In most of aboriginal North America before the arrival of Europeans, the most important outside cultural influences came from the centers of Indian civilization in central and southern Mexico: North America was culturally peripheral to these centers in very much the same way as northern and western Europe was for millenia culturally peripheral to the centers of civilization in Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. But, by the time Europeans arrived on the Northwest Coast, there had developed in that region a radically different and original way of life, most readily recognized by its unique and powerful art, a way of life which owed almost ...