In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians [Hardcover]

Jake Page (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 25, 2003

The story of the American Indians has, until now, been told as a 500-year tragedy, a story of violent and fatal encounters with Europeans and their diseases, followed by steady retreat, defeat, and diminishment. Yet the true story begins much earlier, and its final recent chapter adds a major twist. Jake Page, one of the Southwest's most distinguished writers and a longtime student of Indian history and culture, tells a radically new story, thanks to an explosion of recent archaeological findings, the latest scholarship, and an exploration of Indian legends. Covering no less than 20,000 years, "In the Hands of the Great Spirit" will forever change how we think about the oldest and earliest Americans.

Page writes gracefully and sympathetically, without sentimentality. He explores every controversy, from the question of cannibalism among tribes, to the various theories of when and how humans first arrived on the continent, to what life was actually like for Indians before the Europeans came. Page dispels the popular image of a peaceful and idyllic Eden, and shows that Indian societies were fluid, constantly transformed by intertribal fighting, population growth, and shifting climates.

Page uses Indian legends and stories as tools to uncover tribal origins, cultural values, and the meaning of certain rituals and sacred lands. He tells the story of contact with Europeans, and the multipower conflicts of the Seven Years War, the Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812, from the Indians' point of view. He explains the complex and shifting role of the U.S. government as expressed through executive decisions and through the role of the courts. Finally, he tells the fascinating story ofthe late-twentieth-century upsurge in Indian population and resources, which began as a social movement and exploded once casinos came into fashion.

Author and editor of over a dozen books on American Indian life and culture, Page is a masterful teller of this incredible story. "In the Hands of the Great Spirit" will forever change the familiar story of recent centuries, replacing it with a far more sweeping and meaningful story of tribes and peoples who have suffered enormously yet endure and enrich the American experience.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This superlative popular history of American Indian peoples distills two generations of scholarship into a rare combination of readability and reliability. For former Smithsonian and Natural History editor Page, who is also a prolific mystery novelist and editor, it is a magnum opus. The early chapters establish, with compelling detail that draws on Indian oral history, that the origins of North America's first inhabitants were varied (including relatives of the Japanese Ainu), and that they were numerous, mostly agricultural, organized as civil societies, and living in mystical harmony neither with nature nor with one another. The book's second half details how European diseases, notably smallpox, arrived before most of the guns or large-scale colonies, with appalling consequences for the cohesion and survival of many tribes. What followed was fighting among tribes (such as the fate of the Pawnee at the hands of mounted rivals like the Sioux), deliberate genocide and sometimes well-intentioned but almost always badly executed government policies that left entire peoples in ruin. There are reprieves from tales of destruction: the Pueblo staged a successful revolt against the Spanish in 1680, while the Iroquois and Cherokee created synthetic cultures that tried to adapt to changing circumstances. The book ends with the discovery of Kennewick Man (Ainu kin), the Red Power movement and the profitable and controversial casino ownership by tribes like the Pequot. A smooth, engaged narrative a useful bibliographic essay, make this a book that fills an enormous gap in the popular historical literature, written with a great feel for the many contexts it addresses.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Sweeping across the lands that became the U.S., Page's historical survey of the Indian/European interface over the centuries strives to envelop every significant event and personality within a one-volume format. Page is, therefore, constrained from overly effusive recounting, favoring a methodical chronicle of the inexorable displacement of the native tribes from their lands, noting the epidemics, violence, and chicanery by which that was accomplished. A certain economy must ensue from this approach, characterizing this presentation as an introduction for readers new to the historical contours of Indian-settler relations. Page does well to inform his audience of controversies in the archaeology and historiography of the subject while incorporating his personal view of disputed matters, imbuing his narrative with a certain amount of editorializing. Such readers further benefit from two themes that warrant Page's more detailed treatment: the spiritual life of the Indians, and episodes of pan-Indian resistance, from Pontiac to Tecumseh to the 1970s American Indian movement. As a gateway to more specialized biographies and histories, Page's work will see heavy library use. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (March 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684855763
• ISBN-13: 978-0684855769
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #675,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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66 of 71 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Complex lives of American Indians, May 2, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians (Hardcover)

...Americans love the big picture, the bird's-eye view, the world under one roof. In fact, the pressures to condense and combine as such are as fierce in the book trade today as they are in the one-stop supermarket. Sometimes this leads, between the covers of a single volume, to a thin gruel of pallid generalization. On other, more rare occasions, it yields the virtues of good synthetic writing: broad-ranging, discerning, lucid, judicious.
"In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000 Year History of American Indians" by Jake Page happily does the latter. The book's hefty subtitle may give pause to general readers not prepared for extended time travel in Indian country. But the journey, all 400-odd pages of it, is well worth the trouble.
Mr. Page, a Southwest-based scholar and novelist who has written widely on Indian history, is well suited for the project. He brings with his lively prose a propensity for good judgment, a virtue in a field often marred by ax-grinders, whether they be the politically prehistoric or the politically correct variety.
The premise of "Great Spirit" won't surprise insiders  that the people we have come to know as "American Indians" are an amazingly diverse and complex group of nations and tribes. In Mr. Page's hands, Indians are neither primitives nor victims nor New Age sages, but people who have struggled to maintain cultures and families in the face of disease, war, misguided federal policy, and, yes, even disputes with tribal neighbors and personal shortcomings.
Be it the traditional or multicultural kind, Mr. Page likes to subvert the received wisdom. Most native people in North America in 1492 were small farmers, not nomads. No, the political philosophy of the Iroquois Confederation didn't significantly influence the framers of the Constitution. Yes, there may have been mortal pathogens in the New World before Columbus (tuberculosis and syphilis), and imperial wars for hegemony weren't simply a European invention.
Mr. Page has plenty of critical ground to cover. The California Gold Rush, the Dawes Allotment Act, the Termination movement of the 1950s, all come under his lash for their catastrophic consequences, whether directed by Washington or fueled by large-scale demographics. Thankfully, he censures without resorting to the kind of shrill invective that often dominates discussions of Indian policy.
Nor is the author content with easy targets. He examines controversial claims that the ancient Anasazi practiced cannibalism. He considers charges that native peoples sometimes make bad conservationists, from "Pleistocene overkill" to the historic exploitation of deer in the Virginia tidewater. He reflects on the promise and the failures of the modern gambling industry. His judgment deftly avoids a doctrinaire stamp.
A huge (but unappreciated) difficulty for a writer who does a historical overview is the question of what to leave out. Major trends, from migration to settlement to allotment to tribal sovereignty, are given their due in a straightforward chronological plan.
While another writer might justly have done more on energy resource development or tribal enrollment issues (and less with, say, the unfortunate Chiricahua prisoners of war), the major contours of the book are sound and defensible.
Mr. Page's research, almost all of it secondary, is solid. It's rare to find a gaffe (though the Great Sioux Reservation is misplaced in eastern, not western, South Dakota). Then too, the current class action suit against the Interior Department over trust land royalties is mischaracterized, likely the casualty of a hurried pace in telling a big story.
What makes "Great Spirit" so valuable is Mr. Page's effort to bridge pre-and post-Columbian America. Most authors choose between archaeology and history when writing about native people, so intimidating does the combined chore seem. This tendency to choose one discipline or the other, however, has given us a fractured picture of the past.
Indian history, as a result, is commonly told as a two-act drama that recounts a "rise and fall" story, moving from native "innocence" at the beginning (archaeology) to the corruption of all that followed Columbus in 1492 (history). It's rare that we find a coherent "before" and "after" narrative in one book, as we do in "Great Spirit," especially in a work that suggests the complexities of cultural exchange with little or no moral posturing.
Even for those well schooled in the subject, "Great Spirit" has much to teach. The creative mix of tribes in the 17th-century Great Lakes region; the ambivalent Indian response to World War I, complicated by issues of citizenship and segregation; the forgotten presence of urban Indians; the promising yet skeptical project of the Indian Claims Commission, intended, so very much in the American grain, to settle ancient grievances simply by giving people their day in court.
"Great Spirit" is also a handsome volume, filled with fine pen-and-ink illustrations (though sometimes cryptically labeled and placed). Not least of the virtues of a book that covers 20,000 years of history is that it can fit in a small briefcase.
You'll never get everything in one book. But if you're looking for a lively and readable compendium in a single volume of what we know about native history, "Great Spirit" is an excellent choice. You may be able to put the book down along the way, but not, perhaps, without a sense of regret at the end. It leaves us, as all good histories do, looking squarely at ourselves in the here and now.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good overview of American Indian history, April 29, 2006

By 

S. J. Snyder "De gustibus non disputandum" (Various, United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians (Hardcover)

Here's a few of the big-picture historical items and individual tribe tidbits you'll find here:

Page 111-19, Anasazi cannibalism - has been confirmed by presence of human myoglobin in coprolite.
183, Indian tribal names - Comanche from the Ute "komantica," or enemy (Comanche is itself a Uto-Shoshonean language); Sioux is from the Algonquian word "naodouessioux," also enemy.
204 - The Cheyennes were the first Indians to leave the upper Mississippi woods for the Great Plains, before the Sioux, starting about 1680. They were at the Missouri in central North Dakota circa 1740 About 1780, after Chippewa attacks, they moved west onto the plains
224-25, British and deliberate germ warfare - Sir Jeffrey Amherst., in 1763 in the midst of the so-called Pontiac's War, suggested "inoculating" Indians with smallpox-infested blankets. Not done here, but at Fort Pitt in 1763, two Delawares were given blankets and a handkerchief out of a smallpox hospital ward, and an outbreak did soon start.
232, Myth of Iroquois confederation being a forefather to the Constitution - Ben Franklin, in the 1750s, in urging colonial union, cited the confederation of the Six Nations to shame colonials into doing at least as much. There is no influence link.
266, Hopi intratribal murders at Awatovi - About 1700, one group of Hopis (re)converted to Christianity at Awatovi. Soon the village leader thought that meant they had become witches and called on other Hopis to kill them, which they did.
325, origins of Ghost Dance - started by Paiute named Wodziwob in 1860s, promising world without whites, etc, but then his teaching faded. Paiute Wovoka had vision Jan. 1, 1889 during solar eclipse, starts new Ghost Dance, which urges working with whites, promises rewards in next life. Visiting Sioux take dance home, give "bullet shirt" and other anti-white adaptations.
359 Indians in BIA get first "affirmative action" in 1930s. Legality of affirmative action in BIA confirmed in 1970s, page 391.
384 - Ira Hayes was one of the six Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi at Iwo Jima.
366 - Hopi also served, as well as Navajo, as WWII Code Talkers. In fact, on a smaller scale, Comanches did the same in WWI.
405 - Fake Indian jewelry has become a big problem. In fact, one town in the Philippines renamed itself "Zuni" to try to skirt the law.
407 - Dream catchers are not a traditional Plains (or other) Indian artifact, but were created by them to, basically, cash in on New Age beliefs.
412 ff - Indian tribal casino revenues are estimated at $10 billion in the year 2000. Average annual payment to a casino-owning tribal member is about $3,000. Pequots and Mohegans in Connecticut account for about $2 mil of that $10 mil.

I could see rating this book at a 4.5, but it does try too much to be all things to all people, and so a nice solid 4 is a good rating.

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Informative, but more of a reference work, September 2, 2003

By 

V. Harris (NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians (Hardcover)

Virtually any Indian group you are looking for is included here. It is certainly informative and has some interesting lines of argumentation about the origins of Indian arrivals in this hemisphere. I thought some of the commentary on modern Indian issues was well done too. Those interested in the land issues and casino controversies will be delighted.
My reason for a middlish rating is that it does drone on, and tries to cover too much. It is certainly comprehensive but maybe tried to achieve too much in 400 pages, as it plods in areas and loses its readability.
I do praise it for its balance, but feel it is more of a reference work than enjoyable prose.