Richard Erdoes

Alfonso Ortiz

Combines a bounty of unpublished tales related to the authors by living storytellers with the best of folklore sources to provide 160 myths and legends of more than 80 tribal groups across the continent

American Indian Myths and Legends

More than 160 tales from eighty tribal groups gives us a rich and lively panorama of the Native American mythic heritage. From across the continent comes tales of creation and love; heroes and war; animals, tricksters, and the end of the world.

Native American Myths and Legends

Mary Crow Dog

The bestselling memoir of a Native American woman’s struggles and the life she found in activism: “courageous, impassioned, poetic and inspirational” (Publishers Weekly). Mary Brave Bird grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota in a one-room cabin without running water or electricity. With her white father gone, she was left to endure “half-breed” status amid the violence, machismo, and aimless drinking of life on the reservation. Rebelling against all this—as well as a punishing Catholic missionary school—she became a teenage runaway. Mary was eighteen and pregnant when the rebellion at Wounded Knee happened in 1973. Inspired to take action, she joined the American Indian Movement to fight for the rights of her people. Later, she married Leonard Crow Dog, the AIM’s chief medicine man, who revived the sacred but outlawed Ghost Dance. Originally published in 1990, Lakota Woman was a national bestseller and winner of the American Book Award. It is a story of determination against all odds, of the cruelties perpetuated against American Indians, and of the Native American struggle for rights. Working with Richard Erdoes, one of the twentieth century’s leading writers on Native American affairs, Brave Bird recounts her difficult upbringing and the path of her fascinating life.

Lakota Woman

John Fire

The personal narrative of a Sioux medicine man reveals his way of life, his role as a holy man among the Lakota, and his relationship with the whites. Reissue.

Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

Dennis Banks

Born in 1937 and raised by his grandparents on the Leach Lake reservation in Minnesota, Dennis Banks grew up learning traditional Ojibwa lifeways. As a young child he was torn from his home and forced to attend a government boarding school designed to assimilate Indian children into white culture. After years of being "white man-ized" in these repressive schools, Banks enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, shipping out to Japan when he was only seventeen years old. After returning to the states, Banks lived in poverty in the Indian slums of Minnesota until he was arrested for stealing groceries to feed his growing family. Although his white accomplice was freed on probation, Banks was sent to prison. There he became determined to educate himself. Hearing about the African American struggle for civil rights, he recognized that American Indians must take up a similar fight. Upon his release, Banks became a founder of AIM, the American Indian Movement, which soon inspired Indians from many tribes to join the fight for American Indian rights. Through AIM, Banks sought to confront racism with activism rooted deeply in Native religion and culture. Ojibwa Warrior relates Dennis Banks's inspiring life story and the story of the rise of AIM - from the 1972 "Trail of Broken Treaties" march to Washington, D.C., which ended in the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building, to the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee, when Lakota Indians and AIM activists from all over the country occupied the site of the infamous 1890 massacre of three hundred Sioux men, women, and children to protest the bloodshed and corruption at the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation. Banks tells the inside story of the seventy-one-day siege, his unlikely nighttime escape and interstate flight, and his eventual shootout with authorities at an FBI roadblock in Oregon. Pursued and hunted, he managed to reach California. There, authorities refused to extradite him to South Dakota, where the attorney general had declared that the best thing to do with Dennis Banks was to "put a bullet through his head." Years later, after a change in state govenment, Banks gave himself up to South Dakota authorities. Sentenced to two years in prison, he was paroled after serving one year to teach students Indian history at the Lone Man school Pine Ridge. Since then, Dennis Banks has organized "Scared Runs" for young people, teaching American Indian ways, religion, and philosophy worldwide. Now operating a successful business on the reservation, he continues the fight for Indian rights.

Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement

Ojibwa Warrior

Life and varied careers of a Sioux Medicine Man from the South Dakota Rosebud Reservation.

From Davy Crockett, Wild Bill Hickok, and Calamity Jane to Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Frank and Jesse James, here are more than 130 colorful stories of the pioneers, cowboys, outlaws, gamblers, prospectors, and lawmen who settled the wild west, creating a uniquely American hero and an enduringly fascinating folk mythology. In this wonderfully boisterous treasury of tall tales, everyone and everything is larger than life and bragging is elevated into an art form. Many of these stories are of real people and real events; more than a few, however, grew taller and funnier as they made their rounds from wagon train to campfire to rodeo to miners' quarters. But even if it is far from established that Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were able to kill three men with one bullet or subdue ferocious grizzly bears with their fists, they come vividly to life here as beloved characters who have become part of the fabric of the American imagination. With black-and white illustrations throughout Part of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

Legends and Tales of the American West

Miti e leggende degli indiani d'America

Mary Brave Bird

Relates the experiences of an Indian woman who grew up on a reservation and joined in the revolution for Indian rights in the sixties and seventies

Relates of such characters as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Calamity Jane, Pecos Bill, and Jim Bowie

Tales from the American Frontier

“Ohitika Woman might be the nonfiction find of the year.” —Houston Chronicle The beloved sequel to the now-classic Lakota Woman, Ohitika Woman follows Mary Brave Bird as she continues her powerful, dramatic tale of ancient glory and present anguish, of courage and despair, of magic and mystery, and, above all, of the survival of both body and mind. Coming home from Wounded Knee in 1973, married to American Indian movement leader Leonard Crow Dog, Mary was a mother with the hope of a better life. But, as she says, “Trouble always finds me.” With brutal frankness she bares her innermost thoughts, recounting the dark as well as the bright moments in her always eventful life. She not only talks about the stark truths of being a Native American living in a white-dominated society but also addresses the experience of being a mother, a woman, and, rarest of all, a Sioux feminist. Filled with contrasts, courage, and endurance, Ohitika Woman is a powerful testament to Mary’s will and spirit.

Ohitika Woman

One hundred illustrated stories on Indian tricksters. The characters include Coyote, a master thief and insatiable lover; Iktomi, a shapeshifting Lakota spiderman; and Veeho, the Cheyenne daredevil. Spanning several centuries and the whole North American continent, a unique, illustrated collection of more than one hundred Native American folktales featuring the tricksters of sixty tribes is a companion volume to American Indian Myths and Legends. 15,000 first printing.

American Indian Trickster Tales

An appreciation of Ireland's geography, history, people, religious spirit, art, literature, leprechauns, and leisure.

Ireland: Bewitching Wonderland

Of all the characters in myths and legends told around the world, it's the wily trickster who provides the real spark in the action, causing trouble wherever he goes. This figure shows up time and again in Native American folklore, where he takes many forms, from the irascible Coyote of the Southwest, to Iktomi, the amorphous spider man of the Lakota tribe. This dazzling collection of American Indian trickster tales, compiled by an eminent anthropologist and a master storyteller, serves as the perfect companion to their previous masterwork, American Indian Myths and Legends. American Indian Trickster Tales includes more than one hundred stories from sixty tribes--many recorded from living storytellers—which are illustrated with lively and evocative drawings. These entertaining tales can be read aloud and enjoyed by readers of any age, and will entrance folklorists, anthropologists, lovers of Native American literature, and fans of both Joseph Campbell and the Brothers Grimm.

Richard Erdoes

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