Spirit Of The Plains People

Paintings not only tell a story, they pull the viewer into the emotional life of the individuals portrayed. There are moments of peace, humor, pride, hard-won wisdom, young defiance and fear. The viewer feels the cold, the hunger and the desperate poverty of hunters when the great buffalo herds are extinct.

In People of the Plains (first published in 1909), Amelia McLean Paget records her observations of the customs, beliefs, and lifestyles of the Plains Cree and Saulteaux among whom she lived.

This is a multi-title review: titles include Creators of the Plains, Peoples of the Plains, Spirits of the Plains, and Warriors of the Plains - HIST A specialist in Northern Plains culture, Mails is known for large-format works, made especially distinctive by his own illustrations (e.g., Mystic Warriors of the Plains, 1973), which are now collected as art items and have also been reissued in paperback. As short, handy treatments of the Plains Indian culture for general readers, these four slim texts the first in a series are good compilations of accurate information on art, anthropology, religion, and history. Those who most appreciate Mails's previous work for its beautifully crafted art displayed in a generous format will be disappointed by these books (despite the instructive black-and-white illustrations), but sensitivity, accuracy, thoroughness, and even enthusiasm for the interesting lives of Native peoples survive. Recommended for public and school libraries. Margaret W. Norton, Morton West H.S., Berwyn Ill.-

This book tells how the Plains Indians lived,including their beliefs, ceremoniesand feeling for family life.

The interest of nineteenth-century Lakotas in the Sun, the Moon, and the stars was an essential part of their never-ending quest to understand their world. The Spirit and the Sky presents a survey of the ethnoastronomy of the nineteenth-century Lakotas and relates Lakota astronomy to their cultural practices and beliefs. The center of Lakota belief is the incomprehensible, extraordinary, and sacred nature of the world in which they live. The earth beneath and the stars above constitute their holistic world. Mark Hollabaugh offers a detailed analysis of aspects of Lakota culture that have a bearing on Lakota astronomy, including telling time, their names for the stars and constellations as they appeared from the Great Plains, and the phenomena of meteor showers, eclipses, and the aurora borealis. Hollabaugh’s explanation of the cause of the aurora that occurred at the death of Black Elk in 1950 is a new contribution to ethnoastronomy.

In arresting, but harrowing, prose, James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics--the politics of ethnocide--played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of aboriginal people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald's "National Dream." It was a dream that came at great expense: the present disparity in health and economic well-being between First Nations and non-Native populations, and the lingering racism and misunderstanding that permeates the national consciousness to this day. " Clearing the Plains is a tour de force that dismantles and destroys the view that Canada has a special claim to humanity in its treatment of indigenous peoples. Daschuk shows how infectious disease and state-supported starvation combined to create a creeping, relentless catastrophe that persists to the present day. The prose is gripping, the analysis is incisive, and the narrative is so chilling that it leaves its reader stunned and disturbed. For days after reading it, I was unable to shake a profound sense of sorrow. This is fearless, evidence-driven history at its finest." -Elizabeth A. Fenn, author of Pox Americana "Required reading for all Canadians." -Candace Savage, author of A Geography of Blood "Clearly written, deeply researched, and properly contextualized history...Essential reading for everyone interested in the history of indigenous North America." -J.R. McNeill, author of Mosquito Empires

Describes the history and culture of the Plains Native Americans, or the Buffalo People, before and after the reintroduction of the horse by Spanish explorers; includes instructions for several related projects.