Arts & Crafts of the Native American Tribes

Gr 9 Up—Aimed more at collectors than general students, this companion to the authors' Encyclopedia of Native Tribes of North America (Firefly, 2007) fills in some historical background but is largely a set of dryly academic descriptions of characteristic materials, manufacturing methods, and decorative motifs associated with common types of Native North American artifacts. Seven of the nine chapters are regional surveys covering Arctic residents to the Southeastern Nations; the other two are a broader overview of "Moccasins" and a cursory look at "Ceremonial Dress of Recent Times." The captions and narrative run to eye-glazing lines such as "Western Sioux moccasins of the second half of the nineteenth century were the classic shoe Type 14 with separate hard rawhide sole and buckskin upper with a tongue, sometimes forked, and a collar of varying size." Still, readers will be impressed by the hundreds of black-and-white and color illustrations, ranging from museum specimen photos (of widely varying quality) to early painted portraits, galleries of pottery and fabric design variations, maps, pictures of artisans at work, and labeled diagrams or exploded views of garments, housing, headgear, and weapons. The bibliography, a mass of scholarly and regional publications, is followed by an index that lists only tribal references. Consider as, at best, a source of supplementary images and details for David W. Penney's North American Indian Art (Thames & Hudson, 2004) or Janet Catherine Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips's Native North American Art (Oxford, 1998).—John Peters, formerly at New York Public Library