Aboriginal American Authors

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Member of the American Philosophical Society; the American Antiquarian Society; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, etc.; Vice-President of the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia, and of the Congres International des Americanistes; Delegue-General de l'Institution Ethnographique for the United States, etc.; Author of The Myths of the New World; The Religious Sentiment; American Hero Myths, etc.
Aboriginal American Authors, published by the Anthropologist Daniel G. Brinton in 1883, is a work that is particularly appropriate for our own times. The native American movement has stressed the need for history written from the Indian point of view. Interest in native American literature has become an important component in reinforcing a sense of identity among American Indians today.
Brinton's work is a good summary of the better known traditional writings of Indians from many regions of the Western hemisphere. This bibliographical survey provides information on tribal histories that would be particularly useful for Indian Study Programs in the states of Oklahoma, New York and Wisconsin.
Brinton was aware of the 19th century racism of many who wrote about the American Indian and reacted against it in his writings by taking a stance which in some ways anticipates Ruth Benedict's involvement in similar questions half a century later. Aboriginal American Authors is written as an early attempt at placing the literature of the American Indian with the other great literary traditions of the world; that is why its usefulness endures.
John Hobgood Social Science Department Chicago State College 1970
The present memoir is an enlargement of a paper which I laid before the Congres International des Americanistes , when acting as a delegate to its recent session in Copenhagen, August, 1883. The changes are material, the whole of the text having been re-written and the notes added.