Native Americans - A History in Pictures (Hardcover, American ed)

Combining an extraordinary collection of photographs with an insightful and illuminating narrative by Native American expert Arlene Hirschfelder, this magnificent book casts a fresh light on the history of the Native American.From the Native people's first contact with European explorers in the early 1500s to the realities of twentieth-century life, every major event in the history of North America's indigenous people is featured. Each story in this tragic, but always intriguing, episode of world history is placed in its chronological context: from early attempts to assimilate Native Americans with the newly emerging white population and the role of indigenous people in the American Civil War, to the ceaseless struggle to hold on to their homelands and their defined role in contemporary society.Specially commissioned maps clearly show the shifting and diminishing Native territories, while eyewitness accounts form participants in the story add a further poignancy to the narrative. Native Americans also investigates the economic, social, and spiritual life of the Native people: a traditional Indian childhood, the nineteenth-century boarding schools, religious beliefs and ceremonies, and ways of hunting and farming.This is a compelling documentary record, which, once opened, is impossible to put down.