This book provides the first comprehensive history of the Native Peoples of North America from their arrival in the western hemisphere to the present. It describes how Native Peoples have dealt with the environmental diversity of North America and have responded to the different European colonial regimes and national governments that have established themselves in recent centuries. It also examines the development of a pan-Indian identity since the nineteenth century and provides a comparison not found in other histories of how Native Peoples have fared in Canada and the United States.

"...the authors present an amazing amount of useful material and authoritative and carefully balanced judgements, from which general readers can profit and against which scholars can check their own studies." Francis Paul Prucha, Indiana Magazine of History

"This work consists of the two handsome books....it will serve as a benchmark on the state of aboriginal research in the 1990s. It is a good work and deserves a place on the bookshelves of Native Studies specialists." Ontario History

"...an impressive summing-up of Euro-American scholarship on Aboriginal peoples in the early 1990s. It will be a boon to students as they begin research on a particular period or topic." J.R. Miller, Canadian Historical Review

"The Cambridge History of the Native People of the Americas is an impressive and formidable collection of three two- volume boxed sets that summarizes scholarship on Indian peoples as it existed by the end of the twentieth century...the Cambridge History is a land mark achievement. The broad sweep of the volumes reveals the tremendous diversity of Native American societies, cultures, languages, and historic experiences...It will enjoy a long shelf-life as a handbook even as new research, new publications, and new discoveries counter and qualify some of its contents." Tearsheet From William & Mary Quarterly