North American Indians

A Very Short Introduction

De: Theda Perdue, Michael D. Green

Narrado por: Richard Davidson

When Europeans first arrived in North America, between five and eight million Indigenous people were already living there. But how did they come to be here? What were their agricultural, spiritual, and hunting practices? How did their societies evolve, and what challenges do they face today?

Eminent historians Theda Perdue and Michael Green begin by describing how nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers followed the bison and woolly mammoth over the Bering land mass between Asia and what is now Alaska between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago, settling throughout North America. Throughout the book, Perdue and Green stress the great diversity of Indigenous peoples in America, who spoke more than 400 different languages before the arrival of Europeans and whose ways of life varied according to the environments they settled in and adapted to so successfully. Most importantly, the authors stress how Native Americans have struggled to maintain their sovereignty - first with European powers and then with the United States - in order to retain their lands, govern themselves, support their people, and pursue practices that have made their lives meaningful.

©2010 Oxford University Press, Inc. (P)2021 Tantor

VSI # 243

A great survey of the native people of North America. While not native, I live in AZ and adore the unique perspective of native writers and stories. The authors of this book Theda Perdue and Michael D Green (both professors of history at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), while not Native themselves, do a good job of surveying the history and diversity of the native people of North America. Their survey doesn't have enough room to explore very deep on any one topic, but they incorporate a lot in a short book.