William Wayne Red Hat Jr

As Keeper of the Arrows, William Wayne Red Hat, Jr., is charged with protecting one of the most sacred possessions of the Cheyenne people and serves his tribe as a revered cultural authority. The Arrow Keeper also oversees and maintains the tribe’s spiritual connection to the land. Sibylle Schlesier—whose father, anthropologist Karl Schlesier, was a close associate of Red Hat’s family—recorded and transcribed this memoir of Bill Red Hat’s life. Through his words, we meet an intelligent, humble man who cares deeply about the perpetuation of his people’s cultural identity and the preservation of their beliefs. His descriptions of ceremonies and traditions will serve as a guide to help keep them alive for posterity. Red Hat conveys an oral tradition that preserves stories and memories of his people as well as accounts of historical events passed down within his family.

Papers presented at the Literature Symposium in Taos Ski Valley 2007, includes only authors and artists who volunteered to contribute to this work.

This book is the humorous, bitter-sweet autobiography of a Canadian Ojibwa who was taken from his family at age ten and placed in Jesuit boarding school in northern Ontario. It was 1939 when the feared Indian agent visited Basil Johnston’s family and removed him and his four-year-old sister to St. Peter Claver’s school, run by the priests in a community known as Spanish, 75 miles from Sudbury. “Spanish! It was a word synonymous with residential school, penitentiary, reformatory, exile, dungeon, whippings, kicks, slaps, all rolled into one,” Johnston recalls. But despite the aching loneliness, the deprivation, the culture shock and the numbing routine, his story is engaging and compassionate. Johnston creates marvelous portraits of the young Indian boys who struggled to adapt to strange ways and unthinking, unfeeling discipline. Even the Jesuit teachers, whose flashes of humor occasionally broke through their stern demeanor, are portrayed with an understanding born of hindsight.

"[These volumes] are endlessly absorbing as an excursion into cultural history and national memory."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

An encyclopedia designed especially to meet the needs of elementary, junior high, and senior high school students.