American Indian Fairy Tales: Annotated, Illustrated

by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

With no written language and living in the Lake Superior, American Indians shared tales passed down through the ages. Though the tile suggest the stories are fairy tales, the stories were used to pass along the collective wisdom of the tribes in which they were shared. In the 1830s, ethnologist Henry R. Schoolcraft learned the language of these people and went out to collect and to preserve the stories before the tribes disappeared. Schoolcraft is also known for his major six-volume study of Native Americans published in the 1850s. With one exception, all the tales in this book are adapted from the legends collected by Henry R. Schoolcraft, ethnologist and government agent for the Lake Superior country, and published in 1839 with the title, "Algic Researches."

Genres: History, Native Americans, Reference, Folklore, Anthropology

101 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 30, 1916

About the author

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (March 28, 1793 – December 10, 1864) was an American geographer, geologist, and ethnologist, noted for his early studies of Native American cultures, as well as for his 1832 expedition to the source of the Mississippi River. He is also noted for his major six-volume study of American Indians in the 1850s.

He served as a United States Indian agent for a period beginning in 1822 in Michigan, where he married Jane Johnston, mixed-race daughter of a prominent Scotch-Irish fur trader and Ojibwa mother, herself a daughter of Ojibwa war chief Waubojeeg. She taught him the Ojibwe language and much about her maternal culture. They had several children, two of whom survived past childhood. She is now recognized as the first Native American literary writer in the United States.

In 1846 the widower Schoolcraft was commissioned by Congress for a major study, known as Indian Tribes of the United States, which was published in six volumes from 1851 to 1857. He married again in 1847, to Mary Howard, from a slaveholding family in South Carolina. In 1860 she published the bestselling The Black Gauntlet, an anti-Uncle Tom's Cabin novel.

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[mateusz szum era · Rating 3 out of 5]

why they turn into everything but cats (6/10)

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[Kathleen A Hoyland · Rating 4 out of 5]

enchanting !