the high plains of eastern Wyoming during which a confederation of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians successfully defended their Powder River buffalo range.
Expanding Archaeology is the first attempt to define behavioral archaeology comprehensively and to establish its place among competing theoretical frameworks. Among other objectives, this volume demonstrates that a behavioral approach - the study of material objects regardless of time or space to describe and explain human behavior - provides a ......
Driving across I-70 in southern Utah one can't help but wonder about the magnificent upturned rocks of the San Rafael Reef. With A Travelers Guide to the Geology of the Colorado Plateau in hand, you'll soon discover that you were driving through Page and Navajo Sandstone formations, sharply folded into a monocline along one of the "Basin and ......
Where did the Navajo people come from and when did they differentiate from the larger Athabascan group? Using historic documents, linguistic evidence, and archaeological sites near Abiquiu, New Mexico, Curtis Schaafsma makes the case that in the late 1500s all Apache groups, including ancestral 'Apaches de Navajo,' as the early Spaniards called ......
Edward Geary's collection of writings on the High Plateau country of central and southern Utah, a combination guidebook, travel narrative, personal essays, and natural, social, and literary history, encompasses each of those forms with a sweep as broad as the landscape it describes. It traces the progress of travelers to the region, including the ......
The southern Great Basin/northern Mojave desert region is home to several different Paiute and Shoshone peoples, all of whom speak languages in the Numic language family. These societies shared a way of life based mainly on harvesting wild plants, following an annual cycle of moving and gathering the seasonally abundant resources. Because of this, ......
The vast, pine-covered plateau now known as Yellowstone National Park has been lived in, traveled through, and exploited by humans for thousands of years. It is still possible to see the remnants of old camps and deep-rutted trails over which ancient peoples crossed the Park to reach the bison-rich plains. When did humans first visit the area we ......
