Publisher's Synopsis
Twenty years earlier, J. W. Powell published "Indian Linguistic Families of America North of Mexico" to accompany his Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) of the Smithsonian Institution. Powell interpreted the BAE's vast collection of vocabularies through a classificatory perspective like those of geology, geography, and biology, thus organizing understanding of the hundreds of attested languages as members of linguistic families. Originally published in the same volume in 1966, these two essays form a cornerstone of modern indigenous language studies.