For half a century, readers on peyotism have devoured La Barre's fascinating original study, which began when the author, at age twenty-four, studied the rites of fifteen American Indian tribes using Lophophora williamsii, the small, spineless, carrot-shaped peyote cactus growing in the Rio Grande Valley and southward. Continuing his research from the 1930s through the 1980s, Weston La Barre reviews topics such as the Timothy Leary-Richard Alpert ""experiments"" with peyote and other psychotropic substances, the Carlos Castaneda phenomenon, the progress of the Native American Church toward acceptance as a religious denomination, the presumptions of the Neo-American Church, the legal ramifications of ritual drug use, and the spread of peyotism from the Southwest to other North American tribes. This new edition of La Barre's classic study includes 334 new entries in the latest of his highly valued bibliographical essays on works relating to peyote, not just in anthropology but in a variety of fields including archeology, economics, botany, chemistry, and pharmacology. The bibliography lists important contributions in popular media such as newspapers, audiotapes, and films, as well as in scholarly journals.

Born during the final years of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Reservation, Charles E. Apekaum, grandson of Kiowa chief Stumbling Bear, served as the principal interpreter for the Santa Fe Laboratory of Anthropology field expedition in 1935. Educated, bilingual, and world traveled, Apekaum’s services as a translator were sought by anyone who dealt with the Kiowa Indian Agency personnel, politicians, and scholars.The following year, Apekaum traveled throughout Oklahoma with anthropologist Weston La Barre and ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, serving as their liaison as they documented the peyote religion. During off days, Apekaum narrated his life story to La Barre, recounting the final days of the reservation, allotment, the early days of Anadarko, Oklahoma, his seventeen years attending boarding schools, service in the navy during World War I and then as a state game warden, his work translating for politicians, and his involvement in the Native American Church. La Barre never published the manuscript, which contains rich details about intertribal variants of the sacred peyote rite as well as about Apekaum’s life experience.In Autobiography of a Kiowa Indian Benjamin R. Kracht presents Apekaum’s autobiography for the first time. This eyewitness account is an important addition to Native American life narratives and the reconstruction of Kiowa cultural, social, and religious life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the southern Great Plains.

For half a century, readers on peyotism have devoured La Barre's fascinating original study, which began when the author, at age twenty-four, studied the rites of fifteen American Indian tribes using Lophophora williamsii, the small, spineless, carrot-shaped peyote cactus growing in the Rio Grande Valley and southward. Continuing his research from the 1930s through the 1980s, Weston La Barre reviews topics such as the Timothy Leary-Richard Alpert ""experiments"" with peyote and other psychotropic substances, the Carlos Castaneda phenomenon, the progress of the Native American Church toward acceptance as a religious denomination, the presumptions of the Neo-American Church, the legal ramifications of ritual drug use, and the spread of peyotism from the Southwest to other North American tribes. This new edition of La Barre's classic study includes 334 new entries in the latest of his highly valued bibliographical essays on works relating to peyote, not just in anthropology but in a variety of fields including archeology, economics, botany, chemistry, and pharmacology. The bibliography lists important contributions in popular media such as newspapers, audiotapes, and films, as well as in scholarly journals.

Born during the final years of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Reservation, Charles E. Apekaum, grandson of Kiowa chief Stumbling Bear, served as the principal interpreter for the Santa Fe Laboratory of Anthropology field expedition in 1935. Educated, bilingual, and world traveled, Apekaum’s services as a translator were sought by anyone who dealt with the Kiowa Indian Agency personnel, politicians, and scholars.The following year, Apekaum traveled throughout Oklahoma with anthropologist Weston La Barre and ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, serving as their liaison as they documented the peyote religion. During off days, Apekaum narrated his life story to La Barre, recounting the final days of the reservation, allotment, the early days of Anadarko, Oklahoma, his seventeen years attending boarding schools, service in the navy during World War I and then as a state game warden, his work translating for politicians, and his involvement in the Native American Church. La Barre never published the manuscript, which contains rich details about intertribal variants of the sacred peyote rite as well as about Apekaum’s life experience.In Autobiography of a Kiowa Indian Benjamin R. Kracht presents Apekaum’s autobiography for the first time. This eyewitness account is an important addition to Native American life narratives and the reconstruction of Kiowa cultural, social, and religious life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the southern Great Plains.