Customer Reviews

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Native American History

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is as complete as any single volume can be in spanning Native American History. It covers terminology, law, and culture as well as an account of the United States government's treatment of Native Peoples.

And it does so without belaboring the obvious, that killing people and stealing their land is wrong. In fact, the author was restrained and in no single spot that I can recall did he resort to outright moralizing. Instead, he remained fairly neutral, making the topic approachable.

I would reccomend this book to any literate person.

A basically a glance at everything from pre-columbian to the present. Obviously, this can be broken down into 1000s of subtopics. It's a good introductory book to the basic aspects of Native American studies.

The tone set by Fleming is obviously a native perspective. That's great, as we already have plenty of white perspectives. Regardless, some of the things he says are objectionable, but i highly doubt any of the facts are false. Ironically though, some of the things in this book are claimed false by other books. That's just the nature of this topic.

This book is best to be accompanied by other books. It's difficult finding accurate information on this subject though. It's best to stay away from scientific and anthropological books, which can be very inaccurate and biased.

I bought this book as I was traveling in the Southwest. I enjoyed the first couple of chapters and looked forward to getting into the meat of the book. The style was fun and I picked up a lot of facts I hadn't been aware of.
I had just finished reading "The Wordy Shipmates" and so I was quite surprised to find that (according to the book) Squanto helped the settlers in Jamestown. That made it hard for me to enjoy the rest of the book. How many other errors are there that I didn't pick up? It made me suspicious of all the "Idiot's Guide"s I've purchased or thought of purchasing. Don't they require an expert reviewer?
I'm very sympathetic to the native american tragedy and the author had a chance to improve the general perception of the Europeans' conquest of the New World. He should have taken his job more seriously

While the concept and format are good, this book is so riddled with errors that it will not help anyone learn more about American Indian history.

If you're looking to learn anything about the tribes and traditions of native americans, find yourself another book. You won't find anything useful, fun, or informative here.

If, on the other hand, you want a play by play of everything crappy that has happened to native americans since white people set eyes on them, you'll love this book. If that was its purpose, it's a great book but to me it seemed like a whole lot of whining disguised as an introduction to the culture and history of native americans. It's a lot like a teacher or professor giving a political rant instead of, say, teaching the subject you came to learn.

If you're old enough to read and haven't already learned how horrible white people have been to native americans, you're a complete idiot and reading this book won't help you.