In Elias Johnson's 'Legends, Traditions and Laws of the Iroquois & History of the Tuscarora Indians', readers are taken on a journey through the rich cultural heritage of the Iroquois people. Johnson delves into the myths, rituals, and societal norms of the Iroquois, painting a vivid picture of their way of life. His prose is both informative and engaging, making this book a valuable resource for those interested in Native American culture and history. The book also provides insights into the legal systems of the Iroquois, shedding light on a lesser-known aspect of their civilization. Johnson's meticulous research and attention to detail are evident throughout the text, adding depth and credibility to his accounts.Overall, the book serves as a comprehensive and enlightening exploration of the Iroquois culture and history. Elias Johnson, a noted historian and expert on Native American studies, brings his passion for the subject to life in this captivating work. As a member of the Tuscarora tribe himself, Johnson's personal connection to the material shines through in his writing, adding authenticity and depth to the narrative. 'Legends, Traditions and Laws of the Iroquois & History of the Tuscarora Indians' is a must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the Iroquois people and their fascinating traditions.

When Governor John White sailed for England from Roanoke Island in August 1587, he left behind more than 100 men, women and children. They were never seen again by Europeans. For more than four centuries the fate of the Roanoke colony has remained a mystery, despite the many attempts to construct a satisfactory, convincing explanation. New research suggests that all past and present theories are based upon a series of erroneous assumptions that have persisted for centuries. Through a close examination of the early accounts, previously unknown or unexamined documents, and native Algonquian oral tradition, this book deconstructs the traditional theories. What emerges is a fresh narrative of the ultimate fate of the Lost Colony.

The folktales and myths of the Iroquois and their Algonquian neighbors rank among the most imaginatively rich and narratively co-herent traditions in North America. Inspired by these wondrous tales, Anthony Wonderley explores their significance to Iroquois and Algonquian religions and worldviews. Mostly recorded around 1900, these oral narratives preserve the voice and something of the outlook of autochthonous Americans from a bygone age, when storytelling was an important facet of daily life. Grouping the stories around shared themes and motifs, Wonderley analyzes topics ranging from cannibal giants to cultural heroes, and from legends of local places to myths of human origin. Approached comparatively and historically, these stories can enrich our understanding of archaeological remains, ethnic boundaries, and past cultural interchanges among Iroquois and Algonquian peoples.

In recent years, the study and teaching of Native American oral and written art have flourished. During the same period, there has been a growing recognition among historians, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians that Indians must be seen not as the voiceless, nameless, faceless Other but as people who had a powerful impact on the historical development of the United States. Literary critics, however, have continued to overlook Indians as determinants of American—rather than specifically Native American—literature. The notion that the presence of Indian peoples shaped American literature as a whole remains unexplored. In The Demon of the Continent, Joshua David Bellin probes the complex interrelationships among Native American and Euro-American cultures and literatures from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. He asserts that cultural contact is at the heart of American literature. For Bellin, previous studies of Indians in American literature have focused largely on the images Euro-American writers constructed of indigenous peoples, and have thereby only perpetuated those images. Unlike authors of those earlier studies, Bellin refuses to reduce Indians to static antagonists or fodder for a Euro-American imagination. Drawing on works such as Henry David Thoreau's Walden, William Apess' A Son of the Forest, and little known works such as colonial Indian conversion narratives, he explores the ways in which these texts reflect and shape the intercultural world from which they arose. In doing so, Bellin reaches surprising conclusions: that Walden addresses economic clashes and partnerships between Indians and whites; that William Bartram's Travels encodes competing and interpenetrating systems of Indian and white landholding; that Catherine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie enacts the antebellum drama of Indian conversion; that James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow struggled with Indian authors such as George Copway and David Cusick for physical, ideological, and literary control of the nation. The Demon of the Continent proves Indians to be actors in the dynamic processes in which America and its literature are inescapably embedded. Shifting the focus from textual images to the sites of material, ideological, linguistic, and aesthetic interaction between peoples, Bellin reenvisions American literature as the product of contact, conflict, accommodation, and interchange.

The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia explores the creation, destruction, appropriation, and enduring legacy of one of early America’s most important places: the homelands of the Haudenosaunees (also known as the Iroquois Six Nations). Throughout the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries of European colonization the Haudenosaunees remained the dominant power in their homelands and one of the most important diplomatic players in the struggle for the continent following European settlement of North America by the Dutch, British, French, Spanish, and Russians. Chad L. Anderson offers a significant contribution to understanding colonialism, intercultural conflict, and intercultural interpretations of the Iroquoian landscape during this time in central and western New York. Although American public memory often recalls a nation founded along a frontier wilderness, these lands had long been inhabited in Native American villages, where history had been written on the land through place-names, monuments, and long-remembered settlements. Drawing on a wide range of material spanning more than a century, Anderson uncovers the real stories of the people—Native American and Euro-American—and the places at the center of the contested reinvention of a Native American homeland. These stories about Iroquoia were key to both Euro-American and Haudenosaunee understandings of their peoples’ pasts and futures. For more information about The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia, visit storiedlandscape.com.

Before invasion, Turtle Island-or North America-was home to vibrant cultures that shared long-standing philosophical precepts. The most important and wide-spread of these was the view of reality as a collaborative binary known as the Twinned Cosmos of Blood and Breath. This binary system was built on the belief that neither half of the cosmos can exist without its twin. Both halves are, therefore, necessary and good. Western anthropologists typically shorthand the Twinned Cosmos as "Sky and Earth" but this erroneously saddles it with Christian baggage and, worse, imposes a hierarchy that puts sky quite literally above earth. None of this Western ideology legitimately applies to traditional Indigenous American thought, which is about equal cooperation and the continual recreation of reality. Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath examines traditional historical concepts of spirituality among North American Indians both at and, to the extent it can be determined, before contact. In doing so, Barbara Alice Mann rescues the authentically indigenous ideas from Western, and especially missionary, interpretations. In addition to early European source material, she uses Indian oral traditions, traced as much as possible to their earliest versions and sources, and Indian records, including pictographs, petroglyphs, bark books, and wampum. Moreover, Mann respects each Indigenous culture as a discrete unit, rather than generalizing them as is often done in Western anthropology. To this end, she collates material in accordance with actual historical, linguistic, and traditional linkages among the groups at hand, with traditions clearly identified by group and, where recorded, by speaker. In this way she provides specialists and non-specialists alike a window into the purportedly lost, and often caricatured, world of Indigenous American thought.

Levanna was a famous and well-visited archaeological site in central New York, along the eastern side of Cayuga Lake, during the Great Depression. It was primarily known for its spectacular animal effigies. But were they real or forgeries? Jack Rossen takes us on a journey through the 1920s and 1930s, the era of an outdoor museum, and professional attempts by the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) to suppress it. Larger than life characters include Arthur C. Parker, future President of the SAA, William A. Ritchie, future State Archaeologist of New York, and Harrison C. Follett, the entrepreneurial archaeologist. The book also takes us through the 2007-2009 re-excavation of Levanna and the related 2011-2014 excavations at the Myers Farm site. Along the way, Cayuga history is reinterpreted as more peaceful than previously believed, and the case is made for a Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy more than one thousand years old. An older confederacy is more in line with oral traditions than previous archaeological ideas of a brief confederacy that began either just before or after European contact. The work was conducted through the framework of indigenous collaborative archaeology with leaders of the Cayuga and Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The narrative approach includes stories of the contemporary people, both Native and non-Native, who protected the site, supported the research, and provided ideas, wisdom, inspiration, and friendship.

When American Indians and Europeans met on the frontiers of 18th-century eastern North America, they had many shared ideas about human nature, political life, and social relations. This title is about how they came to see themselves as people so different in their customs and natures that they appeared to be each other's opposite.