Life Stages and Native Women explores how life stages and responsibilities of Metis, Cree, and Anishinaabe women were integral to the health and well-being of their communities during the mid- 20th century. The book is rich with oral history conducted with fourteen Algonquian elders from the Canadian prairies and Ontario. These elders share stories about the girls and women of their childhood communities at mid-century (1930 1960), and customs related to pregnancy, birth and post-natal care, infant and child care, puberty rites, gender, and age-specific work roles, the distinct roles...

No other group in Northern America has been more romanticized and stereotyped than the Plains Indians-the Blackfoot, Plains Cree, Dakota, Kiowa and other tribes of the grasslands. These people did not separate their lives as we do today into categories such as work, play, religion, law and art. To them, every part of life and all forms of life made up a spiritual whole: a self-sufficient way of life attuned to nature. This book, with its authenticated drawings, tells how the Plains Indians lived: how they hunted buffalo, and made their tepees, clothing and tools. It also explains their...