In 1885a genteel New England girl traveled to the western frontier to open a school on the Great Sioux Reservation. For six years, Elaine Goodale Eastman taught, hunted with, and lived among the Lakotas, who were experiencing profound changes as buffalo herds dwindled and they were forced to adjust to reservation life. Her informative and sometimes poignant recollections of those years tell much about the daily lives of the Lakotas and how they grappled with challenges to their way of life. Goodale Eastman witnessed the arrival and flowering of the Ghost Dance religion, visited with Sitting...

"Charles Eastman, in collaboration with his wife, Elaine Goodale Eastman, has assembled in this collection a composite, condensed sampling of his tribe's values, and presents them in a language that is at once direct and engaging. To say these allegories are 'wise' begs the question; they are the distilled conclusions of generations upon generations of Plains society and point to the essence of what it is to be a decent, thoughtful, respectable human being-a Sioux Tao told in prose a child of any culture, of any time, can comprehend." Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa) (1858-1939) was a mixed-blood...