Based on the author's thesis. Part I was previously published in 1940 by the American Museum of Natural History. This revised edition includes two additional comparative sections.

The first economic, military, and diplomatic history of the Plains Cree from contact with the Europeans in the 1670s to the disappearance of the buffalo from Cree lands by the 1870s, focussing on military and trade relations between 1790 and 1870. Milloy describes three distinct eras, each characterized by a paramount motive for war—the wars of migration and territory, the horse wars during the 'golden years' of Plains Indian life, and buffalo wars, which mark the trail to the reserves. Intimately linked to each era was a particular trade pattern and a military system that linked the Cree with other Plains tribes and non-Natives. By tracing these themes, Milloy charts the ability of the Cree to serve their economic interests by forging alliances or undertaking military or diplomatic offensives.

This book examines sentence structure in Plains Cree, an Algonquian language of western Canada. Its detailed discussion of the typologically significant syntactic and semantic properties of Plains Cree makes it a valuable resource for those already familiar with this language family and to the wider field of language typology.

This book explores several topics in Cree morphology, syntax and discourse structure. Cree, an Algonquian language, is non-configurational: the grammatical relations of subject and object are not expressed by word order or other constituent structure relations, as they are in a configurational language like English. Instead, subjects and objects are expressed by means of the inflection on the verb. Cree is typical of non-configurational languages in allowing a great deal of word order variation. This study examines in detail aspects of the Plains Cree dialect, giving a valuable insight into the structure of this endangered language.

"The entries in The Student's Dictionary are all based on actual Cree usage as recorded in spontaneous prose. Because of its reliance on authentic texts, this work is especially rich in terms documenting the lives of women, child-rearing, illness and health and, of course, the ceremonial life."-- Back cover.

The Michif language -- spoken by descendants of French Canadian fur traders and Cree Indians in western Canada -- is considered an "impossible language" since it uses French for nouns and Cree for verbs, and comprises two different sets of grammatical rules. Bakker uses historical research and fieldwork data to present the first detailed analysis of this language and how it came into being.