A Forest of Time : American Indian Ways of History

A FOREST OF TIME introduces undergraduate and graduate students, Western and Indian history scholars and buffs, and general readers to the notion that American Indian societies transmitted and interpreted their own histories in their own ways for their own reasons. Through discussions of legends and oral histories, creation stories and folktales, it illustrates how various Indian peoples related and commented on their changing times. Drawing on his own research as well as recent scholarship from ethnohistory, anthropology, folklore and Indian studies, Dr. Nabokov offers dramatic examples of how the American Indian historical imagination has put rituals and material culture, landscape, prophecies, and the English language to the urgent service of keeping the past alive and relevant. This book also supplies useful references as it demands that we engage with alternative chronicles of America's multicultural past.