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From New England and Virginia to New Spain and the current Southwest, North America's founding householders-English and Spanish alike-took the limited European practice of coerced labor and, over the course of two hundred years, transformed it into a depersonalized and brutal chattel slavery unlike anything that had existed in Europe. What system of language and logic, what visions of religious and civil society, allowed men who saw themselves both as Christians and cultured humanists to dehumanize and enslave people whose cultures and accomplishments were evident to nearly all? In this book we observe the progressive development of a mindset that allowed the settlers to see both Native Americans and Africans as "others" who did not merit human status. ... Read more

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This is the first published dictionary of the Nuuchahnulth language of Vancouver Island, based primarily upon the Tsishaath variety and supplemented by material from a number of other dialects of the language. Nuuchahnulth is the preferred term for a group of First Nations peoples occupying the West Coast of Vancouver Island from Port Renfrew to Cape Cook. The traditional European name applied most commonly to both the people and the language is Nootka, although there have been notable exceptions, such as the use of the term Aht (adapted from the suffix - 'ath 'people of...') used by Knipe 1868 in his early description of the grammar of the language. Note should be taken of the distinction between the linguistic use of Nuuchahnulth, referring to the group of dialects north of Bamfield on the west coast and the socio-political use of the term, which extends to the Ditidaht and Pacheedaht bands south from Bamfield to Port Renfrew, who speak a distinct language. This dictionary is a first attempt at providing a detailed account of the lexicon of the Nuuchahnulth language, complete with examples and grammatical information. Prior to this there have been a number of short wordlists (e.g., Jewitt 1824, Tolmie & Dawson 1884, Boas 1890, 1916) and several larger glossaries (e.g. Knipe 1868, Sapir & Swadesh 1939), but there has been no full dictionary with detailed grammatical information and examples published. Dictionaries are always works-in-progress and this one is no different: it will hopefully provide a foundation upon which to build ever more complete entries of each word of the language. The entries for this dictionary are based on data from a number of sources. The principal source for examples are the fieldnotes gathered by Edward Sapir between 1910 and 1922, principally in the Tsishaath variety, but including material from Clayoquot, Hupachasath, and Ucluelet varieties. Additional fieldnotes from Morris Swadesh in the late 1940s and my own fieldnotes since the 1980s were also consulted. Supplementing this material are forms from a number of additional sources, cited in the References at the end of the dictionary, but notably the chapter by St. Claire in Arima 1991 on Nuuchahnulth placenames, which provides detailed information on local placenames.Other important sources include "Ellis & Swan 1981", and "Turner & Efrat 1982", and "FNP 1995" on ethnobotany and ethnozoological terms, "Rose 1981" on the Kyuquot dialect, and "Drucker 1951" on ethnographical information. Sources are not cited for each entry and example, as this would have increased the length, and hence the cost, of the dictionary inordinately, but every effort has been made to provide full references to the sources. The dictionary is separated into two main parts: (1) a Nuuchahnulth-English dictionary, consisting of over 7,000 main entries with examples and detailed grammatical information, and (2) an English-Nuuchahnulth glossary, containing some 8,500 entries consisting of English headwords with their Nuuchahnulth equivalents and a marker of part of speech. Following the main body of the dictionary are several appendices, including an outline of the inflectional paradigms, an index of placenames derived from St. Claire 1991, and a list of references. In setting up the structure of entries, a number of issues were taken into consideration. First, headwords include roots, affixes and extended words, which include compounds, with specialised meanings.Roots, typically mono- or bisyllabic, have basic meanings and more variation in part of speech, so there may be entries under several part of speech categories and a number of different senses. Roots may have bound forms, which are used in combination with derivational suffixes, noted in the dictionary by means of the label Variant followed by the bound form. Affixes, mainly suffixes with a handful of infixes, are more regular in terms of part of speech category, but may have several different senses and uses. A further important aspect of suffixes is the effect they may have upon the bases to which they attach. "Sapir & Swadesh 1939" and "Stonham 1999", among others, discuss this in more detail, so I will simply state here that a number of abbreviations are employed to indicate the effects which suffixes impose. These include [R] marking reduplication of the base, [L] marking vowel length on the base, and others, as noted under Abbreviations at the end of this section. There is also a significant amount of homonymy among affixes, as there is with roots, and this is addressed by the use of subscript numbers to distinguish homonyms in the dictionary.With extended words, meanings and part of speech membership often seems more transparent, and in these cases, reference is often made to the root or affixes involved under the label of Morph, for morphological structure, in order to clarify the structure of the complex word. A word of caution: A note should be made here concerning the assignment of part of speech categories. There has been a considerable amount of controversy among linguists surrounding parts of speech in Southern Wakashan languages (see, for example, Jacobsen 1979). In this dictionary, the use of part of speech categories should be taken as making no claim concerning the part of speech of the Nuuchahnulth headword. Both Nuuchahnulth and English have many ambiguous cases of word class and it seems best to determine this in relation to the role a form has in a specific context, but this is beyond the scope of a dictionary. The part of speech marker is intended to indicate examples of forms appearing in various part of speech contexts in the English translations of the examples provided. I have tried to provide examples which demonstrate different usages, where possible.This approach demonstrates in many cases the variation that may be found in Nuuchahnulth grammar, especially with respect to bare roots. With respect to the different senses of a word, indicated by numbers, 1), 2), etc., these are again generalisations and may not be exact equivalents of the Nuuchahnulth senses. As with any two languages, there is often no direct equivalency in meaning between Nuuchahnulth and English words. The ordering in the dictionary: The entries in the Nuuchahnulth-English portion of the dictionary follow the order below: I, II...This is basically the order of the Roman alphabet, but with consideration of the far greater number of distinct phonemes in Nuuchahnulth. I have grouped together long, short, and variable-length vowels since often two related words will vary only in the length of the first vowel and this strategy will make it easier to note that relationship. Roots, affixes and complex forms, including compounds, are intermixed according to the above order, and where there is a significantly distinct variant this is entered separately with a cross-reference to the main entry to assist the user in finding the basic form and fuller details.I have also decided not to adopt the English convention of capitalising proper names in Nuuchahnulth, mainly for typographical reasons, and so proper nouns are ordered together with common forms. The dialectal variation: There are a number of different dialects of Nuuchahnulth, roughly divisible into three main regions: Northern, Central, and Southern, which exhibit significant differences. Variation occurs in all areas of the grammar and lexicon, but much work remains to be done to establish the extent of this variation. In this dictionary, forms have been noted as coming from various dialectal sources, although this should not be taken to imply that the forms do not occur in other varieties. Given the principal source for the examples, the majority of forms come from the Tsishaath dialect.The structure of entries : Entries include information concerning the part of speech, English glosses of the Nuuchahnulth headword, instances of the usage of the headword with example sentences where possible and relevant: possible, since appropriate examples are not always available and relevant, since this will depend on the part of speech label for the entry, separate subentries for different senses and for different part of speech usage, and further details concerning cultural information, usage, dialect variation, and specific grammatical information concerning variant forms, irregular plural forms, and the appropriate classifiers associated with nouns. A number of abbreviations have been employed in the entries, some of which demand further clarification. In citing some sources, I have abbreviated the references, including the following (full details are provided in the References):"FNP First Nations' Perspectives Relating to Forest Practices, Appendices V, VIKn Knipe 1868", "S&S Sapir & Swadesh 1939", "R&S Roberts & Swadesh 1955 Sw Swadesh 1949".In addition to these abbreviations there are a number of labels employed to convey further information, including: Cls: This provides the appropriate classifier for each noun, if known. Morph: Morphological analysis of a complex word form. Note: Ethnographic notes relating to the headword. Plur: Irregular plural forms of the headword. See main entry: The main entry for a variant found elsewhere in the dictionary. See: Cross-reference to related words or meanings. Usage: Usage notes about dialect and register of the headword. Variant: Bound forms of the headwordWith respect to the determination of headwords, I have tried to include as many lexical items as are obviously distinct lexical forms, preferring to err on the side of excess, occasionally including redundant or predictable information perhaps. Similarly, in the glossary, I have tried to include as many near-synonyms as possible to ensure adequate retrievability of information. The English-Nuuchahnulth glossary entries are in a more concise format than the Nuuchahnulth-English dictionary, in order to constrain the size of the dictionary, while providing reference to the more detailed information in the first part.In addition to these two parts there is also a set of appendices, which are intended to provide further information related to entries but grouped together in a separate section. These in... ... Read more

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Representations of Indian economic life have played an integral role in discourses about poverty, social policy, and cultural difference but have received surprisingly little attention. Daniel Usner dismantles ideological characterizations of Indian livelihood to reveal the intricacy of economic adaptations in American Indian history.

Officials, reformers, anthropologists, and artists produced images that exacerbated Indians’ economic uncertainty and vulnerability. From Jeffersonian agrarianism to Jazz Age primitivism, European American ideologies not only obscured Indian struggles for survival but also operated as obstacles to their success. Diversification and itinerancy became economic strategies for many Indians, but were generally maligned in the early United States. Indians repeatedly found themselves working in spaces that reinforced misrepresentation and exploitation. Taking advantage of narrow economic opportunities often meant risking cultural integrity and personal dignity: while sales of baskets made by Louisiana Indian women contributed to their identity and community, it encouraged white perceptions of passivity and dependence. When non-Indian consumption of Indian culture emerged in the early twentieth century, even this friendlier market posed challenges to Indian labor and enterprise. The consequences of this dilemma persist today.

Usner reveals that Indian engagement with commerce has consistently defied the narrow choices that observers insisted upon seeing.

Product Description
Native American languages are spoken from Siberia to Greenland, and from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego; they include the southernmost language of the world (Yaghan) and some of the northernmost (Eskimoan). Campbell's project is to take stock of what is currently known about the history of Native American languages and in the process examine the state of American Indian historical linguistics, and the success and failure of its various methodologies.

There is remarkably little consensus in the field, largely due to the 1987 publication of Language in the Americas by Joseph Greenberg. He claimed to trace a historical relation between all American Indian languages of North and South America, implying that most of the Western Hemisphere was settled by a single wave of immigration from Asia. This has caused intense controversy and Campbell, as a leading scholar in the field, intends this volume to be, in part, a response to Greenberg. Finally, Campbell demonstrates that the historical study of Native American languages has always relied on up-to-date methodology and theoretical assumptions and did not, as is often believed, lag behind the European historical linguistic tradition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Scholarly. Difficult. Conservative.
About every branch of science has two types of people: the "splitters" and the "lumpers."The splitters are those who separate everything (plants, animals, etc.) into many different groups and doubt they are connected or related. The lumpers find reasons to believe that everything is related.So it is with languages.A linguist named Greenberg grouped all American Indians languages on both continents into three groups: Amerind, Na-Dine (i.e. Apaches), and Eskimo-Aleut.That's a lumper at work.

By contrast, Campbell, the author of this book is a splitter, finding reasons why North American Indian languages are not related.He asserts there are dozens -- maybe over a hundred -- American Indian language families which are either unrelated or a relationship cannot be proven. Who's right?I don't know, but it makes for heated debate -- and the correct answer is important the who, where, when, and how of the first people to inhabit the Americas.

The virtue of Campbell's book is that he briefly discusses virtually every American Indian language and language family, including those that are proposed but unproven. This sounds pretty dull and technical and beyond the comprehension of the average reader.So it is -- if I qualify as an average reader --but through the fog of technical linguistic discussion comes some wonderfully interesting speculations.For example, how is that two small tribes in northern California speak languages that are related to the Algonquin spoken by dozens of tribes thousands of miles away in Canada, the Great Lakes, and the eastern United States. Did the Algonguins originate in California and migrate eastward?Or the reverse?And, how is that the Uto-Aztecan language family can encompass Indians from El Salvador to Nevada and include both the urbanized Aztecs and the simple hunting gathering groups of the desert?

Campbell imparts an enormous amount of information about American Indian languages and their relationships with each other.He discusses the history of American linguistics and the techniques linguists have used in attempting to establish relationships among languages, and he examines the many theories of linguistic relationships, refuting Greenberg and the other lumpers in detail.One of the better features of this 500 page book are maps of tribal locations and linguistic families.Want to know the name and something about the language of the tribe that inhabited the region of Brazilia?Look up the Xakriaba. "American Indian Languages" is not easy reading but as a thorough reference book I doubt that it is matched in its field.

Smallchief (Kansa tribe, Dheghia language group, Siouan language family)

The authoritative reference book on this topic
This is now the standard reference on this topic, the best place to go for an understanding of what mainstream historical linguists know about the genetic relationships of the native languages of the Americas as well as for an evaluation of proposals of remoter relationships. It is a comprehensive survey by one of the very few scholars with such a breadth of knowledge. In addition to the main content, the survey of the languages and language families of the Americas, it contains discussions of the methodology of historical linguistics and a review of proposals ranging from the extreme fringe to proposals considered plausible but for one reason or another not clearly established. Campbell rates the subjective likelihood of the proposals discussed on a scale from -100 to 100, where 0 means that he is agnostic as to whether the proposal is valid, -100 means that he is certain that it is invalid, and 100 means that he is certain that it is valid. Contrary to another reviewer's comments, there is nothing idiosyncratic in his understanding of probabilities - he is simply presenting his evaluation in a clear and easily understood fashion that happens not to be the usual probability scale.

Any book such as this will seem dry to those looking for interesting facts about American Indian languages. It is a reference book, aimed primarily at scholars and at students and others who want to look up what is known about the genetic affiliation of particular languages. Contrary to another reviewer's comments, one should not expected it to be full of data. A review of the details of the evidence with the scope of this book would require thousands of pages. Those looking for a survey of the languages themselves are more likely to be satisfied with Marianne Mithun's Languages of Native North America, or, if they are more interested in social and cultural aspects of languages, with Shirley Silver and Wick Miller's book American Indian Languages: Cultural and Social Contexts.

The book devotes considerable attention to the work of Joseph Greenberg because Greenberg's book Language in the Americas has received a great deal of attention from non-linguists, many of whom do not understand that Greenberg's methodology is a throwback to pre-scientific historical linguistics. It happens that at present the popular, uninformed view is one that lumps together languages without justification, so any critique appears to be negative.

In sum, this book is not only the most authoritative reference on the classification of the languages of the Americas, but it contains useful discussions of how such classifications are created and evaluated and evaluations of proposed relationships that will be useful both to those who need to decide what to believe and to students and others choosing research projects.

Yes, exactly because of that
The reasosn listed by the other post are exactly de reasons why you should buy this book.
It offers a different vision from that of Greenberg's (fortunately), refutes many things, give a different classification.
Actually, the work of greenberg is falling down, because of the lack of proves.

Where's the Data?
This book never delivers on its title.Thoroughly miserable, its focus is purely negative: an ad hoc piecemeal attack on the author's apparent bugbear, Joseph Greenberg.Buy it only if you wish to be told what to believe, without being given any evidence upon which to judge yourself.

Rather than offering his own arguments in support of any genetic relationships, Campbell spends his time attacking portions of the evidence that other classifiers offer.He never addresses the overall context of any circumstance.He remains silent in the face of any evidence he can't refute.The supposed cognates he disputes are almost never given for the reader to judge.Native forms in general are quite rare, and those spread throughout the book might fill two pages of the total work, three at most.

Whether one proposes three, two-dozen, or the over 50 "un-relatable" North American stocks that Campbell clings to, any book that purports to study the "Historical Linguistics of Native America" should at least be chock-full of native words or texts, with grammatical sketches and detailed phonetic transcriptions, if not cladograms or posited family trees.Campbell gives us almost nothing.For the majority of "isolates" or families we get a mere list of phonemes without the context of even one single native word. (What would a mere list of the phonemes of English tell you about its history or relationships?Except for Hungarian rounded front vowels and English interdental fricatives, the palatal versus the velar nasal, and /w/, the phonemes of English and Hungarian overlap almost completely.German and Hungarian look like siblings, phonetically.Comparing phonemes alone, one might think Japanese and Spanish were close relatives, while French might appear to come from West Africa.) In a few families case endings or pronouns are given, but never once any full paradigms.

The maps given are available elsewhere.There is not one full sketch, brief text, or even partial lexicostatistical wordlist!

This book's fatal flaw is its exclusively negative focus.Pages upon pages list references in English to secondary and tertiary sources, but the subject languages themselves are studiously ignored.Never making any positive argument of his own, he never feels obliged to provide the one thing a thinking reader wants, the evidence.

Campbell further embarrasses himself with his uniquely idiosyncratic system of probability analysis.He cites various theories of distant relationships proposed by other scholars.He then (admittedly subjectively) grades the likeliness of these theories, not on a scale of 0% to 100% as is universally accepted, but rather on a scale of positive to negative (!) 100%, with a 0% probability on his scale indicating an actual probability of 50%.

For example, he finds the Tlingit-Eyak-Athabaskan hypothesis to have a +75% probability, by which he means that it is actually 87.5% likely.But to the Na Dene hypothesis (the above family linked to Haida) he gives a 0% probability, by which means an actual 50% likelihood.Any link between Zuni and Penutian (however constituted) he gives a -80% probability.Yes, that's a "negative eighty percent," by which he means an actual possibility of 10%.

Confused? Then don't buy this book.Marianne Mithun's "The Languages of North America" is an excellent general source for north of the Rio Grande, with a conservative classification, a well-specimened typological overview of the documented variation, and at least a phonology, sketch, and brief text of each language family.Maps of North America are as good as Campbell's.

Campbell may be the most "respected" authority in his field, as were Ptolemy, St. Augustine, and the Malleus Maleficarum in their days.But this evidence-free work certainly gives no evidence as to why.I would suggest that those students of Campbell's giving him such glowing reviews refute me by providing just one set of comparative texts or paradigms from this vacuous pseudo-academic pontification. ... Read more

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Drawing on fieldwork and archival research, Drechsel presents a grammatical, sociolinguistic, and ethnohistorical study of Mobilian Jargon, a Muskogean-based American Indian pidgin of the Mississippi valley. Though linguistic and extralinguistic evidence points to Mobilian Jargon's pre-Columbian origin, it was primarily spoken between 1700 and the mid-twentieth century, when it functioned as a lingua franca among linguistically diverse southeastern Native American groups, and in contact between these groups and non-Indians. Drechsel's study questions the universality of some concepts developed in pidgin and creole linguistics, and carries significant implications for the ethnology of Native American peoples, and for the history of North America. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

VERY GOOD WORDS!
I enjoyed John Ciardi very very much when he was on NPR until his death in the mid-late 80's. The book is a wonderful compilation of the type of word/phrase origin discussions that he shared with us in that way.

While I understand and mostly appreciate the included entries, there are good number that have become "dated" given that Mr. Ciardi came of age in the 30's and 40's and that is his appropriate frame of reference. To the reader 40 y.o. and below, I believe there may be a significant number entries which have no context for any current usage.

Regardless, I can recommend the book for the many entries for still-used words and phrases.

If you like words - WOW!
Ciardi was a mind-bogglingly brilliant man.This comes across in this book.When I want to learn about any subject, I start with the words and their etymologies.I use this book as one of my references.Example:Albania - why is it called that?I find that 'alb' means 'white', so it tells me that the country has snow covered mountains.Then, no wonder the white of the egg is called 'albumen', the alps are called such, and the word 'album' means 'white tablet', or an albino is an albino. I guess an albatross must be white.Looking into word histories tells you about all sorts of things.Ciardi must have been working indefatigably on this subject, like Pliny and some of those other guys who did so much work for all of us. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Other Side, published by The Other Side on March 1, 1998. The length of the article is 1326 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the supplier: Native Americans struggle against offensive language used by the dominant culture. The word "squaw," in Native American languages, refers to a woman's sexual parts and is an offensive term to Native American women. The Arizona legislature considered renaming a landmark called "Squaw's Peak" but failed to rename it. Native Americans struggle to find the right words to defend themselves against cultural insensitivity.

Citation Details
Title: What do you say? (responding to language offensive to Native Americans)
Author: June Lorenzo
Publication: The Other Side (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 1, 1998
Publisher: The Other Side
Volume: v34Issue: n2Page: p48(2)

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