Indigenous art -- North America, Indigenous art 

"The Indian arts of North America, ranging from wooden masks and carved ivory charms to painted rawhide shields and elaborately decorated pottery, are vigorous, colorful and instantly attractive. But our mental picture of the people who made these objects is so influenced by Hollywood's yelling savages that it obscures our view of the culture that produced them.

This book sets out to put the record straight: it deals with each group of Indians in turn, from Alaska through Canada and the United States to the borders of Mexico, and shows how their various ways of life, social structure and environment led them along different artistic paths.

The most potent force in their lives is their sense of oneness with nature: 'We are the whole earth, spiritually plugged into her every process — we hear her every cry.' This goes far to explain the 'naturalness' of their art — not just the materials they used, such as shells, feathers, stone, metal, bone, wood, clay and a variety of fibers, but even the abstract and symbolic designs of birds, animals and dancers.

The other force, invariably malevolent, throughout their history has been their contact with Europeans. Between the bloody religious and military suppression by the Spaniards in the 17th century and the systematic destruction of the whole of Indian culture by the United States in the 19th, it is astonishing that anything has survived, but just in time efforts are now being made to preserve the unique way of life of these beleaguered people.

John Anson Warner, a young Associate Professor of Sociology in the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, has brought to his subject a professional objectivity which fails to hide his deep commitment to the 'new deal' for the Indians. His passionate conviction that, in the modern materialistic world, we have much to learn from these uncomplicated natural people (instead of the other way around) makes this not just a survey of a primitive people and their art, but a 'book for our time.'"--Book jacket. 

168 pages : illustrations (some color), map ; 32 cm. 

Contents:
The prehistoric civilizations --
The Southwest --
The plains --
The Northwest Coast --
The woodlands --
California and the Far West.