Encyclopedia of Native American Healing

Encyclopedia of Native American Healing
Author: William S. Lyon
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 426
Release: 1998
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780393317350

Designed for ease of use with maps, a detailed subject index, an extensive bibliography, and cross references, this book is sure to fascinate anyone interested in Native American culture and heritage.

Continuum Encyclopedia of Native Art

Continuum Encyclopedia of Native Art
Author: Hope B. Werness
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 9780826414656

This lavishly produced voulume is the first reference work to focus on the symbols, meaning, and significance of art in native, or indigenous, cultures.

False Face

False Face
Author: Welwyn Wilton Katz
Publisher: Turtleback
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2001-10-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 9780613889360

Thirteen-year-old Laney and fourteen-year-old Tom form an uneasy alliance after finding rare Indian false face masks and realizing their terrifying power.

The Iroquois Ceremonial of Midwinter

The Iroquois Ceremonial of Midwinter
Author: Elisabeth Tooker
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2000-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780815606413

The Midwinter ceremonial—the longest and most complex of the rituals of the Longhouse religion—is examined here in three parts. Following a short cultural history of the Iroquois and a description of the present geographical location of the various longhouses and tribes, Elisabeth Tooker discusses the principles of Iroquois ritualism. The second part of the book is devoted to detailed accounts of the Midwinter ceremonial as it is performed today at six Iroquois longhouses. The third part presents the historical perspective of the ceremony through excerpts from writings of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries, captives, travelers, local residents, and anthropologists.

Conservatism among the Iroquois at the Six Nations Reserve

Conservatism among the Iroquois at the Six Nations Reserve
Author: Annemarie Anrod Shimony
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1994-07-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780815626305

Annemarie Anrod Shimony's classic work clearly shows the contemporary cultural and religious crises that face the Longhouse Iroquois at the Six Nations Reserve, Ontario. Shimony presents a lucid and eloquent account of the survival of the Native American tradition, which is struggling to maintain political and cultural autonomy in an ever-changing modern world. Based on original field work dating from 1953 to 1961, and supplemented by new material describing changes during the last thirty years, Shimony's work is once again the most comprehensive ethnography of the largest extant traditional Iroquoian community. Some of the material discussed includes the social organization, the system of hereditary chiefs, the beliefs and practices of the Longhouse religion, the events of the Iroquoian life cycle, and the extensive medicinal and witchcraft aspects of the culture. Additional areas of focus include the rituals of the agricultural calendar and Iroquois conceptions of death and burial rituals. As Elizabeth Tooker wrote in Indians of the Northeast, Shimony's monograph is, "next to Morgan's League, the most important general description of the Iroquois." With its new material added, Conservatism among the Iroquois is once again required reading for anyone interested in Native American culture.

People of the Masks

People of the Masks
Author: Kathleen O'Neal Gear
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 580
Release: 1998
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0312858574

The archaeologists/authors continue to entertain an avid international audience with their rousing historical epic of adventure, triumph, and heartbreak of the pre-Columbian peoples who struggled to make this great continent their home.

Shamanism [2 volumes]

Shamanism [2 volumes]
Author: Mariko Namba Walter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 1088
Release: 2004-12-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1576076466

A guide to worldwide shamanism and shamanistic practices, emphasizing historical and current cultural adaptations. This two-volume reference is the first international survey of shamanistic beliefs from prehistory to the present day. In nearly 200 detailed, readable entries, leading ethnographers, psychologists, archaeologists, historians, and scholars of religion and folk literature explain the general principles of shamanism as well as the details of widely varied practices. What is it like to be a shaman? Entries describe, region by region, the traits, such as sicknesses and dreams, that mark a person as a shaman, as well as the training undertaken by initiates. They detail the costumes, music, rituals, artifacts, and drugs that shamans use to achieve altered states of consciousness, communicate with spirits, travel in the spirit world, and retrieve souls. Unlike most Western books on shamanism, which focus narrowly on the individual's experience of healing and trance, Shamanism also examines the function of shamanism in society from social, political, and historical perspectives and identifies the ancient, continuous thread that connects shamanistic beliefs and rituals across cultures and millennia.