A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History

By Peter Nabokov

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521568749
• ISBN13: 9780521568746
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A fascinating, engaging dialogue and sourcebook

A Forest Of Time: American Indian Ways Of History by Peter Nabokov (Professor of American Indian Studies and World Arts/Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles) is a college level study of how Native Americans have interpreted and transmitted their own histories in creation stories, folktales, oral histories, and tradition. Individual chapters address a range of subjects from the dynamics of myth versus history, to the value of rituals, and Native American prophecies for the future embedded within tribal culture. A fascinating, engaging dialogue and sourcebook that contributes a unique multicultural perspective on the origin of America and its native peoples, A Forest Of Time is strongly recommended for personal and academic Native American Studies supplemental reading lists and academic reference collections.