American Indian Nations takes stock of Indian history, policy, and culture over the past 30 years. A distinctive contribution to the understanding and interpretation of current Indian affairs, policies, and community development, this dynamic commentary of contemporary issues brings together a Who's Who of tribal leaders, scholars, and activists. No other collection offers such a thought-provoking and utterly current series of essays on the problems and achievements of modern Native peoples.

American Indian Nations takes stock of Indian history, policy, and culture over the past 30 years. A distinctive contribution to the understanding and interpretation of current Indian affairs, policies, and community development, this dynamic commentary of contemporary issues brings together a Who's Who of tribal leaders, scholars, and activists. No other collection offers such a thought-provoking and utterly current series of essays on the problems and achievements of modern Native peoples.

Native Americans are too few in number to swing presidential elections, affect national statistics, or attract consistent media attention.But their history illuminates our collective past and their current disadvantaged status reflects our problematic present. InAmerican Indians: The First of This Land, C. Matthew Snipp provides an unrivaled chronicle of the position of American Indians and AlaskanNatives within the larger American society. Taking advantage of recent Census Bureau efforts to collect high-quality data for these groups, Snipp details the composition and characteristics of native Indian and Alaskan populations. His analyses of housing, family structure, language use and education, socioeconomic status, migration, and mortality are based largely on unpublished material not available in any other single source. He catalogs the remarkable diversity of a population Eskimos, Aleuts, and numerous Indian tribes once thought doomed to extinction but now making a dramatic comeback, exceeding 1 million for the first time in 300 years. Also striking is the pervasive influence of the federal bureaucracy on the social profile of American Indians, a profile similar at times to that of Third World populations in terms of literacy, income, and living conditions."