A Lost American Religion

For centuries, Native Americans have been seen through one or another distorting lens of the Anglo-American imagination: as archetypal savages, as the hapless victims of the white man's barbarism, as avatars of ecological rectitude. Even the most sympathetic accounts of Indian history are too often burdened by a facile romanticism that obscures the diversity of native peoples and the complexity of their lived experience. In “God's Red Son,” however, Louis Warren, a professor of history at the University of California, offers an original, compellingly written and clear-eyed chronicle of native cultural transformation and ordeal.