Indian
Eskimo Cook Book
This 1952 cookbook began in an Inupiaq village just 20 miles south of the Arctic Circle as part of an elementary school classroom discussion of locally available native foods for good health. The teacher’s request for each student to “bring in a recipe or little story of how mother cooked the meat, fish, or other foods used” resulted in this booklet. Recipes share instructions on preparing indigenous plants and wildlife, from stink weed to polar bear and whale.
Codex Cortesianus
Léon de Rosny, a French ethnologist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wrote this volume describing a Native Central American object in the collection of a Spanish museum. In the 1860s, two fragments of ancient Mayan language surfaced in Spain. Léon de Rosny was one of the first scholars to suggest that both fragments—the Cortesianus Codex described in this volume and the Troano Codex—were part of the same monumental artifact, later known as the Madrid Codex. The Codex Cortesianus, which de Rosny describes in this volume, is the smaller piece.
Nvgvmouinvn Genvnvgvmouat Igiu Anishinabeg Anvmiajig
Smithsonian Libraries has a premiere collection of published works on Native American languages. As Christian missionaries were often the first to make extended contact with native cultures and to devise a written alphabet for the native languages, many of the earliest works take the form of translations of the Bible and other religious texts. Peter Jones (1802-1856) was a mixed-blood chief of the Mississauga Ojibwas in Canada (in the Chippewa/Ojibwa linguistic family) and a Methodist missionary in Ontario.
Topographical Description of the State of Ohio, Indiana Territory, and Louisiana
This book is of interest primarily for including the journal of Charles Le Raye, a fur trader who was purportedly captured by the Sioux on the upper Missouri River. It included descriptions of the Native American peoples whom he encountered and the animals of the region. The journal is actually a fabrication, drawn from contemporary accounts of the Lewis & Clark and the Pike expeditions, but it is the source for the first descriptions and scientific names of seven species of American mammals, including the mule deer.
The Gospel According to Mark...in the Language of the Dakotas = Wotanin Waxte Markus Owa Kin Dee
This is one of the earliest and rarest works in the Dakota (Sioux) language. The text includes all sixteen chapters of the gospel of Saint Mark. It was created by having missionary Thomas Williamson read from the Book of Mark in French, which was then translated into Dakota by Joseph Renville, the son of a French-Canadian fur-trader father and a Dakota mother.
Bible [in Mohawk]
Native American languages have been a central research interest at the Smithsonian since the late 1800s when anthropologist John Wesley Powell founded the Bureau of American Ethnology and (who is he?) James C. Pilling compiled his still-authoritative bibliographies on Native American linguistic families. This volume contains the texts of 17 separately published books of the New Testament in Mohawk: the Gospel of St. John; the Acts of the Apostles; 14 Epistles of Paul, John, James, and Jude; and finally the Revelation of John. H.A.
