Native America

The Story of the First Peoples

Kenneth L. Feder

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780691220468, 9780691220451
• eBook ISBN: 9780691220475
• Subtopic: Archaeology

An epic deep history of the Indigenous peoples of North America, covering more than 20,000 years of astonishing diversity, adaptation, resilience, and continuity

Native America presents an infinitely surprising and fascinating deep history of the continent’s Indigenous peoples. Kenneth Feder, a leading expert on Native American history and archaeology, draws on archaeological, historical, and cultural evidence to tell the ongoing story, more than 20,000 years in the making, of an incredibly resilient and diverse mixture of peoples, revealing how they have ingeniously adapted to the many changing environments of the continent, from the Arctic to the desert Southwest.

Richly illustrated, Native America introduces close to a hundred different peoples, each with their own language, economic and social system, and religious beliefs. Here, we meet the Pequot, Tunxis, Iroquois, and Huron of the Northeast; the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, and Apache of the Southwest; the Hidatsa, Mandan, and Lakota of the Northern Plains; the Haida, Kwakiutl, Nootka, and Salish of the Northwest Coast; the Tule River and Mohave of Southern California; the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole of the Southeast; and the Inuit and Kalaallit of the Arctic. We learn about hunters of enormous Ice Age beasts; people who raised stone toolmaking to the level of art; a Native American empire ruled by a king and queen, with a huge city at its center and colonies hundreds of miles away; a society that made the desert bloom by designing complex irrigation networks; brilliant architects who built fairy castles in sandstone cliffs; and artists who produced beautiful and moving petroglyphs and pictographs that reflect their deep thinking about history, the sacred, the land, and the sky.

Native America is not about peoples of the past, but vibrant, living ones with an epic history of genius and tenacity—a history that everyone should know.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• A Practical Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Crying Indians, Tipi Dwellers, and Other Stereotypes
• 1. Archaeology: A Way of Telling Stories
• 2. In Their Beginning
• 3. Are You Ready to Rock?
• 4. European Encounter with a “New World”
• 5. First Peoples: Origins
• 6. First Peoples: Clovis and Folsom
• 7. First Peoples: Older Still?
• 8. Learning to Live in a New World
• 9. More Than Maize: Native Farmers of North America
• 10. Into the Woods
• 11. Into the Cold
• 12. Monument Builders of the Midwest
• Color Plates
• 13. City Dwellers
• 14. Great Houses and Cliff Castles
• 15. Northwest Coast: Ocean Farmers and Totem Poles
• 16. Art: History, Hunting, Sacred Imagery, and the Sky
• 17. War
• 18. Archaeology and Ethnic Cleansing
• Epilogue: A Story Still Being Written
• Notes
• References
• Index