A Forest of Time

This book, first published in 2002, explores how American Indians interpreted and transmitted their own histories in their own ways.

This book, first published in 2002, is an introduction for both the student and general reader to the notion that American Indian societies had vital interests in interpreting and transmitting their own histories in their own ways. Separate discussions of legends and oral histories illustrate how various Indian peoples related and commented upon their changing times.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.