Barbara Alice Mann Libri

Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas provides a thorough, organized look at the social, political, economic, and religious roles of women among the Iroquois, explaining their fit with the larger culture. Gantowisas means more than simply «woman» - gantowisas is «woman acting in her official capacity» as fire-keeping woman, faith-keeping woman, gift-giving woman; leader, counselor, judge; Mother of the People. This is the light in which the reader will find her in Iroquoian Women. Barbara Alice Mann draws upon worthy sources, be they early or modern, oral or written, to present a Native American point of view that insists upon accuracy, not only in raw reporting, but also in analysis. Iroquoian Women is the first book-length study to regard Iroquoian women as central and indispensable to Iroquoian studies.

Ever since European settlers stumbled upon the eighteenth-century mounds, explanations and interpretations of them – often ridiculous and seldom Native American – have appeared as sober scholarship. Today, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA) has intensified the debate over who «owns» the mounds – modern descendants of the Mound builders or Western archaeologists. Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds is the first cogent look at all the issues surrounding the mounds, their history, their preservation, and their interpretation. Using the traditions of those Natives descended from the Mound Builders as well as historical and archaeological evidence, Barbara Alice Mann placed the mounds in their native cultural context as she examines the fraught issues enveloping them in the twenty-first century.