Exploring the motivations of Indians involved in the fur trade, the contributors to this volume challenge the spiritualist interpretation set forth by Calvin Martin in "Keepers of the Game," which dismisses the lure of European goods--the power and leisure that firearms and other tools afforded the Indians--and instead attributes the Indians' willingness to overkill wildlife to the epidemics that decimated their ranks, that not only shattered their religious bonds with game but also unleashed a furious revenge against the animals.

SHEPARD KRECH III is a professor of anthropology and director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University. He is a past president of the American Society for Ethnohistory and has been a fellow and trustee of the National Humanities Center. His many books include The Ecological Indian and Encyclopedia of World Environmental History.