Handbook of North American Indians: Northwest Coast (Handbook of North American Indians)

Rating:
Summary: The Best Available Resource!
Review: This is almost certainly the best available encyclopedia about the NW American Native Americans. It is compiled and published by the Smithsonian Institution, with input from a number of scholars. Make no mistake about it - this is a serious, scholarly book - this is not the Inidna equivalent of "Funk & Wagnal's" gh for the scholar. This is a must-have for schools, libraries, and serious students and laypeople!

Rating:
Summary: The Best Available Resource!
Review: This is almost certainly the best available encyclopedia about the NW American Native Americans. It is compiled and published by the Smithsonian Institution, with input from a number of scholars. Make no mistake about it - this is a serious, scholarly book - this is not the Inidna equivalent of "Funk & Wagnal's" gh for the scholar. This is a must-have for schools, libraries, and serious students and laypeople!

Rating:
Summary: A great overview, but...
Review: This is really a very thorough book -- it's got large, academic sections on religion, art, forensics, prehistory, archaeology, etc, and these sections are all written by some of the creme de la creme of the field. If you're interested in a brief on Northwest Coast Indian life, this is a reasonably good (if rather scholarly) place to start.

However, I feel the book loses points because of the following reasons: it has precious few Native writers, and therefore lacks the Native perspective; it spends an awful lot of time focusing on the past, forcing Northwest tribes into an "ethnogrpahic present;" it needs desperately to be updated; and its illustrations are entirely in grainy black and white. Finally, Native readers may find themselves uncomfortable with both the sections devoted to forensics and shamanism.