This study of the 1870 and 1890 Ghost Dance movements among North American Indians offers an innovative theory about why these movements arose when they did. Emphasizing the demographic situation of American Indians prior to the movements, Professor Thornton argues that the Ghost Dances were deliberate efforts to accomplish a demographic revitalization of American Indians following their virtual collapse. By joining the movements, he contends, tribes sought to assure survival by increasing their numbers through returning the dead to life. Thornton supports this thesis empirically by closely examining the historical context of the two movements and by assessing tribal participation in them, revealing particularly how population size and decline influenced participation among and within American Indian tribes. He also considers American Indian population change after the Ghost Dance periods and shows that participation in the movements actually did lead the way to a demographic recovery for certain tribes.

Winter counts--pictorial calendars by which Plains Indians kept track of their past--marked each year with a picture of a memorable event. The Lakota, or Western Sioux, recorded many different events in their winter counts, but all include "the year the stars fell," the spectacular Leonid meteor shower of 1833-34. This volume is an unprecedented assemblage of information on the important collection of Lakota winter counts at the Smithsonian, a core resource for the study of Lakota history and culture. Fourteen winter counts are presented in detail, with a chapter devoted to the newly discovered Rosebud Winter Count. Together these counts constitute a visual chronicle of over two hundred years of Lakota experience as recorded by Native historians. A visually stunning book, "The Year the Stars Fell" features full-color illustrations of the fourteen winter counts plus more than 900 detailed images of individual pictographs. Explanations, provided by their nineteenth-century Lakota recorders, are arranged chronologically to facilitate comparison among counts. The book provides ready access to primary source material, and serves as an essential reference work for scholars as well as an invaluable historical resource for Native communities.

This study of the 1870 and 1890 Ghost Dance movements among North American Indians offers an innovative theory about why these movements arose when they did. Emphasizing the demographic situation of American Indians prior to the movements, Professor Thornton argues that the Ghost Dances were deliberate efforts to accomplish a demographic revitalization of American Indians following their virtual collapse. By joining the movements, he contends, tribes sought to assure survival by increasing their numbers through returning the dead to life. Thornton supports this thesis empirically by closely examining the historical context of the two movements and by assessing tribal participation in them, revealing particularly how population size and decline influenced participation among and within American Indian tribes. He also considers American Indian population change after the Ghost Dance periods and shows that participation in the movements actually did lead the way to a demographic recovery for certain tribes. This occurred, Thornton argues, not, of course, by returning dead American Indians to life, but by creating enhanced tribal solidarity.

"The White Man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative process. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped rock and soil." The words of Lakota writer Luther Standing Bear foretold the current debate on the value of Native American studies in higher education. Studying Native America addresses for the first time in a comprehensive way the place of this critical discipline in the university curriculum. Leading scholars in anthropology, demography, English and literature, history, law, social work, linguistics, public health, psychology, and sociology have come together to explore what Native American studies has been, what it is, and what it may be in the future. The book's thirteen contributors and editor Russell Thornton, stress the frequent incompatibility of traditional academic teaching methods with the social and cultural concerns that gave rise to the field of Native American studies. Beginning with the intellectual and institutional history of Native American studies, the book examines its literature, language, historical narratives, and anthropology. The volume discusses the effects on Native American studies of law and constitutionalism; cosmology, epistemology, and religion; identity; demography; colonialism and post-colonialism; science and technology; and repatriation of human remains and cultural objects. Contributors to Studying Native America include Raymond J. DeMallie, Bonnie Duran, Eduardo Duran, Raymond D. Fogelson, Clara Sue Kidwell, Kerwin Lee Klein, Melissa L. Meyer, John H. Moore, Peter Nabokov, Katheryn Shanley, C. Matthew Snipp, Rennard Strickland, Russell Thornton, J. Randolph Valentine, Robert Allen Warrior, Richard White, and Maria Yellowhorse-Braveheart. The book is sponsored in part by the Social Science Research Council.

"The Cherokees: A Population History" is the first full-length demographic study of an American Indian group from the protohistorical period to the present. Thornton shows the effects of disease, warfare, genocide, miscegenation, removal and relocation, and destruction of traditional lifeways on the Cherokees. He discusses their mysterious origins, their first contact with Europeans (prob-ably in 1540), and their fluctuation in population during the eighteenth century, when the Old World brought them smallpox. The toll taken by massive relocations in the following century, most notably the removal of the Cherokees from the Southeast to In-dian Territory, and by warfare, predating the American Revolution and including the Civil War, also enters into Thornton's calculations. He goes on to measure the resurgence of the Cherokees in the twentieth century, focusing on such population centers as North Carolina, Oklahoma, and California.

This demographic overview of North American Indian history describes in detail the holocaust that, even today, white Americans tend to dismiss as an unfortunate concomitant of Manifest Destiny. They wish to forget that, as Euro-Americans invaded North America and prospered in the "New World," the numbers of native peoples declined sharply; entire tribes, often in the space of a few years, were "wiped from the face of the earth."

The fires of the holocaust that consumed American Indians blazed in the fevers of newly encountered diseases, the flash of settlers' and soldiers' guns, the ravages of "firewater," and the scorched-earth policies of the white invaders. Russell Thornton describes how the holocaust had as its causes disease, warfare and genocide, removal and relocation, and destruction of aboriginal ways of life.

Until recently most scholars seemed reluctant to speculate about North American Indian populations in 1492. In this book Thornton discusses in detail how many Indians there were, where they had come from, and how modern scholarship in many disciplines may enable us to make more accurate estimates of aboriginal populations.