A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History

A Forest of Time, first published in 2002, is the first introduction for undergraduates, graduates and general readers to the notion that American Indian societies had vital interests in interpreting and transmitting their own histories in their own ways, for themselves. Drawing upon his own varied research as well as sampling the latest in scholarship from ethnohistory, anthropology, folklore and Indian studies, Dr Nabokov offers dramatic examples of how native peoples also put rituals and material culture, landscape, prophecies, and even the English language to the urgent service of keeping the past alive and relevant. Throughout these lively chapters, we also witness the American Indian historical imagination deployed as a coping skill and survival strategy. This book surveys the latest integrating ideas while offering a useful bibliography that opens up, and demands that we engage with, alternative chronicles for America's multi-cultural past.