In his provocative ethnohistory, Christopher Miller offers an innovative reinterpretation of relations between Native Americans and Christian settlers on the Columbia Plateau. Miller draws on a wealth of ethnographic resources to show how culturally-derived perceptions and systems of rationality played more of a determining role in the interactions between these two groups than did material forces. Initially, Plateau Indians and the American missionaries who came to convert them perceived each other as crucial to the fulfillment of their own millennial destiny. When these views were contravened, relations quickly and fatally soured. In explaining this devolution, Prophetic Worlds provides a novel and insightful rendering of the cultural understandings that underwrote the mid-nineteenth-century transformation of life on the Plateau.

Don Smith - or Lelooska, as he was usually called - was a prominent Native American artist and storyteller in the Pacific Northwest. Born in 1933 of "mixed blood" Cherokee heritage, he was adopted as an adult by the prestigious Kwakiutl Sewid clan and had relationships with elders from a wide range of tribal backgrounds. Initially producing curio items for sale to tourists and regalia for Oregon Indians, Lelooska emerged in the late 1950s as one of a handful of artists who proved crucial to the renaissance of Northwest Coast Indian art. He also developed into a supreme performer and educator, staging shows of dances, songs, and storytelling. During the peak years, from the 1970s to the early 1990s, the family shows with Lelooska as the centerpiece attracted as many as 30,000 people annually. In this book, historian and family friend Chris Friday shares and annotates interviews that he conducted with Lelooska, between 1993 and ending shortly before the artist's death, in 1996. This is the story of a man who reached, quite literally, a million or more people in his lifetime and whose life was at once exceptional and emblematic.

Don Smith or Lelooska (1933-1996) was well known in the Pacific Northwest as a Native American artist and storyteller. Of "mixed blood" Cherokee heritage, he was adopted as an adult by the prestigious Kwakiutl Sewid clan and had relationships with elders from a wide range of tribal backgrounds. Initially producing curio items for sale to tourists and regalia for Oregon Indians, he emerged in the late 1950s as one of a handful of artists who proved critical in the renaissance of Northwest Coast Indian art. He also developed into a supreme performer and educator, staging shows of dances, songs, and storytelling. During his peak years from the 1970s to the early 1990s, his shows attracted as many as 30,000 people annually. In this book, historian and family friend Chris Friday shares and annotates interviews that he conducted with Lelooska between 1993 and 1996. In the process, he develops a portrait that is large enough to embrace the contradictory elements of Lelooska's life. What, he asks, is Native identity? What is "authenticity" in art? How are we to understand the concept of pan-Indianism? What are the politics of Indian tribal adoption? By engaging these questions and the contradictions that produce them, Friday honors Lelooska's complexity and constructs Lelooska's life as a prism for viewing the shifting and historically indeterminate nature of twentieth-century Indian identities.

"A study of the Lummi Indians of northwestern Washington and the political and economic forces that have determined their changing fortunes over the past 150 years. Daniel Boxberger has made excellent use of documentary sources, oral history, and his own observations. . . . The book is compelling and well documented; it is also understated, frequently allowing the actions of the myriad contending interest groups to speak for themselves." "--Ethnohistory"

"Boxberger knows his subject. He displays an impressive understanding of the technical development of fishing, and he repeatedly uses his interviews with Indians to inform and test archival and secondary sources." "--American Indian Quarterly"

"By focusing on the history of control over productive resources (in this case salmon, methods of harvest, processing, capital investment, and markets) Boxberger shows how the Lummi slid from independence and self-sufficiency to dependency, underdevelopment, and poverty. . . . Not only is it an excellent, in-depth study of the Lummi case, it can also serve as a metaphor for the larger question of Native American treaty rights and the resource provisions of agreements." "--Pacific Historical Review"

Daniel L. Boxberger is professor of anthropology at Western Washington University, Bellingham.