In 1906 Curtis approached railroad tycoon J.P. Morgan to request financial assistance for his project. Morgan agreed to pay him a total of $75,000, or $15,000 a year for five years. Curtis' masterwork, The North American Indian, he and Morgan decided, would be a set of 20 volumes of ethnographic text illustrated with high quality photoengravings taken from his glass plate negatives. Each of these volumes would be accompanied by a portfolio of large...

Prior to becoming a "melting pot" of many languages, the continents of North and South America were already home to a variety of Native American tribes, each with its own language. What's more, subsets of tribes often had their own dialects, sometimes making communication between two people nearly impossible, even f they lived near each other. This book discusses the major Native American languages used by tribes in various regions and how some of...

Includes chapters on Athapascan, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Eskimo and Chukchee. (AB1739).

An assessment of the current state of the historical linguistics of North American Indian languages.