American Indian Lives – serie

Fresh, informative, and provocative, this collection of interviews showcases twelve leading Native artists and activists who have challenged and helped reshape prevailing expectations about Native cultures and identities during the late twentieth century: writers Sherman Alexie and James Welch, singer-songwriter and educator Buffy Sainte-Marie, poet Elizabeth Woody, activist and AIM member Dino Butler, musician and activist John Trudell, writer and activist Winona LaDuke, actor and musician Litefoot, the late aids activist Bonnie Blackwolf, and visual artists Rick Bartow, Jesse Hummingbird, and Norman Guardipee. Engaging in their own right and offering substantive insights into individual careers and personalities, these interviews also explore a number of significant and often controversial intellectual, cultural, and political issues affecting Native peoples today. Among the topics discussed are the effects of the New Age movement and other forms of cultural appropriation, current conflicts and disagreements within Native communities, connections to the environment, alcohol and drug addiction, the American Indian Movement, the blood-quantum debate, religious freedom, the value of elders, and obligations to past cultural traditions.

Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer is Allison Adelle Hedge Coke's searching account of her life as a mixed-blood woman coming of age off reservation, yet deeply immersed in her Huron, Metis, and Cherokee heritage. In a style at once elliptical and achingly clear, Hedge Coke details her mother's schizophrenia; the domestic and community abuse overshadowing her childhood; and torments both visited upon her—(rape and violence) and inflicted on herself (alcohol and drug abuse during her youth). Yet she managed to survive with her dreams and her will, her sense of wonder and promise undiminished.The title Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer refers to life-revelations guiding the award-winning poet and writer through her many trials, as well as her labors in tobacco fields, factories, construction, and fishing; her motherhood; her involvement with music and performance; and the melding of language and experience that brought order to her life. Hedge Coke shares insights gathered along the way, insights touching on broader Native issues such as modern life in the diaspora; lack of a national eco-ethos; the threat of alcohol, drug abuse, and violence; and the ongoing onslaught on self amid a complex, mixed heritage.

It was at Wounded Knee, huddled under a night sky lit by military flares and the searchlights of armored carriers seeking him out, that Vietnam vet Woody Kipp realized that he, as an American Indian, had become the enemy, the Viet Cong, to a country that he had defended with his life. With candor, bitter humor, and biting insight, this book tells the story of the long and tortuous trail that led Kipp from the Blackfeet Reservation of his birth to a terrible moment of reckoning on the plains of South Dakota. Kipp's is a story of Native values and practices uneasily crossed with cowboy culture, teenage angst, and quintessentially American temptations and excesses. As a boy, Kipp was a passionate reader and basketball player, always ready to brawl and already struggling with discrimination and alcoholism in his teens. From his tour of Vietnam as a Marine to his troubled return, from his hell-raising as a violent, womanizing, hard-drinking horse breaker to his consciousness-raising as a college student and foot soldier in the American Indian Movement, Kipp's memoir offers a unique, firsthand view of the enduring power—and the vulnerability—of Blackfeet culture, of the difficulties inherent in cross-cultural understanding, and of the urgent necessity of overcoming these difficulties if the essential heritage of Native America is to survive.

Elias Cornelius Boudinot provides the first full account of a man who was intimately and prominently involved in the life of the Cherokee Nation in the second half of the nineteenth century and was highly influential in the opening of the former Indian Territory to white settlement and the eventual formation of the state of Oklahoma. Involved in nearly every aspect of social, economic, and political life in Indian Territory, he was ostracized by many Cherokees, some of whom also threatened his life. Born into the influential Ridge-Boudinot-Watie family, Boudinot was raised in the East after the assassination of his father, who helped found the first newspaper published by an Indian nation. He returned to the Cherokee Nation, affiliating with his uncle Stand Watie and serving in the Confederate Army and as a representative of the Cherokees in the Confederate Congress. He was involved with treaty negotiations after the war, helped open the railroads into the Indian Territory, and founded the city of Vinita in Oklahoma. He also became a political figure in Washington, DC, a newspaper editor and publisher, and a prominent orator.

As a young adolescent, Hollis Dorion Stabler underwent a Native ceremony in which he was given the new name Na-zhin-thia, Slow to Rise. It was a name that no white person asked to know during Hollis's tour of duty in Anzio, his unacknowledged difference as an Omaha Indian adding to the poignancy of his uneasy fellowship with foreign and American soldiers alike. Stabler's story—coming of age on the American plains, going to war, facing new estrangement upon coming home—is a universal one, rendered wonderfully strange and personal by Stabler's uncommon perspective, which embraces two worlds, and by his unique voice. Stabler's experiences during World War II—tours of duty in Tunisia and Morocco as well as Italy and France, and the loss of his brother in battle—are at the center of this powerful memoir, which tells of growing up as an Omaha Indian in the small-town Midwest of Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Oklahoma in the 1920s and 1930s. A descendant of the Indians who negotiated with Lewis and Clark on the Missouri River, Stabler describes a childhood that was a curious mixture of progressivism and Indian tradition, and that culminated in his enlisting in the old horse cavalry when war broke out—a path not so very different from that walked by his ancestors. Victoria Smith, of Cherokee-Delaware descent, interweaves historical insight with Stabler's vivid reminiscences, providing a rich context for this singular life.

Henry Mihesuah, a Comanche of the Quahada band, has led an ordinary modern American Indian life filled with extraordinary moments. Growing up in the 1920s and 1930s on his family's allotment outside Duncan, Oklahoma, Mihesuah was a member of a family of farmers who gave part of what they grew to black sharecroppers and often helped feed their poorer white neighbors. Never afraid of controversy and always the first to fight, Henry Mihesuah fell in love with and married a white woman and then served a dangerous tour of duty in the Marines in post–World War II China. In the 1950s he took a chance and, encouraged by a federal government program, relocated along with many other Indians to seek urban employment in California. Barely surviving a horrific traffic accident, Mihesuah eventually returned home to Oklahoma, where he has spent the last few decades fighting racism and attempts to take his family's land, eschewing local politics yet also taking many steps to reclaim and revitalize connections to his Comanche family and culture, past and present. Henry Mihesuah spoke at length about his life to his daughter-in-law, accomplished historian Devon Abbott Mihesuah, who has carefully researched and edited those hours of conversation into an engaging, detailed account that is at once honest, informative, and moving. Readers come to know and respect how one forthright Comanche man unyieldingly walks his own path in the modern world, the ways in which events big and small have affected him, and how, with his wife, family, land, strong opinions, and tough choices made along the way, Henry Mihesuah leads a happy and fulfilling life.

This is the first full-length biography of William W. Warren (1825–53), an Ojibwe interpreter, historian, and legislator in the Minnesota Territory. Devoted to the interests of the Ojibwe at a time of government attempts at removal, Warren lives on in his influential book History of the Ojibway, still the most widely read and cited source on the Ojibwe people. The son of a Yankee fur trader and an Ojibwe-French mother, Warren grew up in a frontier community of mixed cultures. Warren's loyalty to government Indian policies was challenged, but never his loyalty to the Ojibwe people. In his short life the issues with which he was concerned included land rights, treaties, Indian removal, mixed-blood politics, and state and federal Indian policy. Theresa M. Schenck has assembled a remarkable collection of newly discovered documents. Dozens of letters and other writings illuminate not only Warren's heart and mind  but also a time of radical change in American Indian history. These documents, combined with Schenck's commentary, provide historical and contextual perspective on Warren's life, on the breadth of his activities, and on the complexity of the man himself; as such they offer a useful and long-awaited companion to Warren's History of the Ojibway.

Here is the oral history of the Apache warrior Chevato, who captured eleven-year-old Herman Lehmann from his Texas homestead in May 1870. Lehmann called him "Bill Chiwat" and referred to him as both his captor and his friend. Chevato provides a Native American point of view on both the Apache and Comanche capture of children and specifics regarding the captivity of Lehmann known only to the Apache participants. Yet the capture of Lehmann was only one episode in Chevato's life.  Born in Mexico, Chevato was a Lipan Apache whose parents had been killed in a massacre by Mexican troops. He and his siblings fled across the Rio Grande and were taken in by the Mescalero Apaches of New Mexico. Chevato became a shaman and was responsible for introducing the Lipan form of the peyote ritual to both the Mescalero Apaches and later to the Comanches and the Kiowas. He went on to become one of the founders of the Native American Church in Oklahoma. The story of Chevato reveals important details regarding Lipan Apache shamanism and the origin and spread of the type of peyote rituals practiced today in the Native American community. This book also provides a rare glimpse into Lipan and Mescalero Apache life in the late nineteenth century, when the Lipans faced annihilation and the Mescaleros faced the reservation.

How American is Miss America? For Susan Supernaw, a Muscogee (Creek) and Munsee Native American, the question wasn’t just academic. Throughout a childhood clouded by poverty, alcoholism, abuse, and a physical disability, Supernaw sought escape in school and dance and the Native American Church. She became a presidential scholar, won a scholarship to college, and was crowned Miss Oklahoma in 1971. Supernaw might not have won the Miss America pageant that year, but she did call attention to the Native peoples living largely invisible lives throughout their own American land. And she did at long last earn her Native American name. Chronicling a quest to escape poverty and find meaning, Supernaw’s story is revealing, humorous, and deeply moving. Muscogee Daughter is the story of finding a Native American identity among the distractions and difficulties of American life and of discerning an identity among competing notions of what it is to be a woman, a Native American, and a citizen of the world.

Henry Mihesuah, a Comanche of the Quahada band, has led an ordinary modern American Indian life filled with extraordinary moments. Growing up in the 1920s and 1930s on his family's allotment outside Duncan, Oklahoma, Mihesuah was a member of a family of farmers who gave part of what they grew to black sharecroppers and often helped feed their poorer white neighbors. Never afraid of controversy and always the first to fight, Henry Mihesuah fell in love with and married a white woman and then served a dangerous tour of duty in the Marines in post–World War II China. In the 1950s he took a chance and, encouraged by a federal government program, relocated along with many other Indians to seek urban employment in California. Barely surviving a horrific traffic accident, Mihesuah eventually returned home to Oklahoma, where he has spent the last few decades fighting racism and attempts to take his family's land, eschewing local politics yet also taking many steps to reclaim and revitalize connections to his Comanche family and culture, past and present. Henry Mihesuah spoke at length about his life to his daughter-in-law, accomplished historian Devon Abbott Mihesuah, who has carefully researched and edited those hours of conversation into an engaging, detailed account that is at once honest, informative, and moving. Readers come to know and respect how one forthright Comanche man unyieldingly walks his own path in the modern world, the ways in which events big and small have affected him, and how, with his wife, family, land, strong opinions, and tough choices made along the way, Henry Mihesuah leads a happy and fulfilling life.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Indian Territory, which would eventually become the state of Oklahoma, was a multicultural space in which various Native tribes, European Americans, and African Americans were equally engaged in struggles to carve out meaningful lives in a harsh landscape. John Milton Oskison, born in the territory to a Cherokee mother and an immigrant English father, was brought up engaging in his Cherokee heritage, including its oral traditions, and appreciating the utilitarian value of an American education. Oskison left Indian Territory to attend college and went on to have a long career in New York City journalism, working for the New York Evening Post and Collier's Magazine. He also wrote short stories and essays for newspapers and magazines, most of which were about contemporary life in Indian Territory and depicted a complex multicultural landscape of cowboys, farmers, outlaws, and families dealing with the consequences of multiple interacting cultures. Though Oskison was a well-known and prolific Cherokee writer, journalist, and activist, few of his works are known today. This first comprehensive collection of Oskison's unpublished autobiography, short stories, autobiographical essays, and essays about life in Indian Territory at the turn of the twentieth century fills a significant void in the literature and thought of a critical time and place in the history of the United States.

Rights Remembered is a remarkable historical narrative and autobiography written by esteemed Lummi elder and culture bearer Pauline R. Hillaire, ScÄlla–Of the Killer Whale. A direct descendant of the immediate postcontact generation of Coast Salish in Washington State, Hillaire combines in her narrative her own life experiences, Lummi oral traditions preserved and passed on to her, and the written record of relationships between the United States and the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast. She tells of government officials, treaties, reservations, and the colonial relationship between the Coast Salish people and white settlers.Hillaire’s book, although written out of frustration with the status of Native peoples in the United States, is not an expression of anger. Rather it represents, in her own words, her hope “for greater justice for Indian people in America, and for reconciliation between Indian and non-Indian Americans, based on recognition of the truths of history.” Addressed to Indigenous and non-Native peoples alike, Rights Remembered is a thoughtful call for understanding and mutual respect between cultures.

George Blue Spruce Jr. is recognized as the first American Indian dentist in the United States. His life story reaches back to the ancient Pueblo culture cherished by his grandparents and parents and extends to state-of-the-art dentistry and the current needs of the American Indian people. Blue Spruce's journey begins on the Santa Fe Indian School campus with his parents' determination that their children would excel academically and obtain college degrees. After graduating from dental school, Dr. Blue Spruce planned to return to the pueblos to treat his people. As it turned out, his destiny reached far beyond: from the wilds of Montana to New York City to San Francisco to South America and back to the United States. In Washington DC, he presented the needs of American Indians to Congress and lunched with the president. Throughout his journey Dr. Blue Spruce has traveled between two cultures, succeeding in mainstream society while keeping Pueblo tradition in his heart. Facing prejudice and conquering adversity, he reached the zenith of his career as director of the Phoenix Regional Indian Health Service and achieving the rank of assistant surgeon general of the United States.

Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer is Allison Adelle Hedge Coke's searching account of her life as a mixed-blood woman coming of age off reservation, yet deeply immersed in her Huron, Metis, and Cherokee heritage. In a style at once elliptical and achingly clear, Hedge Coke details her mother's schizophrenia; the domestic and community abuse overshadowing her childhood; and torments both visited upon her—(rape and violence) and inflicted on herself (alcohol and drug abuse during her youth). Yet she managed to survive with her dreams and her will, her sense of wonder and promise undiminished.The title Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer refers to life-revelations guiding the award-winning poet and writer through her many trials, as well as her labors in tobacco fields, factories, construction, and fishing; her motherhood; her involvement with music and performance; and the melding of language and experience that brought order to her life. Hedge Coke shares insights gathered along the way, insights touching on broader Native issues such as modern life in the diaspora; lack of a national eco-ethos; the threat of alcohol, drug abuse, and violence; and the ongoing onslaught on self amid a complex, mixed heritage.

In this lively and sometimes poignant collection of essays and autobiographies, nearly fifty Alaska Native writers tell of their unique way of life and bear witness to the sweeping cultural changes occurring in their lifetimes. They explore a range of experiences and issues, including skinning a polar bear; traditional domestic and subsistence practices; marriage customs; alcoholism; the challenges and opportunities of modern education; balancing traditional and contemporary demands; discrimination; adapting to urban life; the treatment of Native peoples in school textbooks; and the social realities of speaking standard and "village" English.With its fresh perspectives and unfailingly authentic voices, this collection is essential for an understanding of Alaska Native peoples today.

In Winged Words Laura Coltelli interviews some of America's foremost Indian poets and novelists, including Paula Gunn Allen, Michael Dorris, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, N. Scott Momaday, Simon Ortiz, Wendy Rose, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor; and James Welch. They candidly discuss the debt to old and the creation of new traditions, the proprieties of age and gender; and the relations between Indian writers and non-Indian readers and critics, and between writers and anthropologists and histo-rians. In exploring a wide range of topics, each writer arrives at his or her own moment of truth.

Of Athapaskan and Tlingit ancestry, Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned lived in the southern Yukon Territory for nearly a century. They collaborated with Julie Cruikshank, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, to produce this unique kind of autobiography.

One of the earliest memoirs by an American Indian, Chainbreaker presents the recollections of a Seneca chief, also known as Governor Blacksnake. A fighter in the American Revolution who lived more than a century, Chainbreaker told his story as an old man in the 1840s to a fellow Seneca, Benjamin Williams, who translated it and committed it to paper. Epic in scale and yet intensely personal, Chainbreaker's story provides a rare Native view of warfare and diplomacy during a crucial period in American history. His account is only fully available in this edition, featuring extensive commentary by Thomas S. Abler.

George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh, 1818–69), an Ojibwe writer and lecturer, rose to prominence in American literary, political, and social circles during the mid-nineteenth century. His colorful, kaleidoscopic life took him from the tiny Ojibwe village of his youth to the halls of state legislatures throughout the eastern United States and eventually overseas. Copway converted to Methodism as a teenager and traveled throughout the Midwest as a missionary, becoming a forceful and energetic spokesperson for temperance and the rights and sovereignty of Indians, lecturing to large crowds in the United States and Europe, and founding a newspaper devoted to Native issues. One of the first Native American autobiographies, Life, Letters and Speeches chronicles Copway's unique and often difficult cultural journey, vividly portraying the freedom of his early childhood, the dramatic moment of his spiritual awakening to Methodism, the rewards and frustrations of missionary work, his desperate race home to warn of a pending Sioux attack, and the harrowing rescue of his son from drowning.

This is the spirited story of Esther Burnett Horne, an accomplished and inspiring educator in Indian boarding schools. Born in 1909, Horne attended Haskell Indian Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, and often visited relatives on the Shoshone Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Motivated by teachers like Ella Deloria and Ruth Muskrat Bronson, Horne devoted her life to educating other Indian children. She began teaching at the Wahpeton Indian School in Wahpeton, North Dakota, in 1930 and has remained active in education to the present day. Her experiences as student and teacher have enabled Horne to provide a detailed portrait of Indian boarding schools. We learn about daily life at Haskell and about the challenges and rewards of teaching for the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Wahpeton. Above all, Horne's life illuminates the ongoing struggle by Native teachers and students to retain their cultural identities within a government educational system designed to assimilate them. Esther Horne and Sally McBeth developed this life history in a truly collaborative manner. McBeth carefully documented both Horne's personal history and the creation of this work. What emerges is an engaging and informative narrative about education and identity.

This book is the unforgettable story of a Comanche woman who has become one of the most influential, inspired, and determined Native Americans in politics. LaDonna Harris was born on a Comanche allotment in southern Oklahoma in the 1930s. From her earliest years, she was immersed in a world of resistance, reform, and political action. As the wife of Senator Fred R. Harris, LaDonna was actively involved in political advising, campaigning, and networking. Not content to remain in the background, LaDonna became a well-known political figure in her own right, serving on the National Indian Opportunities Council as President Lyndon B. Johnson's appointee and working beside such notable political figures as Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kennedy, and Sargent Shriver. In 1980 she became the vice-presidential nominee for the environmentalist Citizen's Party. Her story provides a witty and valuable American Indian insider's view of modern national political scenes.

Here is the enlightening story of an esteemed and eloquent Mi'kmaq woman whose message of "gentle persuasion" has enriched the life of a nation. Rita Joe is celebrated as a poet, an educator, and an ambassador. In 1989, she accepted the Order of Canada "on behalf of native people across the nation." In this spirit she tells her story and, by her example, illustrates the experiences of an entire generation of aboriginal women in Canada.Song of Rita Joe is the story of Joe's remarkable life: her education in an Indian residential school, her turbulent marriage, and the daily struggles within her family and community. It is the story of how Joe's battles with racism, sexism, poverty, and personal demons became the catalyst for her first poems and allowed her to reclaim her aboriginal heritage. Today, her story continues: as she moves into old age, Joe writes that her lifelong spiritual quest is ever deepening.

Most of Alexander Posey's short and remarkable life was devoted to literary pursuits. Through a widely circulated satirical column published under the pseudonym Fus Fixico, he did much to document and draw attention to conditions in Indian Territory. He rose to prominence among the Creeks and played a leading role as spokesman on a number of serious political issues. Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. has written the first full biography of Alexander Posey, a pioneer of American Indian literature and a shaper of public opinion.

In more than twenty powerful films, Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin has waged a brilliant battle against the ignorance and stereotypes that Native Americans have long endured in cinema and television. In this book, the first devoted to any Native filmmaker, Obomsawin receives her due as the central figure in the development of indigenous media in North America. Incorporating history, politics, and film theory into a compelling narrative, Randolph Lewis explores the life and work of a multifaceted woman whose career was flourishing long before Native films such as Smoke Signals reached the screen. He traces Obomsawin's path from an impoverished Abenaki reserve in the 1930s to bohemian Montreal in the 1960s, where she first found fame as a traditional storyteller and singer. Lewis follows her career as a celebrated documentary filmmaker, citing her courage in covering, at great personal risk, the 1991 Oka Crisis between Mohawk warriors and Canadian soldiers. We see how, since the late 1960s, Obomsawin has transformed documentary film, reshaping it for the first time into a crucial forum for sharing indigenous perspectives. Through a careful examination of her work, Lewis proposes a new vision for indigenous media around the globe: a "cinema of sovereignty" based on what Obomsawin has accomplished.

Mourning Dove was the pen name of Christine Quintasket, a member of the Colville Federated Tribes of eastern Washington State. She was the author of Cogewea, The Half-Blood (one of the first novels to be published by a Native American woman) and Coyote Stories, both reprinted as Bison Books. Jay Miller, formerly assistant director and editor at the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, Newberry Library, Chicago, now is an independent scholar and writer in Seattle. He is the compiler of Earthmaker: Tribal Stories from Native North America.

I'll Go and Do More is the story of Annie Dodge Wauneka (1918–97), one of the best-known Navajos of all time. A daughter of the popular Navajo leader Chee Dodge, Wauneka spent most of her early years herding sheep and raising nine children. After her father's death, she entered politics and was often the only woman on the Navajo Tribal Council during the quarter century that she served. Wauneka became a forceful and articulate advocate for Indian health care, education, and other issues, working both on the reservation and in the halls of Congress to improve the lives of the Navajos. Carolyn Niethammer draws on interviews with family and friends, speeches, and correspondence to offer an arresting and readable portrait of this complex Navajo woman. Wauneka's professional and personal triumphs and challenges—her temper was legendary—are rendered vividly, enabling readers to better appreciate the enduring accomplishments of the Navajos' Legendary Mother.

One of the foremost Native American intellectuals of his generation (1904-77), D'Arcy McNickle is best known today for the American Indian history center that carries his name at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and for his novels, The Surrounded, Runner in the Sun, and Wind from an Enemy Sky. A historian and novelist, he was also an anthropologist, Bureau of Indian Affairs official during the heady days of the Indian New Deal, teacher, and founding member of the National Congress of American Indians. The child of a Métis mother and white father, he was an enrolled member of the Flathead Tribe of Montana. But first, and largely by choice, he was a Native American who sought to restore pride and self-determination to all Native American people. Based on a wide range of previously untapped sources, this first full-length biogrpahy traces the course of McNickle's life from the reservation of his childhood through a career of major import to American Indian political and cultural affairs. In so doing it reveals a man who affirmed his own heritage while giving a collective Indian voice to many who had previously seen themselves only in a tribal context.

John Rollin Ridge is the first full-length biography of a Cherokee whose best revenge was in writing well. A cross between Lord Byron, the romantic poet who made things happen, and Joaquin Murieta, the legendary bandit he would immortalize, John Rollin Ridge was a controversial, celebrated, and self-cast exile. Ridge was born to a prominent Cherokee Indian family in 1827, a tumultuous and violent time when the state of Georgia was trying to impose its sovereignty on the Cherokee Nation and whites were pressing against its borders. James W. Parins places Ridge in the circle of his family and recreates the circumstances surrounding the assassination of his father (before his eyes) and his grandfather and uncle by rival Cherokees, led by John Ross. Eventful chapters portray the boy's flight with his mother and her family to Arkansas, his classical education there, his killing of a Ross loyalist and subsequent exile in California during the gold rush, his talent as a romantic poet and author, and his career as a journalist. To the end of his life, Ridge advocated the Cherokees' assimilation into white society.

Told in their own words, Turtle Lung Woman’s Granddaughter is the unforgettable story of several generations of Lakota women who grew up on the open plains of northern Nebraska and southern South Dakota. Delphine Red Shirt has delicately woven the life stories of her mother, Lone Woman, and Red Shirt’s great-grandmother, Turtle Lung Woman, into a continuous narrative that succeeds triumphantly as a moving, epic saga of Lakota women from traditional times in the mid–nineteenth century to the present. Especially revealing are Turtle Lung Woman’s relationship with her husband, Paints His Face with Clay, her healing practice as a medicine woman, Lone Woman’s hardships and celebrations growing up in the early twentieth century, and many wonderful details of their domestic lives before and during the early reservation years.