Native Paths

This catalogue includes 139 Native North American works of art that represent many peoples and a variety of materials and functions, presented here for their aesthetic value.-- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

Describes the history and culture of the Native peoples of the regions on either side of the border with Mexico

America's first "road signs" were trees bent as saplings by the Indians, marking trails. They were part of an extensive land and water navigation system that was in place long before the arrival of the first European settlers.

O‘ahu has a varied, extensive, and distinctive network of mountain hiking trails. Stuart M. Ball, Jr., author of The Hikers Guide to O‘ahu, explores the history behind many of the island’s trails, beginning with early Hawaiians who blazed routes for traveling, plant and wood gathering, and bird catching. Sugar plantations constructed paths to access ditches that tapped stream water for thirsty cane. The U.S. Army built trails for training and island defense, while those developed by the Territorial Forestry Division and the Civilian Conservation Corps were mainly for reforestation and wild pig control. Most recently, volunteers and hiking clubs have created additional routes solely for recreation. The result of all this varied activity is a large network of just over a 100 mountain trails, a precious resource on a small, populous island. The book compiles the history of 50 of those trails. Most of them still exist, and many are open to the public. The trails are arranged by the group or organization that built them, moving from Hawaiian trails before 1800 to volunteer trails of the 1990s. Each chapter contains an overview that describes the background and purpose of the trail building during the period covered. The trail histories are self-contained, recording the major events from construction through 2010. Native Paths to Volunteer Trails will allow fans of O‘ahu’s hiking trails—and Hawai‘i history buffs—to trek into the past and learn about some of their favorite routes and research future ones.

Alternative medicine, holistic health, and spiritual healing are promoted as recent innovations in modern medicine, yet all have been practiced by native peoples for thousands of years. Native Healing: Four Sacred Paths to Health is unique among health-related books. Native healers explore and promote the powerful effects of family and community, as well as spiritual and traditional treatments, on personal health. Today they are beginning to be integrated into the health care system, and this book shows how you too can benefit from their wisdom. In words and photographs, Dr. Peate draws on his personal experience to describe native healers' holistic approach to healthcare, from sings to sandpaintings to chants and cures.

With the advent of European settlement, the Indian foot trails that laced the Pennsylvania wilderness often became bridle paths, wagon roads, and eventually even motor highways. Most of the old paths were so well situated that there was little reason to forsake them until the age of the automobile. That the Indians, taking every advantage offered by the terrain, "kept the level" so well among Pennsylvania's mountains is an engineering curiosity. Just as remarkable is the complexity of the system and its adaptability to changing seasons and weather. Colonial travelers and Indians met frequently on the trail. Whether traveling to hunt, trade, war, negotiate, or visit, Native Americans demonstrated in these chance encounters that they were not the fiends some thought them to be. Indian Paths of Pennsylvania traces the Indian routes, reveals historical associations, and guides the motorist in following them today.

It is one thing to draw a line in the sand but another to enforce it. In this innovative new work, Jessica Lauren Taylor follows the Native peoples and the newcomers who built and crossed emerging boundaries surrounding Indigenous towns and developing English plantations in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay. In a riverine landscape defined by connection, Algonquians had cultivated ties to one another and into the continent for centuries. As Taylor finds, their networks continued to define the watery Chesapeake landscape, even as Virginia and Maryland’s planters erected fences and forts, policed unfree laborers, and dispatched land surveyors. By chronicling English and Algonquian attempts to move along paths and rivers and to enforce boundaries, Taylor casts a new light on pivotal moments in Anglo-Indigenous relations, from the growth of the fur trade to Bacon’s Rebellion. Most important, Taylor traces the ways in which the peoples resisting colonial encroachment and subjugation used Native networks and Indigenous knowledge of the Bay to cross newly created English boundaries. She thereby illuminates alternate visions of power, freedom, and connection in the colonial Chesapeake.

In Creek Paths and Federal Roads, Angela Pulley Hudson offers a new understanding of the development of the American South by examining travel within and between southeastern Indian nations and the southern states, from the founding of the United States until the forced removal of southeastern Indians in the 1830s. During the early national period, Hudson explains, settlers and slaves made their way along Indian trading paths and federal post roads, deep into the heart of the Creek Indians' world. Hudson focuses particularly on the creation and mapping of boundaries between Creek Indian lands and the states that grew up around them; the development of roads, canals, and other internal improvements within these territories; and the ways that Indians, settlers, and slaves understood, contested, and collaborated on these boundaries and transit networks. While she chronicles the experiences of these travelers--Native, newcomer, free, and enslaved--who encountered one another on the roads of Creek country, Hudson also places indigenous perspectives squarely at the center of southern history, shedding new light on the contingent emergence of the American South.

First Nations people know that a tribe must have control over its resources and sustain its identity as a distinct civilization for economic development to make sense. With an integrated approach to tribal societies that defines development as a means to the end of sustaining tribal character, Dean Howard Smith offers both conceptual and practical tools for making self-determination and self-sufficiency a reality for Native American Nations. Smith draws from his extensive experience as a consultant, teacher, and instructor to offer a wide variety of detailed case studies, and readers will learn from both successful and failed development initiatives. While focused on the United States, his work will be applicable for indigenous peoples in many parts of the world.