American mariners made more than 175 voyages to the Northwest Coast during the half-century after 1787. The art and culture of Northwest Coast Indians so intrigued American sailors that the collecting of ethnographic artifacts became an important secondary trade. Malloy has brought details about these early collections together for the first time.

Gifts from the Thunder Beings examines North American Aboriginal peoples’ use of Indigenous and European distance weapons in big-game hunting and combat. Beyond the capabilities of European weapons, Aboriginal peoples’ ways of adapting and using this technology in combination with Indigenous weaponry contributed greatly to the impact these weapons had on Aboriginal cultures. This gradual transition took place from the beginning of the fur trade in the Hudson’s Bay Company trading territory to the treaty and reserve period that began in Canada in the 1870s. Technological change and the effects of European contact were not uniform throughout North America, as Roland Bohr illustrates by comparing the northern Great Plains and the Central Subarctic—two adjacent but environmentally different regions of North America—and their respective Indigenous cultures. Beginning with a brief survey of the subarctic and Northern Plains environments and the most common subsistence strategies in these regions around the time of contact, Bohr provides the context for a detailed examination of social, spiritual, and cultural aspects of bows, arrows, quivers, and firearms. His detailed analysis of the shifting usage of bows and arrows and firearms in the northern Great Plains and the Central Subarctic makes Gifts from the Thunder Beings an important addition to the canon of North American ethnology.

The art and objects of the Indians of the Eastern Woodlands, past and present, are given full attention in this lavishly illustrated volume. Leading scholars from Europe and North America discuss the cultural significance of Native art and objects as well as examine the composition and history of particularly distinctive museum collections. Subjects include traditional and contemporary Iroquois art, war clubs, captains' coats, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, and famous collections in Scotland and Germany as well as at the Musée d'Yverdon, the Manchester Museum, and the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology.

This textbook provides an account of intellectual property law. The underlying policies influencing the direction of the law are explained and explored and contemporary issues facing the discipline are tackled head-on. The international and European dimensions are covered together with the domestic position.

New Faces of the Fur Trade is a collection of fifteen essays selected from the Seventh North American Fur Trade Conference held in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1995. These articles question the traditional focus of fur trade literature and suggest that there are richer, more diverse narratives to be constructed and new ways to look at the fur trade. Many focus on subjects and themes that either have been formerly overlooked or have been introduced and then neglected. Fur trade studies have been criticized for remaining outside the current mainstream of historiography, in particular for paying scant attention to the rich insights to be found in approaches adopted from the fields of social and gender history. This volume redresses some of those omissions.

A collection of articles that describe the relationships and encounters between Native Americans and Europeans throughout American history.