["Many Smokes, Many Moons"-is a general survey which] treats the Americas as a whole. Mr. Highwater writes in his preface: "This book is an effort to make bridges across the vast spaces between Indians and non-Indians and to explore the America of native Americans as it is made visible through Indian art." Actually, the book is not nearly so ambitious as that sentence suggests. The "bridges" are simply brief chronological entries in a calendar of events that mark the experience of American Indians from prehistoric to contemporary times. The book, then, is a kind of clock, the bare outline of an enormous record yet to be set down in writing. As such it is more nearly a reference book than anything else.

Yet the principle of selection seems highly arbitrary; indeed, it seems at times curiously rhetorical, even contentious. Under 1528-36, for example, the single entry refers...