A Forest of Time
A Forest of Time, first published in 2002, is the first introduction for undergraduates, graduates and general readers to the notion that American Indian societies had vital interests in interpreting and transmitting their own histories in their own ways, for themselves. Drawing upon his own varied research as well as sampling the latest in scholarship from ethnohistory, anthropology, folklore and Indian studies, Dr Nabokov offers dramatic examples of how native peoples also put rituals and material culture, landscape, prophecies, and even the English language to the urgent service of keeping the past alive and relevant. Throughout these lively chapters, we also witness the American Indian historical imagination deployed as a coping skill and survival strategy. This book surveys the latest integrating ideas while offering a useful bibliography that opens up, and demands that we engage with, alternative chronicles for America's multi-cultural past.
- Demonstrates wide range of American Indian ways of communicating and using history
- Provides working 'handbook' with abundant references, so students can broaden their perspective and enrich their writing
- Re-positions American Indian intellectual life within the overall context of American history
Reviews & endorsements
'… marvelous … The significance of this book … in its intelligent synthesis, and elaboration, of a culturally oriented ethnohistory …'. Michael E. Harkin, Ethnos
Product details
May 2002Paperback
9780521568746
260 pages
228 × 152 × 18 mm
0.35kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction: short history of American Indian historicity
- 1. Some dynamics of American Indian historicity
- 2. Within reach of memory - oral traditions, legends and history
- 3. Almost timeless truths - myth and history
- 4. Commentaries and subversions - memorates, jokes, tales and history
- 5. Anchoring the past in place - geography and history
- 6. Memories in things - material culture and Indian histories
- 7. Renewing, remembering and resisting - rituals and history
- 8. Old stories, new ways - writing, power and Indian histories
- 9. Futures of Indian pasts - prophecy and history.