Based on papers delivered at the 1976 meeting of the American Ethnological Society, American Indian Intellectuals of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries offers biographical sketches of major American Indian scholars and historians between 1828 and 1975.

Edited by Margot Liberty, this book includes important individuals from throughout the United States, including the Northwest Coast (William Beynon), the Great Basin(Sarah Winnemucca), the Southwest(Flora Zuni), the Northeast (Jesse Cornplanter, Alexander General, Arthur Parker, and Ely Parker), and the Plains (George Bushotter, Charles Eastman, Francis La Flesche, John Joseph Mathews, James Murie, and Bill Shakespeare). As liberty notes in her introduction, the biographies of these individuals are marked by the ""awareness of life-ways precious because they were unique, each in its own way, and more precious because they were rapidly vanishing. Linked to this awareness was dedication to the task of preserving at least something for the future ….There is no more poignant record of the pressures of acculturation than some of the personal vignettes presented here.""