Native American Ways - Grinnell, George Bird

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Résumé :
In this 4-in-1 omnibus edition, explore four Native American cultures, examining their lives, lore, and legends. Learn how they worshiped, lived in harmony with nature, and constructed unique social orders. Before Europeans invaded their homeland, these richly varied cultures thrived with a level of harmony with the land and dignity of spirit unmatched by modern Western civilization.Contained herein are The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees; Blackfoot Lodge Tales; Truth of a Hopi; and Navaho Myths, Prayers, and Songs. Now you can explore these four cultures and their mystic traditions.

Biographie:
James Mooney was an American ethnographer whose extensive fieldwork made him an important early scholar of Indigenous histories, languages, religions, and ceremonial traditions. Born in Richmond, Indiana, in 1861, he joined the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology in 1885 and spent several seasons among Eastern Cherokee communities in North Carolina. He learned the Cherokee language and documented myths, medicinal practices, sacred formulas, oral traditions, and the work of Cherokee healers and ceremonial specialists.Mooney later conducted research among the Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other Native nations. His major works include Myths of the Cherokee, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, and The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Although his interpretations reflect aspects of nineteenth-century anthropology, the linguistic and historical materials he recorded remain important resources for scholars and Indigenous communities....

Sommaire:
Four significant works bring together sacred formulas, traditional narratives, clan histories, prayers, songs, and accounts of ceremonial life from the Cherokee, Blackfoot, Hopi, and Navajo peoples. Rather than presenting a single universal Native American spirituality, this omnibus reveals four distinct cultures, each possessing its own language, history, social structures, religious traditions, and relationship with the natural world. James Mooney's The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees records prayers, healing rites, songs, charms, and ceremonial knowledge collected among Cherokee communities in North Carolina. George Bird Grinnell's Blackfoot Lodge Tales combines traditional stories of Old Man and other figures with accounts of Blackfoot history, social organization, hunting, warfare, and religious life. Edmund Nequatewa's Truth of a Hopi presents Hopi origin traditions, clan histories, migrations, sacred beliefs, and experiences of cultural survival from the perspective of a Hopi author. Washington Matthews's Navaho Myths, Prayers, and Songs preserves Navajo narratives and ceremonial texts accompanied by translations and explanatory material. Together, these works offer an expansive introduction to the spiritual and narrative traditions of four Indigenous peoples of North America. The accounts were written or recorded between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and should be read with attention to their historical settings: Nequatewa writes from within Hopi culture, while Mooney, Grinnell, and Matthews document traditions as outside ethnographers whose interpretations sometimes reflect the assumptions of their era. Native American Ways preserves important historical material while inviting readers to recognize these nations not as remnants of the past, but as living peoples whose cultures and traditions continue today....