Native America

The Story of the First Peoples

De: Kenneth L. Feder

Narrado por: Adam Barr

Native America presents an infinitely surprising and fascinating deep history of the continent's Indigenous peoples. Kenneth Feder, a leading expert on Native American history and archaeology, draws on archaeological, historical, and cultural evidence to tell the ongoing story, more than 20,000 years in the making, of an incredibly resilient and diverse mixture of peoples, revealing how they have ingeniously adapted to the many changing environments of the continent, from the Arctic to the desert Southwest.

Native America introduces close to a hundred different peoples, each with their own language, economic and social system, and religious beliefs. We learn about hunters of enormous Ice Age beasts; people who raised stone toolmaking to the level of art; a Native American empire ruled by a king and queen, with a huge city at its center and colonies hundreds of miles away; a society that made the desert bloom by designing complex irrigation networks; brilliant architects who built fairy castles in sandstone cliffs; and artists who produced beautiful and moving petroglyphs and pictographs that reflect their deep thinking about history, the sacred, the land, and the sky.

Native America is not about peoples of the past, but vibrant, living ones with an epic history of genius and tenacity—a history that everyone should know.

©2025 Princeton University Press (P)2025 Princeton University Press

Not what I was after

Got about 20% into the book before I gave up. I want/need a good outline of Native American history. I teach world art history, and this would have been great context to help teach that class, but there was essentially no meaningful history covered in the first 20% of the book. It was mostly stuff meta to the topic: lists and discussions of modern archaeologists, discussions about archaeology, a long diatribe on Columbus (which I agree with) tied to a story about the time the author wrote an opinion article and got an unhinged response to, etc. I just don't care about any of this when I'm buying a book about Native American history, I want... Native American history.

Writing style is very casual. If that's not your bag, I'd skip this, but it can be nice for a more conversational read.