The Enchanted Mirror

This book is the second of three volumes on the history of the Pawnee people. It examines the roots of the primary shaping cultural innovation in recent Pawnee history - an issue ignored in all other studies of Pawneeland. The 18th century saw the slow formulation of race as a global identity system in Europe and America, and the Pawnees embraced this innovation early in the 19th century. The ideas of race flowed up the Mysterious River in those days, and the coming of racial identity systems rewrote the nature of humankind and the truths of the Pawnee world.