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Edited by RAYMOND J. DEMALLIE. General editor, WILLIAM C. STURTEVANT. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution 2001. Pp. 1376, illus. $101.00
Perhaps no image represents Indian peoples better among the general public than that of the Plains warrior. Thanks to popular writing and, more especially, the dubious contributions of Hollywood, the Plains warrior chief astride his horse, with eagle-feather war bonnet trailing, often serves as visual shorthand to denote First Nations in general. Only the North-West Coast totem pole comes close to rivalling the image of Plains people as representing all Indian peoples. As the developers of such striking cultural products as the buffalo hunt and sacrificial rituals such as the Sun Dance, not to mention a legacy of conflict with the American military that includes numerous massacres of Indians by cavalry and the memorable annihilation of Custer's troup by Sioux at the Little Big Horn, Plains First Nations bulk large as symbols of Aboriginal peoples historically.
The Smithsonian Institution's magisterial series Handbook of North American Indians has now reached the Plains peoples with its volume 13, Plains. It has been preceded by works on ten other regions or topics, completing the specific studies of individual regions from the Arctic to the southwestern United States and bringing the series, which the Smithsonian began to discuss in 1965 and to publish in 1978, well past the halfway mark. Only the thematic and reference volumes remain to appear. Since the Plains region, stretching from Texas to Alberta, is second in geographical area only to the Subarctic (volume 4), it is not surprising that this volume is printed in two parts. Its sixty-seven chapters are outnumbered only by the seventy-two of the Northeast volume and the seventy-eight of that on California. The Plains volume, then, is not just magisterial, it's massive. The volume opens with a series of essays on environment and languages, followed by a section on 'Prehistory,' then a shorter group of four essays on the history of the United States...