Everywhere they are dancing. From Oklahoma City's huge Red Earth celebration to fund-raising events at local high schools, powwows are a vital element of contemporary Indian life on the Southern Plains. Some see it as tradition, handed down through the generations. Others say it's been sullied by white participation and robbed of its spiritual

significance. But, during the past half century, the powwow has become one of the most popular and visible expressions of the dynamic cultural forces at work in Indian country today.

Clyde Ellis has written the first comprehensive history of...

Near the close of the nineteenth century, Isabel Crawford went to the Kiowa-Comanche Reservation in Oklahoma and founded the Saddle Mountain Baptist Mission. This book, written in journal form, begins with her arrival at the reservation in 1896 and describes her decade-long crusade to convert the Indians to Christianity. She and her assistant were the only white women at the isolated station in the Wichita Mountains. Crawford's experience there tested her resourcefulness, endurance, and sometimes her faith. Humor marks her journal as she recounts her struggles to establish a formal mission....

Tales of the Tepee grew out of Edward Everett Dale's close association with Indian tribes living in Oklahoma. During territorial days young Dale rode, hunted, and visited with the Kiowas, Comanches, and Wichitas. Later he taught many Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, Sac and Fox, and Delawares at the state university. Near the beginning of his long and distinguished career as a historian, he gathered and recorded these stories. Originally published in 1920, Tales of the Tepee takes the reader to the lodge bonfires of the Cherokees, Wichitas, and Pawnees, where children stayed awake to...

This anthology examines the origins, meanings, and enduring power of the powwow. Held on and off reservations, in rural and urban settings, powwows are an important vehicle for Native peoples to gather regularly. Although sometimes a paradoxical combination of both tribal and intertribal identities, they are a medium by which many groups maintain important practices. Powwow begins with an exploration of the history and significance of powwows, ranging from the Hochunk dances of the early twentieth century to present-day Southern Cheyenne gatherings to the contemporary powwow circuit of the...

In this highly original and moving volume, an anthropologist, a historian, and a Native singer come together to reveal the personal and cultural power of Christian faith among the Kiowas of southwestern Oklahoma and to show how Christian members of the Kiowa community have creatively embraced hymns and made them their own. Kiowas practice a unique expression of Christianity, a blending that began with the arrival of missionaries on the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation in the 1870s. In these pages, historian Clyde Ellis offers a compelling look at the way in which many Kiowas became Christian...

Reservation boarding schools represented an important component in the U.S. government's campaign in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to "civilize" American Indians according to Anglo-American standards. The history of the Rainy Mountain School in southwestern Oklahoma reveals much about the form and function of the Indian policy and its consequences for the Kiowa children who attended the school.

In To Change Them Forever, Clyde Ellis surveys changes in government policy and tells how the Kiowa people resisted and accommodated the efforts of school personnel...