From "Aztec" to "Zuni," here are portraits of the daily lives of the First Nations people who lived and still live on the continent of North America; the great floating island the Northeastern woodland tribes called Turtle Island. Songs, chants and legends from the tip of southern Mexico to Alaska and Arctic Canada are included. Covering a time span of a thousand years, the book includes tribes now decimated or who are a nearly forgotten and rarely mentioned part of history.

This book of word-sketches paints a picture of their world: at times harsh and cruel, at other times spiritual and filled with beauty. These word-sketches convey the humanness of the original inhabitants of Turtle Island, the Native American Indians; paints them as neither noble nor savage, but simply as people who learned to live with nature's challenges and hardships and to endure.

To read these portraits of tribes and individuals, their land and customs, their needs, both physical and spiritual, is to understand the magnificent heritage that is the gift to the world from Native American Indian people.