Anthropology

"‘Wendat’ was the word used by the five confederated nations of Wendake, the Wendat name for Huronia, the Ontario territory that the French -- mainly the Jesuits -- knew and described between 1615, when the Recollet Joseph Le Caron and Samuel de Champlain arrived, and 1649, when the Wendat confederacy collapsed. Champlain was the first to make consistent use of the disparaging term ‘Huron’ in naming the Wendats, and until recently that was still the name used by scholars and others in referring to these indigenous people.

"Especially notable for Lucien Turner's descriptions of nineteenth-century Native material culture, Ethnology of the Ungava District, Hudson Bay Territory was originally published in 1894 as part of the Smithsonian's Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology series - publications that are often considered to mark the beginning of American anthropological studies.

"Our understanding of the precontact nature of the Northwest Coast has changed dramatically over the last twenty years. This book brings together the most recent research on the culture history and archaeology of a region of longstanding anthropological importance, whose complex societies represent the most prominent examples of hunters and gatherers.

"The Native peoples of Canada have been here since the Ice Age and were already accomplished traders, artisans, farmers, and marine hunters when Europeans first reached their shores. Contact between Natives and European explorers and settlers initially presented an unprecedented period of growth and opportunity. But soon, the two vastly different worlds clashed. From first contact to current Native land claims, Arthur Ray charts the history of Canada's Native peoples.

"The most isolated archipelago on the west coast of the Americas, inhabited for at least 10,500 years, Haida Gwaii has fascinated scientists, social scientists, historians, and inquisitive travelers for decades. This book brings together the results of extensive and varied field research by both federal agencies and independent researchers, and carefully integrates them with earlier archaeological, ethnohistorical, and paleoenvironmental work in the region.

"At the place known as Head-Smashed-In in southwestern Alberta, Aboriginal people practiced a form of group hunting for nearly 6,000 years before European contact. The large communal bison traps of the Plains were the single greatest food-getting method ever developed in human history. Hunters, working with their knowledge of the land and of buffalo behaviour, drove their quarry over a cliff and into wooden corrals. The rest of the group butchered the kill in the camp below.