I found this writing to be an excellent source of information and reference material. Ms. Carter clearly has an extremely enviable position from which to view and record the unfolding Caddo Tribal Culture.

I was also enamored with the authentic Tribal photographs. This book contains very well taken photos of the Caddo Tribal grounds in Binger, Oklahoma and Culturally accurate Caddo Tribal members in authentic Native American dance regailia.

This easily read book is also providing me with many bits of information for my childs research projects.

Where We Came From is a must have book for your personal library.

It would be foolish to give a book that won three prestigious professional awards (the Bancroft, Turner, and Parkman prizes) all in one year anything less than five stars, but the stars I have given this book can only hint at its remarkable contents. Captives and Cousins is based on prodigious research in original sources, and the research is wedded to a compelling and innovative analysis.
Brooks is not the first historian to show that the practice of taking captives and subjecting them to involuntary servitude was widespread in the American Southwest, but I don't think that anyone else has demonstrated so convincingly how deep and wide the cycle of capture and slavery was. Virtually all of the peoples who lived in and around New Mexico in the three centuries following the Spanish entrada (Native Americans and Europeans alike) took captives and engaged to one degree or another in the slave trade. Indians preyed on Spanish and Mexicans, and on themselves, and the Spanish and Mexicans returned the favor. To a degree, even Americans played a role in the trade after they became the controlling force in the region. They offered rewards for the return of captives and thus provided incentives for further captures. Brooks shows that the system of capture and slavery contributed in significant ways to the political, economic, and cultural development of the Southwest, providing a ready source of labor (and wives), knitting disparate peoples into webs of kinship (some biological, some adoptive, some deriving from Catholic godparenthood), helping to equalize wealth, and provoking endless cycles of revenge and retaliation. The system (a kind of "war of all against all") had its own logic, though the logic was crude and in many respects cruel.
Brooks does not saddle Europeans with all of the blame for the system. He makes it clear that capture and enslavement were practiced before the Spanish first arrived in the Southwest. But they participated in it and added refinements derived from their own Iberian traditions. In one sense, the book helps to challenge the myth of Indians as indigenous peoples "operating within subsistence-and-exchange economies that produced little intergroup conflict." Conflict there was, and in spades.
Brooks is an academic, and the book is addressed primarily to his fellow academics. General readers will find the text too dense for easy reading. I found some parts of the book slow going, but I persisted and, in the end, was glad I did. Captives and Cousins not only informed me; it made me think.

I recently had a conversation with a vetern professor of archaeology. He's a brilliant wealth of information, and he doesn't use the word "hip" too often. So when he described this book as "The 'hip' new thing in archaeology," I was a bit taken back. He turned over a copy, and I fell in love with it that night. Using his word, I'm going to continue to decribe this book as "hip," - here's why. It takes the format of a compilation of articles written by some of the leading professionals in the field. By formatting it in this way, the editors have provided a concise and detailed overview of new technologies that have helped archaeologists understand prehistoric behavior in the southwest. It is an absolutely necessary piece of literature, as it could be considered the jumping-off point for those interested in using high-technology to study ceramics. I would recomend the book to anyone who is interested in the science of archaeology and indian pottery. But if you decide to read it, don't expect an "Indiana Jones" type theme. It is very technical, and it is highly doubtful that the authors and editors had a popular audience in mind when they wrote it. But if you think you can take a heavy dose of science, then open wide and read it.

On September 17, 1868, Eugene Carr's Fifth United States cavalry guided by "Buffalo Bill" Cody, surprised and attacked Tall Bull's village of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers at Summit Springs, Colorado Territory. In one of the hastily abandonded lodges, a ledger book was found which had been initially captured by the Cheyenne during their retalitory raids following the Sand Creek massacre four years earlier. In the book were drawings of events of great valor done by Cheyenne warrior/artists.

The authors have reproduced the pages of the original ledgerbook in their original size and have added very detailed explainations of the drawings.

This book is very well researched and produced. David F. Halaas is the Colorado State Historian and Andrew Masich is a past president of that organization.

This colorful book uses a story of a Navajo weaver and her granddaughter to convey Navajo culture and history. The Chief is a northern Plains Indian, who trades with the Navajo, one often overlooked aspect of Native American history. Winner, Border Regional Library Association's 1998 Southwest Book Award.

Excerpts from plays and other dramatic productions, songs, and poems reflect a Navajo's personal view of his culture and environment. Keywords
1. Navajo Indians -- Juvenile literature
2. Indians of North America

It's too bad this book is out of print, and so expensive, because it's a most enlightening book for those interested in 20th Century China and the immense changes it has undergone. Presumably libraries are the main customers for this book. Yet while it's very intelligent, it's not a dry academic book, so has broad appeal beyond scholarly libraries. The fact that this book focuses on an often neglected region of China (Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, Tibet, Xinjiang, Yunnan, etc.) makes it all the more important. It would be interesting to see the ratio of books published on the SE coast vs. the far West.

A. Doak Barnett, a legendary China scholar, toured these areas in
1948 and again in 1988. He paints a rich picture by interviewing a wide range of people: government officials high and low, blue-collar workers, peasants, a former labor camp prisoner, etc. As well as, of course, adding his own observations of the changes.

The consensus among all is that the positive economic transformation in these 4 decades is enormous, yet poverty remains widespread (it could hardly be any other way). Many told Barnett that the biggest positive changes in their lives, materially, came in the 1980s. This is doubtlessly true, because only in the reform period did the government give up its obsession with heavy industry and allow the production of consumer goods and petty retail market activity to flourish. But it's also likely, and one can infer this from Barnett's observations and interviews, that the capabilities for reform period growth were enhanced by productive capacity investments in the pre-reform era, which were underutilized.

The biggest current problem in urban economic reform remains the "third front" industries. These are defense industries that were placed in the far west for strategic purposes during the cold war, but now are unneeded duplicates that lose money, yet at the same time provide employment for many. The main rural problem is how to diversify (diets are much more grain-heavy/homogeneous than in the central and eastern regions) and raise yields in a difficult geographic and economic environment. Yields went through a surge in the 1978-83 period, yet gains since have been slow.

Those with an interest in China's minorities will especially want to read this book. For instance the lay reader might not know that as many Tibetans live outside of Tibet than live in it. Barnett discusses the history of and meets the Tibetans of Sichuan, Gansu, and Qinghai; as well as the many other minorities in the West.

It would be great to update this book with a third visit.

The totally accessible writing style makes the experience one of sitting down with an expert who is also a friend! The photographs are artfully composed. This handbook is loaded with information helpful for beginners and/or anyone who cares about this great, indigenous art form.

As you would expect, "Colors of the Navajo" is full of rich, color illustrations. Each page focuses on one color, much like an ABC book for colors. The illustrations on each page are predominantly in the color being described. The text beautifully teaches about one aspect of the Navajo World through each color. For example, "Turquoise" is used to share information about the history of silversmithing and the creation of jewelry with turquoise stones. "Red" is used to share the beliefs about sacred red ants and the use of sandpaintings in healing ceremonies. Although it appears to be presented in a simple form, the rich color illustrations will hold a child's attention long enough to read or listen to the rich historical and cultural information being given.

A highly recommended contribution to Native American Studies, Comanche Society: Before the Reservation by Gerald Betty (History Department, Texas A&M, Corpus Christi) is a meticulous and scholarly study of Comanche society from the beginning of New World Colonization by European powers through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Focusing especially on how the bonds of kinship affected the interplay within Comanche clans, and how the Comanches came to adopt horses, pastoralism, and other Iberian traits into their own culture, Comanche Society is a fascinating and analytical history of the evolution of this Native American nation.