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Two books just published by The University of Arizona Press detail historical issues within American Indian communities.

The University of Arizona Press has published two new books, both of which are centered on issues within American Indian communities.

The first book, "Native American Language Ideologies: Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country," was edited by Paul V. Kroskrity and Margaret C. Field.

The second, "The Archaeology of Native-Lived Colonialism Challenging History in the Great Lakes," was written by Neal Ferris, an archaeologist who holds the Lawson Chair of Canadian Archaeology at The University of Western Ontario in Canada.

The book edited by Kroskrity and Field examines American Indian views on language and preservation. Kroskrity is an anthropology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and Field is chair and associate professor of the American Indian Studies program at San Diego State University.

Beliefs and feelings about language vary dramatically within and across American Indian cultural groups and are an acknowledged part of the processes of language shift and language death.

Kroskrity and Field's volume samples language ideologies of a wide range of American Indian communities – from the Canadian Yukon to Guatemala – to show their role in sociocultural transformation.

The authors – including the members of indigenous speech communities who are participating in language renewal efforts – discuss American Indian conscious language ideologies and the relationship between these beliefs and other more implicit realizations of language use.

The chapters discuss the impact of contemporary language issues related to grammar, language use, the relation between language and social identity, and emergent language ideologies themselves in American Indian speech communities.

The book considers the emergent interaction of indigenous and imported ideologies and the resulting effect on language beliefs, practices, and struggles in today's American Indian communities as it demonstrates the practical implications of recognizing a multiplicity of indigenous language ideologies and their impact on heritage language maintenance and renewal.

The book authored by Ferris takes a look at colonialism and how it may has impacted the history of North America even though its impact on American Indian community has been greatly misunderstood.

In the book, Ferris offers alternative explanations of colonial encounters that emphasize continuity as well as change affecting Native behaviors.

He also examines how communities from three nations – the Ojibwa, Delawares and the Six Nations Iroquois – in what is now southwestern Ontario negotiated the changes that accompanied the arrival of Europeans and maintained a cultural continuity with their pasts that has been too often overlooked in conventional "master narrative" histories of contact.

In reconsidering American Indian adaptation and resistance to colonial British rule, Ferris reviews five centuries of interaction that are usually read as a single event viewed through the lens of historical bias.

The book utilizes historical archaeology to link the American Indian experience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the deeper history of the 16th and 17th centuries and the interactions and with pre-European times.

The book shows how such communities succeeded in retaining cohesiveness through centuries of foreign influence and material innovations by maintaining ancient, adaptive social processes that both incorporated European ideas and reinforced historically understood notions of self and community.