From Native Americans, Europeans learned about corn and beans, toboggans and canoes, and finding their way around an unfamiliar landscape. Yet the Europeans learned what they wished to learn—not necessarily what the natives actually meant by their stories and their lives—says Calvin Luther Martin in this unique and powerfully insightful book. By focusing on their own questions, Martin observes, those arriving in the New World have failed to grasp the deepest meaning of Native America.Drawing on his own experiences with native people and on their stories, Martin brings us to a new conceptual landscape—the mythworld that seems unfamiliar and strange to those accustomed to western ways of thinking. He shows how native people understand the world and how human beings can and should conduct themselves within it. Taking up the profound philosophical challenge of the Native American “way of the human being,” Martin leads us to rethink our entire sense of what is real and how we know the real.

From Native Americans, Europeans learned about corn and beans, toboggans and canoes, and finding their way around an unfamiliar landscape. Yet the Europeans learned what they wished to learn—not necessarily what the natives actually meant by their stories and their lives—says Calvin Luther Martin in this unique and powerfully insightful book. By focusing on their own questions, Martin observes, those arriving in the New World have failed to grasp the deepest meaning of Native America.Drawing on his own experiences with native people and on their stories, Martin brings us to a new conceptual landscape—the mythworld that seems unfamiliar and strange to those accustomed to western ways of thinking. He shows how native people understand the world and how human beings can and should conduct themselves within it. Taking up the profound philosophical challenge of the Native American “way of the human being,” Martin leads us to rethink our entire sense of what is real and how we know the real.