The richness and the range of Native American spirituality has long been noted, but it has never been examined so thoroughly, nor with such an eye for the amazing interconnectedness of Indian tribal ceremonies and practices, as in An Archaeology of the Soul. In this monumental work, destined to become a classic in its field, Robert Hall traces the genetic and historical relationships of the tribes of the Midwest and Plains--including roots that extend back as far as 3,000 years. Looking beyond regional barriers, An Archaeology of the Soul offers new depths of insight into American Indian ethnography. Hall uncovers the lineage and kinship shared by Native North Americans through the perspectives of history, archaeology, archaeoastronomy, biological anthropology, linguistics, and mythology. The wholeness and panoramic complexity of American Indian belief has never been so fully explored--or more deeply understood.
Sally rescued by the Comanche Indians, given the name Yacke-pete, finds herself adopted into a culture that lived in harmony with nature, honored the spirit, didnt believe in a punishing God, did not cover their nakedness and practiced polygamy. As a young maiden she falls in love with and is promised to Blue Sky, her Indian brother. When the soldiers find her, they insist on returning her to her white civilization. Forced back into her white world, she is always referred to as, the girl who lived with the Indians. She will never give up her love for her Comanche people, her wild free spirit and her Indian ways. She falls in love with and marries Martin a rancher, whom she will always love deeply, but Blue Sky is still her hearts love. Believing as her people that sex is a natural act shared between a woman and man, sometimes with feelings of love, sometimes with only the need for peace and comfort. She will try to divide her heart between the men she loves, but her heart cannot divide or subtract, it can only add and multiply. She believes, as the Indians that our life is decided by destiny, that we cannot fight it. It will lead us down a path that was decided before our birth into this world. We make choices but fate might turn it all around and lead us where we are to go. This is a historical romance based on true events; one woman torn between two cultures must follow her heart to determine whether her choices will decide her destiny.
Danny Lindeen strapped on two guns, aiming to rescue his sister, Amy, and kill the white slavers that had abducted her. He left town with a price on his head for killing the man that sold her, leaving his two-timing girlfriend behind. He set off down the Santa Fe Trail into the wilds of early America to a future where a back-up gun held by a guy or girl meant the difference of life or death.
In the autumn of 1878 a band of Cheyenne Indians set out from Indian Territory, where they had been sent by the U.S. government, to return to their homeland in Yellowstone country. Mari Sandoz tells the saga of their heartbreaking fifteen-hundred-mile flight. Alan Boye provides an introduction to this Bison Books edition.
Susan Kalter presents seventeen previously unpublished short stories by John Joseph Mathews and skillfully intertwines literary analysis, author biography, and archival research with his journals and personal correspondence. Mathews is considered one of the founders and shapers of the twentieth-century Native American novel, yet literary history has largely ignored his work. An Osage writer from Oklahoma, Mathews also spent time in Los Angeles and Europe. The stories in this volume were written at the dawn of the nuclear age by an author who exposed the social dynamics of an emerging world order, an author who had also published explicitly about the ways he observed the East Coast establishment suppressing southwestern writers. This work shows us the aesthetics we missed out on as a result. Topics range from adulterous murder to Cherokee removal, from the thrill of the hunt to the cultural impasses between U.S. citizens in Mexico and their hosts, from the modern Middle East to the fantastical future. The stories bear the consciousness of a postwar world--its confusions and regrets, its orthodoxies and hypocrisies--as well as the mark of a practiced and prolific writer. The Short Stories of John Joseph Mathews, an Osage Writer sheds light on the complexity of Native American experiences of the last century and the ripple of these stories today.
An historical narrative of epic scope, An American Passion is a story of adventure, political intrigue, war, and romance set on the Northern Plains during the last several decades of the Nineteenth Century. While faithfully adhering to the sketchy and often contradictory historical record, the epic offers a vivid, imaginatively realized account of the life of the mysterious Crazy Horse, legendary war chief of the Lakota Sioux. A man who typically let his actions do his speaking for him and who died young, assassinated at the hands of the U.S. Government in his mid-thirties, Crazy Horse's story is related by five different narrators. An American Passion opens with a prologue spoken by the Missouri River, the mighty river of the Great Plains. With the historical context established, Crazy Horse's life, from his birth to his death little more than a year following his great victory over George Armstrong Custer at the Little Big Horn, is related retrospectively by his grieving father Worm, a notable medicine man of the tribe. The net major section of the epic is narrated by the woman for whom Crazy Horse risked his life and the welfare of his people. Black Buffalo Woman's tale is a tragedy in the vein of Romeo and Juliet's. Unlike the story of Shakespeare's fallen lovers, however, the love story of Crazy Horse and Black Buffalo Woman has never been related in its full, gripping complexity as it is in An American Passion. Amazingly, after his nearly fatal attempt to take Black Buffalo Woman as his wife Crazy Horse went on to marry, and the third major narration of An American Passion is that of Black Shawl, his fiercely loyal and devoted widow and the mother of his only known child. Telling her story at about the time Sitting Bull was returning to the reservation after having been released from prison by the U.S. Government, a bitter but not a hopeless woman, Black Shawl focuses on the early death of her daughter by Crazy Horse and on her final days in captivity with Crazy Horse. The epic concludes with the account of He Dog, a loyal friend of Crazy Horse, having fought beside him throughout his days as the greatest warrior among the Sioux. He Dog lived to be nearly a hundred years old and served as a respected judge in the Indian courts on the reservation. Told from the vantage point of 1910, some 33 years after the killing of Crazy Horse, He Dog's narration is largely a tribute to his friend, a consideration of the differences in character and temperament between himself and Crazy Horse, and an elegy to what might have been and, perhaps, may some day yet be. In the depth and breadth of its portrayal of major figures in Crazy Horse's life who are little more than footnotes in the historical record, and in the insight it offers into the heart and mind of a great and complicated man, a man who lived and died, ultimately, as an enigma even to the people who revered (and revere) him, An American Passion is a unique, emotionally engaging account of the final days of the resistance of the Native Americans of the Northern Plains to that juggernaut of forces which, having achieved its objective, destroyed a culture, though not a people.
