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Acknowledgments This book is about relationships, tribal and international, nation and state, within and across communities, between people. Undeniably appropriate for a volume highlighting some of the best current thinking on Indigenous nationhood, it also speaks to the inception of this project, and the larger “Tribal Worlds” series for which this is one of the initial offerings. If tribal nations are human relationships, writ large, then Tribal Worlds is true to those sensibilities. Tribal Worlds owes its origins to professional friendships that developed over time, and nurtured through ritual restatements of community we know as academic conferences. At one such gathering, our friend and colleague, Gary Dunham, approached Nesper and Hosmer about launching a book series for SUNY Press. Gary, universally respected as the principal architect of the University of Nebraska’s peerless catalogue of publications in American Indian Studies, had been named Director of SUNY Press and was eager to make a mark in a new location. Nesper and Hosmer began working together nearly a decade ago, in the context of another set of personal and professional relationships. The CIC American Indian Studies Consortium, then hosted by the Newberry Library’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History (now the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies), functioned as a common space, or meeting ground, for professors and graduate students working in various disciplines, and at different institutions. Faculty members from “Big Ten” universities conceived of this novel academic village, convinced administrators to support it, and found an appropriate home at the Newberry. The CIC AIS was designed to foster professional relationships, and did just that. This volume testifies to that fact as a majority of our contributors participated in CIC AIS programs, as did the editors. Those relationships revealed shared scholarly interests as, for instance, a curiosity about the nature and dimensions of tribal nationhood. Our debt to the American Society of Ethnohistory matches our appreciation to the Newberry/CIC AIS. It too functions as meeting vii viii Acknowledgments ground, and graciously allowed us to appropriate most of a day to introduce this project by highlighting earlier versions of several of the papers published in this book. SUNY Press funded a closing reception, at which we, the three of us, decided to press ahead with Tribal Worlds. We are grateful to our many contributors for allowing us to publish their work, and accepting the fact that edited volumes frequently take a long time to appear. We hope you like the final product. We also extend our thanks to anonymous reviewers, James Peltz at SUNY Press; Barry Hosmer, who produced our maps; Matthew Simmons of the University of Tulsa, who produced the consolidated bibliography, compiled the essays, and proofread the final version; and our indexer, Phil Roberts from the University of Wyoming. Chapter 4 is reprinted with permission from American Indian Quarterly 36, number 2 (University of Nebraska Press). Finally, if friendships form the backbone of these tribal worlds, our teachers provided the direction and support. So, this volume is dedicated to Raymond Fogelson and John E. “Jack” Sunder, our teachers. Tulsa, OK and Madison, WI November 2011 ...

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