Buffalo Girl

Buffalo Bird Girl (ca. 1839-1932) was a member of the Hidatsa, a Native American community that lived in permanent villages along the Missouri River on the Great Plains. Like other girls her age, Buffalo Bird Girl learned the ways of her people through watching and listening, and then by doing. She helped plant crops in the spring, tended the fields through the summer, and in autumn joined in the harvest. She learned to prepare animal skins, dry meat, and perform other duties. There was also time for playing games with friends and training her dog. When her family visited the nearby trading post, there were all sorts of fascinating things to see from the white man’s settlements in the East. Award-winning author and artist S. D. Nelson (Standing Rock Sioux) captures the spirit of Buffalo Bird Girl by interweaving the actual words and stories of Buffalo Bird Woman with his artwork and archival photographs. Backmatter includes a history of the Hidatsa and a timeline.

A strange old woman caked in Montana mud pens a letter to her darling daughter back East—the writer's name is Martha Jane, but her friends call her Calamity... I am the Wild West, no show about it. I was one of the people who kept it wild. Larry McMurtry returns to the territory of his Pulitzer Prize–winning masterwork, Lonesome Dove, to sing the song of Calamity Jane's last ride. In a letter to her daughter back East, Martha Jane is not shy about her own importance. Martha Jane—better known as Calamity—is just one of the handful of aging legends who travel to London as part of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show in Buffalo Girls. As he describes the insatiable curiosity of Calamity's Indian friend No Ears, Annie Oakley's shooting match with Lord Windhouveren, and other highlights of the tour, McMurtry turns the story of a band of hardy, irrepressible survivors into an unforgettable portrait of love, fellowship, dreams, and heartbreak.

"This vibrant book of wonders speaks true and dreams deep. Writng with blazing honesty she tells of her hard-won knowledge of many of the world's spiritual and healing traditions, while hold the Sacred Hoop of Natie Amreicanwisdom. This magnificent teacher becomes for us a new embodiment of White Buffalo Woman." Jean Houston Author of THE SEARCH FOR THE BELOVED BUFFALO WOMAN COMES SINGING explores fascinating uses of traditions like the Medicine Wheel; healing through ritual action; dreamtime; and the moon lodge -- the woman's place of retreat and visioning. These powerful personal tools integrate ancient wisdom with contemporary experience, as Buffalo Woman calls each spiritual warrior to her own true place in the dance of life.

In this intriguing tale (not for children), storyteller extraordinaire Ursula K. Le Guin explores the magic of animals. Her animal characters -- from the irreverent trickster Coyote to the wise matriarch Grandmother Spider -- seem like people to us, just as they do to the little girl who finds herself living among them. We learn, with the girl, that these "Old People" once lived freely on the earth but now must maintain their lifeways carefully alongside the "New People" -- humans. Susan Seddon Boulet chose this tale to illustrate, completing twenty works for its publication. They are extremely effective in bringing Le Guin's characters to life, imbuing them, of course, with Boulet's singular vision of the otherworldly realms occupied by animal spirits. This book is a must for any serious collector of Boulet art.

A haunting dream that will not relent pulls author Kent Nerburn back into the hidden world of Native America, where dreams have meaning, animals are teachers, and the “old ones” still have powers beyond our understanding. In this moving narrative, we travel through the lands of the Lakota and the Ojibwe, where we encounter a strange little girl with an unnerving connection to the past, a forgotten asylum that history has tried to hide, and the complex, unforgettable characters we have come to know from Neither Wolf nor Dog and The Wolf at Twilight. Part history, part mystery, part spiritual journey and teaching story, The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo is filled with the profound insight into humanity and Native American culture we have come to expect from Nerburn’s journeys. As the American Indian College Fund has stated, once you have encountered Nerburn’s stirring evocations of America’s high plains and incisive insights into the human heart, “you can never look at the world, or at people, the same way again.”

In Lori Lansens’ astonishing second novel, readers come to know and love two of the most remarkable characters in Canadian fiction. Rose and Ruby are twenty-nine-year-old conjoined twins. Born during a tornado to a shocked teenaged mother in the hospital at Leaford, Ontario, they are raised by the nurse who helped usher them into the world. Aunt Lovey and her husband, Uncle Stash, are middle-aged and with no children of their own. They relocate from the town to the drafty old farmhouse in the country that has been in Lovey’s family for generations. Joined to Ruby at the head, Rose’s face is pulled to one side, but she has full use of her limbs. Ruby has a beautiful face, but her body is tiny and she is unable to walk. She rests her legs on her sister’s hip, rather like a small child or a doll. In spite of their situation, the girls lead surprisingly separate lives. Rose is bookish and a baseball fan. Ruby is fond of trash TV and has a passion for local history. Rose has always wanted to be a writer, and as the novel opens, she begins to pen her autobiography. Here is how she begins: I have never looked into my sister’s eyes. I have never bathed alone. I have never stood in the grass at night and raised my arms to a beguiling moon. I’ve never used an airplane bathroom. Or worn a hat. Or been kissed like that. I’ve never driven a car. Or slept through the night. Never a private talk. Or solo walk. I’ve never climbed a tree. Or faded into a crowd. So many things I’ve never done, but oh, how I’ve been loved. And, if such things were to be, I’d live a thousand lives as me, to be loved so exponentially. Ruby, with her marvellous characteristic logic, points out that Rose’s autobiography will have to be Ruby’s as well — and how can she trust Rose to represent her story accurately? Soon, Ruby decides to chime in with chapters of her own. The novel begins with Rose, but eventually moves to Ruby’s point of view and then switches back and forth. Because the girls face in slightly different directions, neither can see what the other is writing, and they don’t tell each other either. The reader is treated to sometimes overlapping stories told in two wonderfully distinct styles. Rose is given to introspection and secrecy. Ruby’s style is "tell-all" — frank and decidedly sweet. We learn of their early years as the town "freaks" and of Lovey’s and Stash’s determination to give them as normal an upbringing as possible. But when we meet them, both Lovey and Stash are dead, the girls have moved back into town, and they’ve received some ominous news. They are on the verge of becoming the oldest surviving craniopagus (joined at the head) twins in history, but the question of whether they’ll live to celebrate their thirtieth birthday is suddenly impossible to answer. In Rose and Ruby, Lori Lansens has created two precious characters, each distinct and loveable in their very different ways, and has given them a world in Leaford that rings absolutely true. The girls are unforgettable. The Girls is nothing short of a tour de force.

Fifteen-year-old Amanda's refined life in early twentieth-century San Francisco is disrupted when she grudgingly accompanies her mother to the Oklahoma Territory on a crusade to save the buffalo.