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Plains Indian Sign Talk (PST), a complex system of hand signs, once served as the lingua franca among many Native American tribes of the Great Plains, who spoke very different languages. Here, Farnell reveals how PST is still an integral component of the stroytelling tradition in contemporary Assiniboine (Nakota) culture.
Describes a unique case of sign language that served as an international language among numerous Native American nations not sharing a common spoken language. The book contains the most current descriptions of all levels of the language from phonology to discourse, as well as comparisons with other sign languages.
Learn to communicate without words with these authentic signs. Learn over 525 signs, developed by the Sioux, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and others. Book also contains 290 pictographs of the Sioux and Ojibway tribes.
Hugh Lenox Scott, who would one day serve as chief of staff of the U.S. Army, spent a portion of his early career at Fort Sill, in Indian and, later, Oklahoma Territory. There, from 1891 to 1897, he commanded Troop L, 7th Cavalry, an all-Indian unit. From members of this unit, in particular a Kiowa soldier named Iseeo, Scott collected three volumes of information on American Indian life and culture—a body of ethnographic material conveyed through Plains Indian Sign Language (in which Scott was highly accomplished) and recorded in handwritten English. This remarkable resource—the largest of its kind before the late twentieth century—appears here in full for the first time, put into context by noted scholar William C. Meadows. The Scott ledgers contain an array of historical, linguistic, and ethnographic data—a wealth of primary-source material on Southern Plains Indian people. Meadows describes Plains Indian Sign Language, its origins and history, and its significance to anthropologists. He also sketches the lives of Scott and Iseeo, explaining how they met, how Scott learned the language, and how their working relationship developed and served them both. The ledgers, which follow, recount a variety of specific Plains Indian customs, from naming practices to eagle catching. Scott also recorded his informants’ explanations of the signs, as well as a multitude of myths and stories. On his fellow officers’ indifference to the sign language, Lieutenant Scott remarked: “I have often marveled at this apathy concerning such a valuable instrument, by which communication could be held with every tribe on the plains of the buffalo, using only one language.” Here, with extensive background information, Meadows’s incisive analysis, and the complete contents of Scott’s Fort Sill ledgers, this “valuable instrument” is finally and fully accessible to scholars and general readers interested in the history and culture of Plains Indians.
This unique book teaches children the hand signals that Native American tribes used to communicate with one another: How to ask a question, how to express past, present and future, and more.
Under orders from General Sheridan, Captain W. P. Clark spent over six years among the Plains Indians and other tribes studying their sign language. In addition to an alphabetical cataloguing of signs, Clark gives valuable background information on many tribes and their history and customs. Considered the classic of its field, this book provides, entirely in prose form, how to speak the language entirely through sign language, without one diagram provided.
Explores current efforts to record, collect and archive endangered languages which are in danger of falling silent.
This is a new release of the original 1926 edition.
This comprehensive survey of indigenous languages of the New World introduces students and general readers to the mosaic of American Indian languages and cultures and offers an approach to grasping their subtleties. Authors Silver and Miller demonstrate the complexity and diversity of these languages while dispelling popular misconceptions. Their text reveals the linguistic richness of languages found throughout the Americas, emphasizing those located in the western United States and Mexico while drawing on a wide range of other examples from Canada to the Andes. It introduces readers to such varied aspects of communicating as directionals and counting systems, storytelling, expressive speech, Mexican Kickapoo whistle speech, and Plains sign language. The authors have included the basics of grammar and historical linguistics while emphasizing such issues as speech genres and other sociolinguistic issues and the relation between language and worldview. American Indian Languages: Cultural and Social Contexts is a comprehensive resource that will serve as a text in undergraduate and lower-level graduate courses on Native American languages and provide a useful reference for students of American Indian literature or general linguistics. It also introduces general readers interested in Native Americans to the amazing diversity and richness of indigenous American languages.