The field of molecular anthropology has grown in recent years with the advent of new methodologies and theoretical assumptions. The field has been particularly insightful in helping understand the initial peopling of North America. The author discusses the field of molecular anthropology and its insights into the peopling of North America, examining in detail the mtDNA and Y chromosome genetic data. Written in a clear, readable fashion, the author gives an overview of the topic for researchers, graduate students, and other professionals who are interested in this exciting new area of inquiry and the possibilities it holds for such contentious issues as biological affiliation, the peopling of North America, and historic population movements.

American Indian mtDNA, Y Chromosome Genetic Data, and the Peopling of North America

Politics & Social Sciences

Jones, Peter N.

Anthropology

Bauu Institute

In 1996 on the banks of the Columbia River a 9,300-year old skeleton was found that would become the impetus for the first legal assault on the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The Kennewick Man, as it came to be called, put to test whether the American Indian tribes of the area were culturally affiliated with the skeleton as they claim and their oral traditions affirm, or whether the skeleton was affiliated with a people who are no longer present. At the same time, another 9,000-year old skeleton was found in the storage facility of the Nevada State Museum, where it had gone unnoticed for the past 50 years. Like the Kennewick Man, the Spirit Cave Mummy also brought to fore the question of cultural affiliation between contemporary American Indian tribes of the western Great Basin and those people who resided in the area during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. Cultural anthropologist Peter N. Jones tackles these contentious questions in this landmark study, Respect for the Ancestors. For the first time in a single work, the question of cultural affiliation between the present-day American Indians of the American West and the people of the distant past is examined using multiple lines of evidence. Out of this comprehensive study, a picture of continuous cultural evolution and adaptation between the peoples of the ancient past and those of the present-day emerges from the evidence. Further, important implications for the field of anthropology are discussed as a result of this benchmark study. Anyone working in the American West today will benefit from this book.

Respect for the Ancestors: American Indian Cultural Affiliation in the American West

Very few books on the history and culture of the southern New England Native peoples have been written by the Natives themselves. Standard academic books read like a clinical autopsy of a dead culture from many years ago. Contrary to this, A Cultural History of the Native Peoples of Southern New England provides an understanding of the ways, customs, and language of the southern New England American Indians from the Native's perspective. For the first time, a book written about the Native American peoples of southern New England is written by the Natives themselves. Incorporating voices of modern Elders and other Natives to the historic records of the 1500s and 1600s, everything about the beauty, power, and richness of their culture has been included. Sections of the book cover appearance, language, family and relations, religion, the body and senses, marriage, sickness, war, games, hunting, and much more. The proud and fiercely independent Native American peoples of southern New England once walked tall and proud on this land. With this book, they are now beginning to walk tall again.

A Cultural History of the Native Peoples of Southern New England: Voices from Past and Present

History

Moondancer

Strong Woman

Americas

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declared in a recent United Nations address: "Too often, where we need water we find guns instead. Population growth will make the problem worse. So will climate change. As the global economy grows, so will its thirst. Many more conflicts lie just over the horizon." Anticipating what might happen when this declaration comes true, To The Last Drop foreshadows what might happen when water reserves and resources decline in the immediate future. As written in this thrilling novel, when this critical resource dries up, governments may need to exploit every option at their disposal to secure water - even resorting to warfare. In such turmoil, individuals will have to defend their water rights by any means necessary in order to secure their livelihood, including armed insurgency. Such an imminent crisis exists between Texas and New Mexico, which have fought bitterly over water rights since the early nineteenth century. The pattern of a Texan invasion followed by New Mexican resistance is brought to the present day in To The Last Drop. Taken from this morning's headlines, the novel is narrated by a tragic-comic cast from all sides of the conflict. Exploring the development of the Southwest, the relationship between oppression and terrorism, and our unquenchable thirst for water, Andrew Wice's novel provides much more then just a fictional tale.

To the Last Drop: A Novel of Water, Oppression, and Rebellion

Literature & Fiction

Wice, Andrew

Genre Fiction

E.J. Wensing is the founder of Ecosphere Net (www.ecosphere.net). Based out of St. John in the US Virgin Islands, we are a global network providing powerful cross-cultural education for personal and global sustainability. This book introduces a new approach to global sustainability, one that links conversation, action and research in a continuous cycle of exploration and discovery. The first part of this approach is called I Am Sustainability. It is a curriculum for personal and global sustainability that we continually create and recreate together across all cultures of the world. This book starts the I Am Sustainability conversation, action and research with an opening argument that describes how all of the human impediments to global sustainability begin in a single human problem, that is, the psychology of the currently disproportionate human need to belong to competitive social groups. While competition can bring out the best in us, it also brings out the worst in us. For instance, it results in our overconsumption and exploitative behaviors toward the environment and other humans. Who we are, our "self", is almost entirely defined, maintained and lost in the competitive social groups we chose to belong to. As described in this book, the best way to sustain the self is to ground our individuality in the body. An individual in a healthy balance between their "self" in their body and their group is also less likely to be exploitative of others and the environment. So you get your self and save the planet too! At Ecosphere Net we are teachers, graduate students, therapists, scholars, physicians, professors and people who just want to make a positive difference regarding sustainability; both human and environmental. I invite you to read this book, visit us at www.ecosphere.net and join us in the I Am Sustainability conversation, action and research to save the planet.

I Am Sustainability: How The Human Body Can Save The Planet

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Wensing, Enrico J.

Psychology & Counseling

Tales, interviews, and culture/culinary essays that drew fans in border region papers and Harpers magazine, IMAGINARY LINES gives a warm, humorous, sometimes dark portrait of frontiers not just of the Mexico/California border, but of many invisible fault lines in the human condition: rich/poor, third/first world, home/foreign, male/female. A rare collaboration between two writers across some of the more obvious lines - Catholic Mexican mother Ana Maria Corona and jaded American muckraker Linton Robinson - IMAGINARY LINES transforms the life stories of maids, matadors, gigolos, cooks, gamblers, and con men into metaphors for the vague but palpable fault lines that separate us, yet bind us together. IMAGINARY LINES is a book celebrated by cover artist Victor Cauduro, one of Mexico's finest and most celebrated painters, and by Pulitzer nominee Luis Urrea, who considers it a "well guided tour" to the labyrinths of intercultural interface.

Imaginary Lines: Stories of Physical, Cultural, and Culinary Frontiers

Robinson, Linton

Corona, Ana Maria

Literary

One of the first psychic vampire novels of its time - where the vampire feeds off of more than just blood - The House of the Vampire is an early classic in its genre. Republished in this new edition, this Victorian novel operates in the continuum of life and death. What has been can be again, though often terribly transformed. Energetically inventive and infused with a relish for the supernatural, especially the trappings of the dark, The House of the Vampire delivers a horror which we know does not - but none the less conceivably might - exist and threaten ourselves. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, The House of the Vampire is considered a classic among Victorian Gothic stories. He felt the presence of the hand of Reginald Clarke - unmistakably - groping in his brain as if searching for something that had still escaped him. He tried to move, to cry out, but his limbs were paralysed. When, by a superhuman effort, he at last succeeded in shaking off the numbness that held him enchained, he awoke just in time to see a figure, that of a man, disappearing in the wall that separated Reginald's apartments from his room.... George Sylvester Viereck (1884 - 1962), remembered today chiefly for his contributions to fantasy literature, was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States with his family at age 11. He was editor of the magazine The Fatherland, and author of Confessions of a Barbarian and Glimpses of the Great.

The House of the Vampire

Viereck, George Sylvester

Shamanism... what is it? Is it a phenomenon with a clear definition or with a set of clearly definable attributes? Has the phenomenon changed over time, or are today's versions found in suburban basements the same as those that were practiced hundreds of years ago by various tribal people? What can we figure out about shamanism if we simply look at the term itself and how it has been employed over time? What if we restrict ourselves to one geographic location? These are some of the questions grappled with, and partially answered, in this book. By discussing the historical use of the terms shamanism and shaman in North America, Peter N. Jones offers fresh insights into the history of this phenomenon. Comparing current understandings and descriptions of the phenomenon with those of the historical and archival record, Shamans and Shamanism presents a comprehensive analysis of the terms use over time. Included in the book is a comprehensive bibliography of the term's use in North America. Shamans and Shamanism is an important resource for anyone interested in this phenomenon. It provides new insights into the history of the terms, their use in both academic and pop literature, and offers a starting point for future investigations of the phenomenon.

Shamans and Shamanism: A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Terms Use in North America

If anybody wondered why star journalist Mundo Carrasco would stop investigating Mazatlan's drug lords and politicos in order to run the shady new puppet mayor's press relations, then they had never been to bed with the scorching, amoral, monumental Mijares. Mazatlan's huge, blaring Carnival became the greatest time Mundo had lived since his days as a local baseball hero: access to the real power and closeted skeletons, a political future of his own, and...mostly...the perfect flesh of Mijares. Then the mayor beats up his wife, the city government starts to unravel into scandal and panic, and they start killing people--with Mundo right up there on their list. Tumbling through the tumult of Carnival, mob violence, narco suites and wretched bulldozed hovels, musical mayhem, his own corruption, and three women who want to reclaim his soul for his own good and their own purposes, Mundo is either sorting himself out or getting totally mixed up...if he comes out of it with his damaged scruples and bruised hide intact. Linton Robinson is a veteran award-winning journalist and author of several popular books on Mexican culture. His work is very much affected by the decades he has lived in various parts of Mexico and Central America. "Sweet Spot" is a valentine to the eight years he lived on a hill right above the throbbing heart of Mazatlan's carnival celebration, wrote for local newspapers, and hung out with the local musicians, athletes, and criminals. Editorials Politics are murder for basepath journalist during Mazatlan's riotous Carnival. Mexican Gorky Park...with baseball and table dancers! Mazatlan politics turn Carnival into carnage for basepath journalist Mundo Carrasco. A beautiful, amoral revolutionary sucks batting champ/journalist Mundo Carrasco into a web of political murder during the peak of Mazatlan's Carnival. Batting champ Mundo Carrasco becomes Mazatlan's top journalist but loses his beautiful, amoral love to revolutionary murder during Carnival.

Sweet Spot: A Novel About Mazatlan Carnival, Dirty Politics, and Baseball

Oral traditions and myths have long been an integral part of Native American cosmology. Not only have they been - and continue to be - an essential part of handing down Native American customs, norms, beliefs, and cultural histories, but they also form a communal mythic discourse. This discourse is not a "fixed text," but rather a dynamic process of interactive relations that are developed over generations of experience, and passed from relation to relation and generation to generation. In this sense, the traditional structures of mythic discourse serve an integrative function: to form a coherent basis for communal identity in terms of a shared set of fundamental ideas and beliefs expressed in multiple forms.  The oral traditions and myths recorded in this book are part of the communal mythic discourse of the Lakota Sioux people. Originally collected and recorded at the close of the nineteenth century by two Native language speakers - Marie L. McLaughlin and Zitkala Sa - these oral traditions provide some of the least distorted or colonially disrupted examples of the Lakota Sioux communal mythic discourse. Containing over 40 oral traditions, Lakota Sioux Legends and Myths brings together into a single volume these remarkable myths and legends.  Edited and with a forward by Peter N. Jones, Ph.D., Lakota Sioux Legends and Myths is a welcome and refreshing addition to the literature. Once again the beauty, depth, and knowledge contained within the Lakota Sioux oral traditions can speak for themselves.

Lakota Sioux Legends and Myths: Native American Oral Traditions Recorded by Marie L. McLaughlin and Zitkala-Sa

Zitkála-Šá

McLaughlin, Marie L.

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