Product Description
In this dictionary of the Nez Perce language, which is spoken in the states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, the author illustrates how each word is used by citing examples from published Nez Perce oral literature; the dictionary is thus also a concordance. In addition, the author retranscribes and incorporates words from earlier publications, when recognized by today's Nez Perce speakers. The dictionary includes an English-Nez Perce index, appendixes listing phonosymbolic words and Nez Perce animal and plant names, and illustrations from Nez Perce life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Nez Perce Dictionary
This is a 1300-page dictionary comprehensively detailing the Nez Perce language, with multiple verb tenses and example sentences for each entry. There is also a pronunciation guide, grammatical notes, a separate English-Nez Perce section, illustrations, several black-and-white photographs, and a map. Quite an impressive work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Local knowledge and fish biology
This book deserves the highest praise for its integration of local knowledge with academic fisheries biology. It provides an excellent guide to Columbia River fish.That alone is worth the price of the book.The real "meat" of the book, though, are the Nez Perce testimonies:myths, folktales, personal reminiscences, views on local fish politics, and just plain good old-timer stories.We are reminded that the Native people often say in poetic or symbolic form what biologists say in academic polysyllables.Whether Coyote's encounter with beavers or excessive offtake of a fluctuating population is to blame, everybody knows that you can't catch too many fish or there won't be any more.The Native people add the critically important dimension of respect for the fish.You won't protect what you don't respect.That is why the politicians and even biologists so often fail to preserve the fisheries, even with the best intentions and the fisheries science--they lack that critical realization.
The book brings out the tragedy of damming the Columbia River.Hydropower is cheap only because nobody factors in the real costs, especially the hundreds of millions of fish a year lost to the economy.
This book is pure delight.I haven't enjoyed reading a book in a while, or learned so much.

What a book about fish should be
Books about fish customarily fall into twocategories: biology texts that treat the animals like biochemical systems and fishing books that treat them like cunning prey (the better to rationalize the angler's heroism). "Salmon and His People" is another kind of book entirely-acomplex look at how the salmon has figured in Nez Perce tribal originstories, tribal history, tribal religion, tribal stewardship, and how theanimal has fared under the dubious stewardship of the Corps of Engineers,Bureau of Reclamation, and National Marine Fisheries Service.

The voicestelling this complicated story are multiple, as are the perspectives:tribal storytellers, biologists, fishermen, children, policymakers. Salmonis not treated as an isolated creature but is instead viewed within afinely wrought network of other water animals.

I cannot praise theambition and achievement of this book highly enough. Because the Nez Perceview the fate of the salmon as part of a regionwide environmental disaster,"Salmon and His People" also becomes an elegy for that lostriver, the free-flowing Columbia. Several recent books (Blaine Harden's"A River Lost," Wm. Dietrich's "Northwest Passage,"Richard White's "The Organic Machine") have addressed thedevastation of the Columbia and its fisheries, but none of these is asheartful and creaturely an account of what the damming of the Columbia hasmeant to the peoples and animals of the river. The Nez Perce areparticularly qualified to write an account of the Columbia's devastationbecause their lands are upstream of most of the eighteen dams on themainstem Columbia and Snake, and much of their section of the river lieswithin the Hanford Reach, that unhappy zone once occupied by the federalgovernment's plutonium-production plants. (The Hanford Reach is also theonly undammed section of the Columbia River.)

Beautifully illustratedwith color plates on almost every page (the registration could be better),"Salmon and His People" will challenge most readers to thinkabout fish more deeply. The book is the second in a series of Nez Percenature guides; it was written by Dan Landeen, environmental specialist forthe tribe, and Allen Pinkham, a tribal elder and former chairman of the NezPerce Tribe Executive Committee, and published by Lewis-Clark StateCollege's Confluence Press.

I have no connection to the Nez Perce Tribeor the Confluence Press. I write for fishing magazines, and in myexperience this is a singular book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A little disappointing and lacking spark
From having looked at the brilliant World Atlas of Language Structures, I was really curious to find out about the many interesting extinct languages described therein.

Haruo Aoki's "Nez Perce Grammar", part of the University of California's large but poorly-stored collection of linguistic publications, is unfortunately for someone with a great deal of interest in linguistics, a little disappointing.

Whilst "Nez Perce Grammar" does offer a reasonable outline of the actual structure of the language, there is I feel rather too much emphasis placed on details that are of relatively little significance to a person like myself whose primary focus tends to be on how languages actually work at their roots - if you want, the logical basis of each language. The examples provided do not build into the knowledge of a language - even one unwritten and extinct - that I feel a book of this size could and should do. Even the stories collected could certainly have been annotated better than Aoki actually does.

All in all, this is a solid work, but it really needed more spark to be something of value. ... Read more

Product Description
The story of Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce Native American leader who tried but failed to get his people into Canada in 1877 so that they would not be sent to a reservation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

He Helped Lewis & Clark With His People, Nez Perce.
Joseph was the leader of the Nimipu, 'The Real People.' They were the hosts of the explorers Lewis and Clark and from which tribe their female guide came to get them back to civilization. Joseph and 150 Nez Perce were confined on a reservation in NE Washington state for all of their efforts on behalf of the U. S. Government.

Robert Penn Warren is a disguished Southern writer, born in Guthrie, Kentucky. Since he graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, we like to claim him as one of us. The first book of his I read was A PLACE TO COME TO. He went on to get degrees from University of California, Yale, and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1930.

He was a most prolific writer, some of the main ones I enjoyed were THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR, JEFFERSON DAVIS GETS HIS CITIZENSHIP BACK, JOHN BROWN: THE MAKING OF A MARTYR, BAND OF ANGELS (a movie was made of this), ALL THE KING'S MEN (won Pulitizer Prize for Fiction) and EYES, ETC.: A MEMOIR. He wrote a famous play called ALL THE KING'S MEN and many volumes of poems, most especially AUDUBON: A VISION, CHIEF JOSEPH OF THE NEZ PERCE, PROMISES (1957, which won the Pulitizer Prize for Poetry) and NOW AND THEN (his third Pulitizer Prize).

In 1944-45, he was the second occupant of the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress. He received numerous other awards for his writing of all sorts, as he continued to be a professor of English. He was one of 'The Fugitives,' a special group of Vanderbilt-educated writers, including some well known personages as prolific as he and as well-loved like Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom (from Pulaski, Tennessee) the two major domos, along with Andrew Lytle and a Mr. Oswald. He did an in-depth study of Melville.

"Abou Ben Adhem -- may his tribe increase!
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, withint the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel, writing in a book of gold.
****************
The angel wrote and vanished. The next night
It came again, with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed;
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest."

This is an important story
The story of Chief Joseph is one of the most important and disturbing chapters in American history. In this book, Bill McAuliffe provides an excellent introduction to Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce, and the amazingstory of their flight to escape the American Army. The book contains someexcellent photographs and a time line of events. It concludes with wordsfrom Chief Joseph, "The earth is the mother of all people, and allpeople should have equal rights upon it." This is a man and a subjectthat we all should know more about. This book is an excellent begining. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
Although mute since the death of his parents in a fire, a young Nez Perce Indian boy has a happy and adventurous life with his adopted family until a war between the white man and the Indians in the summer of 1877. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The Best Indian Book You Can Read
I thought this was a very good book. I enjoyed the story because it was breath taking and historical fiction. Even though, not all of the characters were real, this event really took place. This book is about an Indian band who is living peacefully in their valley. But one day, they are made to move out because the white people want to build roads and farms on their land. The Nez Perce tribe is forced to move on a reservation, but instead of going there, they set out on a journey to Canada. Soun, the main character, is an Indian boy who cannot speak because of a shock when he is young. Soun is the main helper. He helps herd the horses. I encourage you to read this book to find out if Soun ever speaks again. It is a history helper and is good to realize what happened back then to real Indian tribes.

5 stars and two thumbs way up!
I thought that this was a very good book, and even though I am 17, it is still a good book to read. I have almost all of his books, which I got a longtime ago. I have always enjoyed reading these kinds of books.

great book for all ages
When traviling through the Yellowstone and Teton area a while back as a young boy, i picked up a copy of this book. To make a long stroy short,once i started i could not stop. Not only was the historical lessons grand butit was very moving. I actually cried the first couple of times i read it.now over 10 years later i read it every once in a while. Ken is a fantasticwriter, and i recomend all his books. Parents and children should read thisbook. I read it with my grandmother, and at65+ she loved it too. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
A biography of the Nez Percâe chief who led his people on a long trek to escape the injustices of the United States government and never stopped fighting for equality. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great Study
A fascinating view of how a culture evolves when it bumps head-on with a far different, "more advanced" culture. In my journey into the Nez Perce culture, I've come to greatly appreciate Deward Walker's interest in the Nez Perce. He's an easy writer to understand and I like the way he grounds the reader by giving them a view of the aboriginal culture. I like the level of detail he uses because it makes the culture real to me, a layman. I'm going to be looking for more of his studies. ... Read more

Product Description
A rare collection of many never-before-published firsthand accounts of the Nez Perce Tribe. These pieces span more than 100 years of history and were gathered from archives all over North America. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Do Them No Harm
Few books have been written that tell about the Native American's side of history. This book tells about the Nez Perce stories of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in Idaho. Zoa Swayne spent decades interviewing tribal elders and studying the journals before putting this book together.Clark met 3 Nez Perce boys on the Weippe Prairie, Zoa discovered the names of 2 of the boys. Lewis and Clark spent 2 1/2 weeks in the Nez Perce country building canoes before continuing on to the Pacific Ocean and nearly 2 months on the return trip, so there is a lot to tell.

The world as Indians saw it
Ms. Swayne has done an excellent job of telling the story of one indian tribe's encounters with American explorers. Not really a portrayal of Lewis and Clark themselves, it is more a glimpse into what the world looked liketo the Nez Perce 200 years ago. It's told from the Indians' point of view,based on oral and written history collected after much research by MsSwayne. Each stage of the unfolding story is contrasted with entries fromLewis's and Clarke's journals. The different views of the same developmentsprovides real insight into the different world views and problems faced bythe Indians and the explorers.

It's a fairly short book written in thestyle of a novel, and is a good relaxing read for adults or teenagers. ... Read more

Product Description
This work focuses on how whites used Nez Perce history, images, activities and personalities in the production of history, developing a regional identity into a national framework. ... Read more

Product Description

Chief Joseph was a Nez Perce Indian who tried to keep the peace for his people. During his lifetime, Chief Joseph learned how to hunt and fish, led his people on the Flight of the Nez Perce, and spoke with the president of the United States. Can you imagin

... Read more