Review of <i>Handbook of North American Indians</i> Volume 13. <i>Plains</i>. Edited by Raymond J. DeMallie

INDIANS AND ANTHROPOLOGISTS To say that the Plains volume of the Smithsonian Institution's Handbook of North American Indians has been long awaited is a literal as well as a figurative verity. Research for the volume began in 1971, then stalled until 1985, when Raymond DeMallie took over as editor and reinvigorated the project. Still, progress remained slow until 1998, as other volumes in the series were given priority. Then an all-out push was made to complete the work: manuscripts written in the 1970s and 1980s were revised, often through the addition of a co-author, and the content was generally updated to reflect the state of knowledge in the 1990s. The last manuscript was accepted on 14 November 2000, a year before publication. The wait was worthwhile. The final product is a comprehensive and scholarly synthesis of Plains Indian ways of life from 12,000 BCE to the 1990s, from the Prairies of Canada to the Rio Grande, and from archaeological records to tribal traditions. The volume (which comes in two parts of about seven hundred pages each) is handsomely presented: there are photographs on almost every page, each explicated in detail as to provenance and content in an accompanying caption, and frequent 217 maps expertly done. If the reader needs additional information beyond the mass of material in each chapter, the bibliography contains more than two hundred pages of references, drawn from many scholarly fields. DeMallie deserves praise not only for pulling it all together, but for his own chapter contributions seven in all, either as sole or joint author. It is a major accomplishment. Beneath the main content conveying the remarkable diversity and richness of Plains Indian societies, there is a subtext that reveals the ways anthropologists have interacted with and represented indigenous peoples. Most of the authors are anthropologists, with a sprinkling of historians and scholars from other disciplines. Only one scholar-JoAllyn Archambault-has a tribal affiliation noted in the list of contributors. Possibly there are other Native Americans here who chose not to give their tribal affiliation, but it seems they are poorly represented. There is a tradition of collaboration between anthropologists and Indian experts-Alice Fletcher and Francis La Flesche, for example-and it would have been enterprising on the part of their writers to have co-authored some chapters in this manner.

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