Native American Culture

Lyn has her pottery artwork, her precocious kid, Willow, and the uncertain terrain of her midlife to keep her mind, heart and hands busy. June, a Métis Studies professor, yearns to uproot from Vancouver and move. With her loving partner, Sigh, and their faithful pup, June decides to buy a house in the last place on earth she imagined she’d end up: back home in Winnipeg with her family.

When European settlers - and later American settlers - came into contact with Native American tribes on the continent, they were frequently unable to differentiate between the subcultures within individual tribes. This led to all kinds of misunderstandings. When the Spanish came into contact with different tribes in the Southwest, they categorized several of them as Pueblo. Thus, while most Americans have heard of the Pueblo and Navajo, many remain unfamiliar with distinctions within the tribes.

Learning Native Wisdom explains why achieving a sustainable culture is more important than any other challenge we face today. Although there are many measures of a society's progress, Holthaus warns that only a shift away from our current culture of short-term abundance, founded on a belief in infinite economic growth, will represent true advancement. In societies that value the longevity of people, culture, and the environment, subsistence and spirituality soon become closely allied with sustainability.

For thousands of years two distinct cultures evolved unaware of one another’s existence. Separated by what one culture called The Great Sea and known to the other as the Atlantic Ocean, the course of each culture’s future changed irreversibly 400 years ago.

When most people think of “ancient American civilizations,” the Aztec, Maya, or Inca cultures probably come to mind immediately, because the societies in Mesoamerica have left behind permanent structures for millions of visitors from around the world to see each year. At the same time, however, from about 1000-1500 CE, an equally complex culture formed along the banks of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers.

The ancient desert O’odham people’s creation stories parallel the path a young Guy Thornton takes to emerge from the “maze” he has made of his life. The novel opens in the center of the narrative as Guy, a down-on-his-luck Arabian horse trainer fresh out of prison, is getting drunk at the Wander On Inn. He spends the next several months living in the central Arizona desert with an elderly O’odham woman who seeks to teach him “tribe spirit,” while alternating chapters recount the past and his big break when the wealthy Frank Fielding hires him to tend to his champion Arabian ...

In the 15th century, four Mahu sail from Tahiti to Hawaii and share their gifts of science and healing with the people of Waikiki. The islanders return this gift with a monument of four boulders in their honor, which the Mahu imbue with healing powers before disappearing. As time passes, foreigners inhabit the island and the once-sacred stones are forgotten until the 1960s. Though the true story of these stones was not fully recovered, the power of the Mahu still calls out to those who pass by them at Waikiki Beach today.

Young listeners learn about the early traditions which have led to our present-day celebration of Thanksgiving.

Fifteen thousand years before Europeans stepped foot in the Americas, people had already spread from tip to tip and coast to coast. Like all humans, these Native Americans sought to understand their place in the universe, the nature of their relationship with the divine, and the origin of the world into which their ancestors had emerged. The answers lay in their sacred stories. This collection of those stories - from nations and cultures across two continents, what the Aztecs called the Sea-Ringed World, from the edge of Argentina all the way up to Alaska - is a treasure.

The Olmec people are widely recognized as the first major civilization of Mexico and are thus generally regarded as the mother civilization of Mesoamerica, making them the people from which all subsequent Mesoamerican cultures derived. By and large, the Olmec culture is perhaps best identifiable by their so-called colossal heads, mammoth basalt head-statues wearing helmet-like headdresses found throughout Olmec habitation sites.

Physician, activist, and author Charles Alexander Eastman was the first Native American certified in Western medicine and one of the first authors of any background to emphasize the Native American perspective. In The Soul of the Indian, he shares the customs, rituals, celebrations, and beliefs of Native American spirituality, and in so doing provides a powerful account of the “Great Mystery” at their core.

Since the late 1800s, it has been believed that Native American civilization has been wiped from the United States. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee argues that Native American culture is far from defeated—if anything, it is thriving as much today as it was 100 years ago.

In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, historian Peter C. Mancall reveals how Europeans and Native Americans thought about a natural world undergoing rapid change in the century following the historic voyages of Christopher Columbus. Through innovative use of oral history and folklore maintained for centuries by Native Americans as well as original use of manuscript atlases, paintings that depict European representations of nature, and texts that circulated across the ocean, he reveals how the encounter between the old world and the new changed the fate of millions.

Award-winning author Duncan Tonatiuh reimagines one of Mexico's cherished legends. Princess Izta had many wealthy suitors but dismissed them all. When a mere warrior, Popoca, promised to be true to her and stay always by her side, Izta fell in love. The emperor promised Popoca if he could defeat their enemy Jaguar Claw, then Popoca and Izta could wed.

Most of Guy Thornton’s family is thriving on their ranch in southern Arizona, but Samson the mule has grown old and his caretaker, Jasmine, has been struggling with depression since her mother’s recent death. Star insists Guy take them to a Mojave Ghost Doctor living on the Colorado River near Parker where Guy’s son Trick is starting his career as a large animal vet. The old Mojave man’s “cure” involves the family in a mind-bending journey along the Colorado River and a nearly-deadly encounter with his vengeful son and his friends. Book Seven of The Arizona Series—novels ...

Guy Thornton’s dreams for his new ranch on the outskirts of the small, southern Arizona town of Sonoita have hit an impasse: his wife is away in Tucson caring for her ailing father; his Yaqui housekeeper is busy participating in her tribe’s 40-day Lenten observances; and JC, the troubled teenager entrusted to him, has gone missing. When Guy’s son, Trick, rides out to investigate, he encounters the unknowable worlds of the Surem, the ancient Yaqui spirits who trouble and assist lost travelers, and returns bloodied, confused, and empty-handed. So Jasmine, Trick’s former classmate, ...

Quince mil años antes de que los Europeos pisarán las Américas, la gente ya se había propagado de punta a punta y de costa a costa. Como todos los humanos, estos Nativos Americanos buscaban comprender su lugar en el universo, la naturaleza de su relación con lo divino, y el origen del mundo en el que habían emergido sus antepasados.Las respuestas se encuentran en sus historias sagradas.

Sacred Arrow finds Guy Thornton resurrecting the old Rawlings cattle ranch near Winslow, Arizona into a profitable bison operation and guiding tourists and researchers to the ranch’s trove of ancient petroglyphs when Bane, a White Mountain Apache, abducts the ranch owner’s five-year-old son, Jack. Accounts of Guy’s friendship with Old Trick during their rodeo years and his relationship with a Yavapai woman named Sally are woven through the story of the family’s desperate efforts to rescue young Jack.

The Toltec are one of the most famous Mesoamerican groups in South America, but they are also the most controversial and mysterious. The Toltec have been identified as the group that established a strong state centered in Tula (in present-day Mexico), and the Aztec claimed the Toltec as their cultural predecessors, so much so that the word Toltec comes from the Aztec's word Tōltēcatl, translated as artisan.

Native American Mound Builders During the Early and Late Woodland Periods the early Native American tribes built mounds, mostly in the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys. There are no written records about the purpose of these mounds, so the reasons for building them remain largely speculative. Adena and Hopewell Culture and Mounds People of both the Adena and later Hopewell cultures inhabited the White River region of Mounds State Park. They constructed several mounds on the bluffs above the river. The mounds are well preserved due to the efforts of some of the earliest American settlers ...