Fools Crow

In the Two Medicine territory of Montana, the Pikuni Indians are forced to choose between fighting a futile war or accepting a humiliating surrender, as the encroaching numbers of whites threaten their very existence

Frank Fools Crow, Ceremonial Chief of the Teton Sioux, is regarded by many to be the greateset Native American holy person since 1900. Nephew of Black Elk, and a disciplined, spiritual and political leader, Fools Crow died in 1989 at the age of 99. This volume reveals his philosophy and practice.

Gathers the reminiscences of Frank Fools Crow, one of the most famous Sioux ceremonial chiefs of the twentieth century

From the award-winning author of the Native American classic Fools Crow, James Welch gives us a richly crafted novel of cultural crossing that is a triumph of storytelling and the historical imagination. Charging Elk, an Oglala Sioux, joins Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and journeys from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the back streets of nineteenth-century Marseille. Left behind in a Marseille hospital after a serious injury while the show travels on, he is forced to remake his life alone in a strange land. He struggles to adapt as well as he can, while holding on to the memories and traditions of life on the Plains and eventually falling in love. But none of the worlds the Indian has known can prepare him for the betrayal that follows. This is a story of the American Indian that we have seldom seen: a stranger in a strange land, often an invisible man, loving, violent, trusting, wary, protective, and defenseless against a society that excludes him but judges him by its rules. At once epic and intimate, The Heartsong of Charging Elk echoes across time, geography, and cultures.

Black Robe, an account of the 17th-century encounter between the Huron and Iroquois the French called "Les Sauvages" and the French Jesuit missionaries the native people called "Blackrobes," is Brian Moore's most striking book. No other novel has so well captured both the intense--and disastrous--strangeness of each culture to one another, and their equal strangeness to our own much later understanding.

James Welch never shied away from depicting the lives of Native Americans damned by destiny and temperament to the margins of society. The Death of Jim Loney is no exception. Jim Loney is a mixed-blood, of white and Indian parentage. Estranged from both communities, he lives a solitary, brooding existence in a small Montana town. His nights are filled with disturbing dreams that haunt his waking hours. Rhea, his lover, cannot console him; Kate, his sister, cannot penetrate his world. In sparse, moving prose, Welch has crafted a riveting tale of disenfranchisement and self-destruction. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

This challenging study analyzes nearly forty superb stories, from mythic narratives predating Columbus to contemporary American Indian fiction, representing every traditional Native American culture area. Developing recent ethnopoetic scholarship and drawing on the critical ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin and Pierre Bourdieu, Karl Kroeber reveals how preconceptions deriving from our hypervisual, print-dominated culture distort our understanding of essential functions and forms of oral storytelling. Kroeber demonstrates that myths do not merely preserve tradition but may transform it by performatively reenacting the concealed sociological and psychological conflicts that give rise to social institutions. Showing how the variability of mythic narrative fosters communal self-renewal, Kroeber offers startling insight into Native Americans' perception of animals as "cultured, " their creation of visually unrepresentable tricksters by aural imagining, and the rhetorical means through which oral narratives may not only reflect but even redirect political change. By making understandable the forgotten artistry of oral storytelling, Kroeber enables modern readers to appreciate fully the tragic emotions, hilarious ribaldry, and haunting beauty in these astonishing Native American mythic narratives. Karl Kroeber is Mellon Professor of Humanities at Columbia University. His most recent books are Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of the Mind and Retelling/Rereading: The Fate of Storytelling in Modern Times.

For centuries, a persistent and important component of Lakota religious life has been the Inipi, the ritual of the sweat lodge. The sweat lodge has changed little in appearance since its first recorded description in the late seventeenth century. The ritual itself consists of songs, prayers, and other actions conducted in a tightly enclosed, dark, and extremely hot environment. Participants who “sweat” together experience moral strengthening, physical healing, and the renewal of social and cultural bonds. Today, the sweat lodge ritual continues to be a vital part of Lakota religion. It has also been open to use, often controversial, by non-Indians. The ritual has recently become popular among Lakotas recovering from alcohol and drug addiction. This study is the first in-depth look at the history and significance of the Lakota sweat lodge. Bringing together data culled from historical sources and fieldwork on Pine Ridge Reservation, Raymond A. Bucko provides a detailed discussion of continuity and changes in the “sweat” ritual over time. He offers convincing explanations for the longevity of the ceremony and its continuing popularity.