Books in Native American Biographies series

Raised among the Sioux until the age of 15, Charles Alexander Eastman (1858–1939) resolved to become a physician in order to be of the greatest service to his people. Upon completing his education at Boston University School of Medicine, he accepted an appointment to a South Dakota Indian reservation, where he was the only doctor available to the victims of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. With the encouragement of his wife, he further distinguished himself both as a writer and as a uniquely qualified interpreter of Native American ways. His writings offer authentic, sometimes stirring views of a world that has forever changed.In The Soul of the Indian, Eastman brings to life the rich spirituality and morality of the Native Americans as they existed before contact with missionaries and other whites. This is a rare firsthand expression of native religion, without the filters imposed by translators or anthropologists. Rather than a scientific treatise, Eastman has written a book, "as true as I can make it to my childhood teaching and ancestral ideals, but from the human, not the ethnological standpoint." His discussions of the forms of ceremonial and symbolic worship, the unwritten scriptures, and the spirit world emphasize the universal quality and personal appeal of Native American religion.

Plains Indians from different tribes speaking different languages were nevertheless able to communicate facts and feelings of considerable complexity when they met. They used a language composed of gestures made almost entirely with the hands and fingers, probably the most highly developed gesture language to be found in any part of the world.With this book, you will find it simple to use this language, which the author learned in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, principally from Sioux Indians in Wyoming. Drawings and short descriptions make clear the proper positions and motions of the hands to convey the meaning of over 870 alphabetically arranged common words — hungry, camp, evening, angry, fire, laugh, owl, cat, many times, brave, cold, heart, rain, spotted, together, river, etc. The words are then used in sample sentences. There are also brief sections on the pictography and ideography of the Sioux and Ojibway tribes, and on smoke signals.This is a book for anyone who wants to learn or teach Indian sign language — scouts, school teachers, camp counselors, scout leaders, parents, linguists, and students of Indian culture. To help counselors and teachers, the last chapters give instructions on how to conduct the Indian ceremony for opening a council fire, an Indian initiation ceremony, and suggestions for sign language tests and exercises.

In this, one of Native American history's most extraordinary documents, a legendary warrior and shaman recounts the beliefs and customs of his people. Completely and utterly authentic, its captivating narrator is the most famous member of the Apache tribe: Geronimo.The spiritual and intellectual leader of the American Indians who defended their land from both Mexico and the United States for many years, Geronimo surrendered in 1886. Two decades later, while under arrest, he told his story through a native interpreter to S. M. Barrett, an Oklahoma school superintendent. Barrett explains in his introduction, "I wrote to President Roosevelt that here was an old Indian who had been held a prisoner of war for twenty years and had never been given a chance to tell his side of the story, and asked that Geronimo be granted permission to tell for publication, in his own way, the story of his life."This remarkable testament is the result. It begins with Geronimo's retelling of an Apache creation myth and his descriptions of his youth and family. He explains his military tactics as well as traditional practices, including hunting and religious rituals, and reflects upon his hope for the survival of his people and their culture.

Black Elk was a medicine man of the Oglala Sioux who rose to fame because of his talents as a healer and his role in the Battle of Wounded Knee. These are just some of the facts readers learn about this fascinating figure, whose life is detailed through biographical text, primary sources, and historical photographs. Readers learn the important place Black Elk occupies in Native American history and United States history. The social studies-focused text helps readers understand how Black Elk helped shape the history of the Sioux people in the 19th century and beyond. A timeline and sidebars offer opportunities for additional learning.

These people also used certain characters or letters, with which they wrote in their books about the antiquities and their sciences. We found a great number of books in these letters and since they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil we burned them all, which they took most grievously, and which gave them great pain.So writes Friar Diego de Landa in his Relación De las cosas de Yucatan of 1566, the basic book in Maya studies. Landa did all he could to wipe out Maya culture and civilization. In the famous auto da fé of July 1562 at Maní, as he tells us, he destroyed 5,000 "idols" and burned 27 hieroglyphic rolls. And yet paradoxically Landa's book, written in Spain to defend himself against charges of despotic mismanagement, is the only significant account of Yucatan done in the early post-Conquest era. As the distinguished Maya scholar William Gates states in his introduction, "ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know as the result either of what Landa has told us in the pages that follow, or have learned in the use and study of what he told." Yucatan Before and After the Conquest is the first English translation of this very important work.Landa's book gives us a full account of Maya customs, daily activities, history, ceremonial festivals, and the many social and communal functions in which their life was expressed. Included here are the geography and natural history of Yucatan, the history of the Conquest, indigenous architecture and other aspects of Maya civilization (sciences, books, religion, etc.), native historical traditions, the Inquisition instituted by the Spanish clergy, Maya clothing, food, commerce, agriculture, human sacrifices, calendrical lore, and much more.