Native American Studies

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Animal Speak: The Spiritual & Magical Powers of Creatures Great & Small

Want to learn how to speak the language of critters, large and small? Easy-to-read and understand, Ted Andrews's bestselling Animal Speak shows readers how to identify his or her animal totem and learn how to invoke its energy and use it for personal growth and inner discovery. Nature lovers will love this insightful compendium, chock-full of touching stories about animals, natural history, and animal folklore. Readers will also learn magical animal rites and how to read omens. Animal Speak includes a dictionary of bird, animal, reptile, and insect totems, which describe each creature's meaning. For example, if a person's totem is dragonfly, he or she was most likely excessively emotional and passionate in early years, learning with age to balance it with mental clarity and control. If a dragonfly suddenly shows up in your life, it means you may need to gain a new perspective or make a change. --P. Randall Cohan

Open your heart and mind to the wisdom of the animal world.

Animal Speak provides techniques for recognizing and interpreting the signs and omens of nature. Meet and work with animals as totems and spirits by learning the language of their behaviors within the physical world.

Animal Speak shows you how to: identify, meet, and attune to your spirit animals; discover the power and spiritual significance of more than 100 different animals, birds, insects, and reptiles; call upon the protective powers of your animal totem; and create and use five magical animal rites, including shapeshifting and sacred dance.

This bestselling guide has become a classic reference for anyone wishing to forge a spiritual connection with the majesty and mystery of the animal world.

Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache

This remarkable book introduces us to four unforgettable Apache people, each of whom offers a different take on the significance of places in their culture. Apache conceptions of wisdom, manners and morals, and of their own history are inextricably intertwined with place, and by allowing us to overhear his conversations with Apaches on these subjects Basso expands our awareness of what place can mean to people.

Most of us use the term sense of place often and rather carelessly when we think of nature or home or literature. Our senses of place, however, come not only from our individual experiences but also from our cultures. Wisdom Sits in Places, the first sustained study of places and place-names by an anthropologist, explores place, places, and what they mean to a particular group of people, the Western Apache in Arizona. For more than thirty years, Keith Basso has been doing fieldwork among the Western Apache, and now he shares with us what he has learned of Apache place-names—where they come from and what they mean to Apaches.

"This is indeed a brilliant exposition of landscape and language in the world of the Western Apache. But it is more than that. Keith Basso gives us to understand something about the sacred and indivisible nature of words and place. And this is a universal equation, a balance in the universe. Place may be the first of all concepts; it may be the oldest of all words."—N. Scott Momaday

"In Wisdom Sits in Places Keith Basso lifts a veil on the most elemental poetry of human experience, which is the naming of the world. In so doing he invests his scholarship with that rarest of scholarly qualities: a sense of spiritual exploration. Through his clear eyes we glimpse the spirit of a remarkable people and their land, and when we look away, we see our own world afresh."—William deBuys

"A very exciting book—authoritative, fully informed, extremely thoughtful, and also engagingly written and a joy to read. Guiding us vividly among the landscapes and related story-tellings of the Western Apache, Basso explores in a highly readable way the role of language in the complex but compelling theme of a people's attachment to place. An important book by an eminent scholar."—Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.

Lakota Woman

A unique autobiography unparalleled in American Indian literature, and a deeply moving account of a woman's triumphant struggle to survive in a hostile world.

Ceremony (Contemporary American Fiction Series)

Thirty years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature, a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. He is deeply scarred by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese and further wounded by the rejection he encounters from his people. Only by immersing himself in the Indian past can he begin to regain the peace that was taken from him. Masterfully written, filled with the somber majesty of Pueblo myth, Ceremony is a work of enduring power.

Flight: A Novel

The Way to Rainy Mountain

First published in paperback by UNM Press in 1976, The Way to Rainy Mountain has sold over 200,000 copies.

"The paperback edition of The Way to Rainy Mountain was first published twenty-five years ago. One should not be surprised, I suppose, that it has remained vital, and immediate, for that is the nature of story. And this is particularly true of the oral tradition, which exists in a dimension of timelessness. I was first told these stories by my father when I was a child. I do not know how long they had existed before I heard them. They seem to proceed from a place of origin as old as the earth.

"The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself."--from the new Preface

Two Old Women: An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival

Based on an Athabascan Indian legend passed along for many generations from mothers to daughters of the upper Yukon River Valley in Alaska, this is the suspenseful, shocking, ultimately inspirational tale of two old women abandoned by their tribe during a brutal winter famine.

Though these women have been known to complain more than contribute, they now must either survive on their own or die trying. In simple but vivid detail, Velma Wallis depicts a landscape and way of life that are at once merciless and starkly beautiful. In her old women, she has created two heroines of steely determination whose story of betrayal, friendship, community and forgiveness "speaks straight to the heart with clarity, sweetness and wisdom" (Ursula K. Le Guin).

The Maya, Seventh Edition (Ancient Peoples and Places)

"A clear and intelligent description of the development and organization of Maya civilization." —Natural History

The Maya has long been established as the best, most readable introduction to the New World's greatest ancient civilization. In these pages Professor Coe distills a lifetime's scholarship for the general reader and student.

Since the publication of the sixth edition of The Maya, new sites have been uncovered and further excavations in old sites have proceeded at an unprecedented pace. Among the many new discoveries is the chance find of extraordinary murals dating to ca. AD 100 at San Bartolo in the Petén. New epigraphic, archaeological, and osteological research has thrown light on the identity of the "founding fathers" of such great sites as Tikal and Copan, and their close affiliation with Teotihuacan in central Mexico. The previously little known center of Ek' Balam in northeastern Yucatan has turned out to be a regional kingdom of major importance, with extraordinary stucco reliefs and a plethora of painted inscriptions.

It has now become apparent that the birth of Maya civilization lies not in the Classic but during the Preclassic period, above all in the Mirador Basin of northern Guatemala, where the builders of gigantic ancient cities (interconnected by causeways) erected the world's largest pyramid as early as 200 BC. All of these finds suggest that we must rethink what we mean by "Classic."

The seventh edition also presents new evidence for the use of wetlands by the Classic Maya, and fresh perspectives on the catastrophic demise of Classic civilization by the close of the ninth century. 175 illustrations, 17 in color.

Reservation Blues