Beth Piatote's luminous debut collection opens with a feast, grounding its stories in the landscapes and lifeworlds of the Native Northwest, exploring the inventive and unforgettable pattern of Native American life in the contemporary world Told with humor, subtlety, and spareness, the mixed–genre works of Beth Piatote’s first collection find unifying themes in the strength of kinship, the pulse of longing, and the language of return. A woman teaches her niece to make a pair of beaded earrings while ruminating on a fractured relationship. An eleven–year–old girl narrates the unfolding of the Fish Wars in the 1960s as her family is propelled to its front lines. In 1890, as tensions escalate at Wounded Knee, two young men at college—one French and the other Lakota—each contemplate a death in the family. In the final, haunting piece, a Nez Perce–Cayuse family is torn apart as they debate the fate of ancestral remains in a moving revision of the Greek tragedy Antigone. Formally inventive and filled with vibrant characters, The Beadworkers draws on Indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life.

Originally published in 1942 this now classic book is a study of the Nupe of Northern Nigeria. The economic and political complexity of their kingdom evoked comparisons with the civilization of Byzantium. The detailed description and analysis of their social life and political institutions was the first study of a Muslim Emirate in Nigeria and as such is still an indispensable work.

An intimate view of frontier women--Anglo and Indian--and the communities they forged.

In recognizing the established intellectual and institutional authority of Aboriginal artists, curators, and academics working in cultural institutions and universities, this volume serves as an important primer on key questions and issues accompanying the changing representational practices of the community cultural center, the public art gallery and the anthropological museum.

Sunset. Fire. Rainbow. Drawing on such common occurrences of light, Navajo artists have crafted an uncommon array of design in colored glass beads. Beadwork is an art form introduced to the Navajos through other Indian and Euro-American contacts, but it is one that they have truly made their own. More than simple crafts, Navajo beaded designs are architectures of light. Ellen Moore has written the first history of Navajo beadwork—belts and hatbands, baskets and necklaces—in a book that examines both the influence of Navajo beliefs in the creation of this art and the primacy of light and color in Navajo culture. Navajo Beadwork: Architectures of Light traces the evolution of the art as explained by traders, Navajo consultants, and Navajo beadworkers themselves. It also shares the visions, words, and art of 23 individual artists to reveal the influences on their creativity and show how they go about creating their designs. As Moore reveals, Navajo beadwork is based on an aggregate of beliefs, categories, and symbols that are individually interpreted and transposed into beaded designs. Most designs are generated from close observation of light in the natural world, then structured according to either Navajo tradition or the newer spirituality of the Native American Church. For many beadworkers, creating designs taps deeply embedded beliefs so that beaded objects reflect their thoughts and prayers, their aesthetic sensibilities, and their sense of being Navajo—but above all, their attention to light and its properties. No other book offers such an intimate view of this creative process, and its striking color plates attest to the wondrous results. Navajo Beadwork: Architectures of Light is a valuable record of ethnographic research and a rich source of artistic insight for lovers of beadwork and Native American art.

This uniquely designed book and kit with a detachable plexiglass spine contains nearly 2,000 colorful beads and instructions to make a variety of jewelry items while learning about African culture. 100 illustrations.

This Companion offers students and scholars a comprehensive introduction to the development and the diversity of the American short story as a literary form from its origins in the eighteenth century to the present day. Rather than define what the short story is as a genre, or defend its importance in comparison with the novel, this Companion seeks to understand what the short story does – how it moves through national space, how it is always related to other genres and media, and how its inherent mobility responds to the literary marketplace and resonates with key critical themes in contemporary literary studies. The chapters offer authoritative introductions and reinterpretations of a literary form that has re-emerged as a major force in the twenty-first-century public sphere dominated by the Internet.

"An outstanding set of studies that work well with each other to produce truly substantial and rich insights into the making and consuming of art in the colonial and post-colonial world."—Susan S. Bean, Curator, Peabody Essex Museum

Beginning in the 1920s anthropologists, traders, and other admirers of traditional Native American cultures--appalled by the degradation of fine crafts into tourist trinkets--began cultivating a fine-arts market for indigenous textiles, jewelry, ceramics, and basketry. In More Than Curiosities, Susan Labry Meyn explores how this grassroots revival led to the founding of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board in 1935. Meyn demonstrates how the Board and its activities--such as development and marketing of quality arts and crafts, targeted loan programs, and the creation of artisans' cooperatives--not only aided in the development of a source of sustained income for Native artists, but also were pivotal in overcoming the larger Euro-American indifference toward Native culture. Under the leadership of René d'Harnoncourt, the Board facilitated cross-cultural understanding and provided the mechanisms that allowed Native American artists to revive traditional practices and adapt them to an Anglo market. Meyn's novel study will become an invaluable contribution to scholars of the period, artists, and anyone interested in Native American studies.

"...we have tried here to present designs known to be Sioux, for use in Sioux schools. The purpose of the book is a practical one. Though we have striven for accuracy, our aim has not been an exhaustive scientific study. Rather, it has been to bring together a representative collection of designs and to explain them, so that practical workers, both students and teachers, may be able to recognize the bead and quillwork of the western Sioux and to make it for themselves. The art has changed in the past and those who understand its style and uses may use their imaginations to develop it still more, while keeping it Indian and Sioux."--Introduction, page 9.