Trickster and transformer, powerful and vulnerable, Coyote is a complex figure in Indian legend. He was often the ultimate example of how not to be: foolish, proud, self-important. The tales in Old Man Coyote were told by the Crow Indians of present-day southeastern Montana. During long winter evenings by the lodge fire, they enjoyed hearing about the only warrior ever to visit the Bird Country, the Little-people who adopted a lost boy, the two-faced tribe that gambled for keeps, the marriage of Worm-face, and the origin of the buffalo. Wandering through these well-spun tales is the...

About 1875 the Crows abandoned their own Sun Dance, but they continued to carry out other traditional rites despite opposition from missionaries and the federal government. In 1941, Crow Indians from Montana sought out leaders of the Sun Dance among the Wind River Shoshonis in Wyoming and, under the direction of John Truhujo, made the ceremony a pan of their lives. In The Shoshoni-Crow Sun Dance, Fred W. Voget draws on forty years of fieldwork to describe the people and circumstances leading to this singular event, the nature of the ceremony, the reconciliations with Christianity and...

In They Call Me Agnes, the narrator, Agnes Deernose, provides a warm, personal view of Crow Indian family life and culture.

Fred Voget, anthropologist and adopted Crow, sets the stage for Agnes's story, which he compiled from extensive interviews with Agnes and her friends. He describes the origins of the Crows and their culture during buffalo-hunting days and early reservation life. Through Agnes, an elderly Crow woman, he also reveals changes wrought on this once far-ranging, independent tribe by twentieth-century forces.