referencebooks

Tiller's Guide to Indian Country: Economic Profiles of American Indian Reservations

Edited and compiled by Veronica E. Velarde Tiller

Published by BowArrow Publishing Company, 1996 (newer editions are available)

This is an 8.5" by 11" hardcover book running to 698 pages including the bibliography and index, plus a brief preferatory section.

Note: This book is updated regularly. Ours is a pretty old edition. The most recent is a 2006 edition, just published.

What the book does is provide an economic profile for each indian Reservation in the United States, of which there are about 300. Most profiles give some simple stats (including address, area in acres, labor force, education levels, per capita income, unemployment rate, and population of the reservation and tribal enrollment); the location and land status of the reservation; the culture and history of the Tribe; description of the Tribe's government; description of the reservation's economic activity; and a description of the reservation's infrastructure and facilities. Many profiles give a little less information.

The Fond du Lac Reservation is near where I live, so I looked it up to see what I could learn. This entry is about a page and a quarter in length and is very informative. The section on location and land status describes the geography and the history of the reservation. The section on culture and history talks about the history of the tribe and a bit about their contemporary culture and situation. The section on the reservation's economy is the longest part, and has separate sections for types of economic activity (construction, agriculture, forestry, gaming, tourism, etc.). The prose is clear and very informative.

This is an essential reference work for those interested in getting quick information about reservations and the tribes that live on them. It is important to keep in mind that the basic unit of description is the reservation and not the tribe, because there are more than 200 recognized tribes in the United States that do not have reservations, and this resource does not provide information on them.

Encyclopedia of Native American Jewelry: A Guide to History, People, and Terms

By Paula Baxter with Allison Bird-Romero.

Published by Oryx Press, 2000.

This is a 7" by 10" hardcover book running to 242 pages including the bibliography and subject and author indexes, plus maps, a classified list of entries, a preface, acknowledgments, and a long introduction.

Native American jewelry is among the most narrow subject areas that one might find treated in a dedicated encyclopedia. Spend a little time with the book, though, and it becomes evident that the subject is rich enough to warrant such a treatment. For a sense of what is covered, here is the full list of items in the "A" sequence:

• abalone
  
• agate
  
• Aleut See Inuit, Inupiat, and Aleut Jewelry
  
• alloy
  
• Anasazi
  
• animal tracks
  
• annealing
  
• Antique Tribal Art Dealers Association (ATADA)
  
• Apache mountan spirit dancer (gan)
  
• appliqué
  
• argillite
  
• arrowheads, arrows
  
• Atsidi Chon
  
• Atsidi Sani
  
• avanyu See Water Serpent
  
• awl
  
• azurite
  

As you can see, there are entries for materials, cultural groups, tools, organizations, specific jewelrymakers, and other topics. Among the entries listed above, the shortest is two inches of text (in one column on a two-column page) and the longest is about a page. There are some black and white illustrations in the book, but not a tremendous number.

This book is well-written and informative. It makes a useful reference resource for anyone studying Native American jewelry, but makes an equally useful and a very interesting introduction to Native American Studies, because of the many peripheral and contextual issues that it discusses.

The Encyclopedia of Native American Biography

By Bruce E. Johansen and Donald A. Grinde, Jr.

Published by Henry Holt and Company, 1997.

This is a 7.5" by 9.5" hardbound book running to 463 pages including the index, plus a brief foreword and introduction.

What the book does is provide biographical summaries of the contributions of hundreds of important Native Americans, in history and today.

Entries range in length from a paragraph to a couple of pages, concisely discussing each person's role in history.

The focus is on figures form the 19th Century, but some earlier and later figures are included too. Among contemporary Native Americans I was pleased to find Leonard Peltier, Winona LaDuke, and Gerald Vizenor, but a little disappointed not to find Sherman Alexey. I think the emphasis is on people who've had a political role, and less on cultural figures. Some will be interested to know that Ward Churchill is not included.

This is a very useful book, one which I will certainly spend some more time with during my reference shift tonight.

Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World: 15,000 Years of Inventions and Innovations

By Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield.

Published by Facts On File, 2002.

This is an 8.5" by 11" hardbound book runnning to 384 pages including the appendices, bibliography and indexes, plus a preface.

The preface begins:

What follows is a collection of contributions American Indian peoples have made to the world. The word contribution is defined in The American Heritage College Dictionary, Second Edition as "to give to the common fund or common purpose." American Indians, from the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America, donated many gifts to the world's common fund of knowledge in the arears of agriculture, science and technology, medicine, transportation, architecture, psychology, military strategy, government, and language. These contributions take the form of inventions, processes, philosophies, and political or social systems. For the most part until the late 19th century, they remained unrecognized outside of the disciplines of anthropology and archaeology. People throughout the world enjoyed the fruits of indigenous American invention -- such as rubberized raincoats, popcorn, hammocks, and the drug quinine -- without being aware of their origin. At the same time textbooks, novels, and later movies and television portrayed the first people of the Americas as primitives who were incapable of complex ideas or inventions.

So, the purpose of this encyclopedia is clear.

Enties are mostly short, about a quarter page to two pages in length. Each one is about a specific cultural invention or an area of invention. For an idea of the range of things covered, here are the first fifteen items in the "L" sequence (including see references):

• labor laws
  
• lacemaking
  
• lacrosse
  
• lady's slipper
  
• lamination
  
• language, American Indian influence on
  
• language, sign
  
• latex (rubber)
  
• laundry detergent
  
• laws
  
• laxatives
  
• League of Nations, American Indian Influence
  
• libraries
  
• lighthouses
  
• llamas
  

The information presented is eye-opening, showing that Native American cultures were much more innovative and highly developed (technologically and organizationally) than most of us have been taught. However, the objectivity of the authors seems compromised by their desire for the mainstream culture to respect Native American culture more than they do, with the result that their accomplishments are sometimes exaggerated (specifically in the degree of advancement of technologies that they developed). More often than exaggeration of their accomplishments, however, we see those accomplishments treated as the origin of technologies now in common use, without recognition of parallel developments within Western culture, where the actual history of our use of a technology goes back to Western origins, despite Native American peoples' having done it also, or perhaps first or perhaps better. Given that, I think the book might more accurately have been titled "Encyclopedia of Native American Innovation and Invention."

It's a good book, but the authors' wishes shine through the pages and make them a little less than objective.

Word Dance: The Language of Native American Culture

By Carl Waldman, with pen-and-ink drawings by Molly Braun.

Published by Facts On File, 1994.

This is a hardbound book measuring 6" by 9" and running to 290 pages including the bibliography and appendix, plus a brief introduction.

The first second paragraph of the introduction describes the book pretty well:

"Word Dance is designed as a short-entry study aid and companion volume for students pursuing many aspects of American Indian cultural studies. Since language usage and word definitions are central to it, the book is closest in form to a glossary or dictionary. But Word Dance also resembles an encyclopedia in that entries discuss how a term or concept relates specifically to Native American culture or history.

The first twelve entries in the "Q" sequence (which has 24 entries total) are:

• qarmaq
  
• Quaitso
  
• Quapaw
  
• quarrying
  
• quarry site
  
• quartz
  
• Quechan
  
• Quechua
  
• Quechuamaran
  
• quetzal
  
• Quetzalcoatl
  
• quid
  

Besides words from Native American languages, words from various social science and humanities fields as well as common speech are included, defined in terms of their usage in Native American studies.

Entries range in length from a sentence to a long paragraph.

Terms defined elsewhere in the book are rendered in SMALL CAPS in the text. There are also lots of see also references capping off the entries.

Pen and ink drawings illustrate the definitions every few pages.

Taken as a whole, the book is a nice, easily-digestible overview of the field of Native American studies. It is useful as a reference to terms, concepts, tribes, and elements of Native American Culture.