Review of Heaven is Near the Rocky Mountains

Thomas Woolsey was a Methodist missionary in the Edmonton region between 1855 and 1864. This book is a collection of his letters and journals, edited by historian Hugh Dempsey. Woolsey seems to have been concerned more with combating his Oblate Romish competitors than he was in understanding the Cree, Stoney, Blackfoot, and Sarcee Indians with whom he came into contact. Woolsey was thoroughly convinced of the superiority of his Methodism over heathenism and popery alike. He seems to have been a decent and articulate person, but not a particularly engaged observer of the Indian peoples to whom he ministered

Review of Heaven is Near the Rocky Mountains

Thomas Woolsey was a Methodist missionary in the Edmonton region between 1855 and 1864. This book is a collection of his letters and journals, edited by historian Hugh Dempsey. Woolsey seems to have been concerned more with combating his Oblate Romish competitors than he was in understanding the Cree, Stoney, Blackfoot, and Sarcee Indians with whom he came into contact. Woolsey was thoroughly convinced of the superiority of his Methodism over heathenism and popery alike. He seems to have been a decent and articulate person, but not a particularly engaged observer of the Indian peoples to whom he ministered

Review of The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and u.s. Indian Policy

Last spring, as we cleared several generations worth of household goods and memorabilia from the Ridington family home in Westminster, Maryland, we came upon a framed print of Appeal to the Great Spirit. In it, an Indian brave sits astride his horse, his head flung back, his arms beseechingly out at his sides, his palms up. The body language tells of grief and supplication, and of one last desperate hope. The colors are brown, yellow, and orange, the tones of sunset. When we read Brian Dippie\u27s The Vanishing American, we realized that Appeal to the Great Spirit, or works similar to it, must be in a lot of attics. It was created as a statue by Cyrus E. Dallin in 1908 and copied many times. It was widely distributed on postcards, prints, and plaster replicas. It was one of the most popular of many works of art that portrayed the Vanishing American. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, poets and artists used images from nature to sum up the fate of America\u27s aboriginal people: sunsets, melting snowflakes, morning dew, and other ephemeral phenomena were used to signify the transitory nature of the Indian. The popularity of these works demonstrated the pervasiveness of the idea that Indians were a dying race-and the recent success of the latest film version of The Last of the Mohicans demonstrates its persistence. Brian Dippie\u27s book demonstrates how that idea has affected the U.S. government\u27s Indian policy

Review of \u3ci\u3eAn Archaeology of the Soul: North American Indian Belief and Ritual\u3c/i\u3e By Robert L. Hall

This rich and complex book reminds me of Sir James G. Frazer\u27s The Golden Bough, with one big difference: Hall is a distinguished practicing archaeologist. He knows about the symbolic and ceremonial life of Native America from firsthand experience with its archaeological, ethno-historical, and ethnographic record. Archaeologists look to the earth for their information but look down upon it in order to discover meaningful patterns. Hall surveys the Native American symbolic vocabulary with an eagle\u27s eye, discovering connections among such diverse symbols and practices as sacred poles, calumets, atlatl weights, spirit release ceremonies, and Hopewell interaction spheres. Hall, whose ancestry includes Mohican, Menominee and Ottawa, begins with a tribute to Omaha ethnographer Francis La Flesche for preserving physical objects and information that today provide invaluable clues to understanding Native American symbolism. La Flesche and Hall\u27s own forebears in archaeology led the author to discover that cultural history can be extracted from museum collections and ethnographic records. His practice of noninvasive archaeology emphasizing Native American spirituality led him to call his enterprise an archaeology of the soul. The cover of this handsomely produced volume shows a duck-headed male calumet, one of a pair used in the Pawnee and Omaha Hako and Wa\u27wan ceremonies. Calumet ceremonialism, Hall tells us, is a theme around which to relate such seemingly unrelated phenomena as the Morning Star sacrifice of the Skiri Pawnees, the worship of Xipe Totec in Mesoamerica, the relationship of sacred pipes to spear throwers, and the cosmology of the Aztec calendar stone. His wider objective is to facilitate a broader recognition of the continent-wide roots of many varieties of American Indian religious experience. Each chapter tells a set of interrelated stories, sometimes drawn from a single tradition: gifts of the White Buffalo Calf maiden; spirit bundles; soul release; the Ghost Lodge. Sometimes the stories range widely across space and time: atlatls, courting flutes and calumets; mourning and adoption; calendrics; contrary behavior and the spirit world. Together, they reveal deeply rooted and widely distributed Native American ideas about individual and cosmic death and renewal. The book is particularly powerful in its reading of symbolic objects and ceremonies as texts. At a time when Indian spirituality is sometimes reduced to facile formulations of medicine wheel teachings, Hall provides both substance and insight. This remarkable book will serve both Native American philosophers and non-Native students of cultural history. A chart showing relationships among Woodland, Mississippian, and Mesoamerican traditions would have been a handy reference

Review of \u3ci\u3e Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the Omaha Indians: The Big Village Site\u3c/i\u3e by John M. O\u27Shea and John Ludwickson

Until recently, anthropological archaeology considered the burial grounds of Native Americans to be a proper subject of scientific investigation with little or no consideration for the cultural values of contemporary Native people regarding the resting places of their ancestors. Between 1939 and 1941 archaeologists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln excavated cemeteries and dwelling sites of the Omaha tribe at the site of their former village near the present town of Homer, Nebraska. Known to Omahas as Ton\u27wontonga (Big Village), the site was occupied from 1775 to 1845. Under the direction ofJohn Champe, the remains of something like a hundred Omahas were brought to the university and placed in storage with little or no examination for three decades. In the 1970s, the authors of this volume began working on the material with the cooperation of Champe until his death in 1978. The report is valuable, if long overdue, because it summarizes information previously unavailable to scholars or to members of the Omaha tribe. It also provides a convenient overview of Omaha tribal history and adaptive strategies in the early nineteenth century

Trail To Heaven: Knowledge And Narrative In A Northern Native Community

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