My Indian Boyhood
摘要
'The book is replete with information. Standing Bear details many native beliefs and interpretations, as well as the symbolism, of the things of nature that guided the very lives of the Lakota, and makes lucid many conceptions that white people have usually regarded as mere superstition because not understood' - Saturday Review of Literature. 'From this book the reader gets a clear picture of Indian life as it looked to the Indian' - Books.Although the traditional nation was in its last days when Luther Standing Bear was born in the 1860s, he was raised in the ancestral manner to be a successful hunter and warrior and a respectful and productive member of society. Known as Plenty Kill, young Standing Bear belonged to the Western tribe that inhabited present-day North and South Dakota.In My Indian Boyhood, he describes, with clarity and feeling lent by experience, the home life and education of Indian children. Like other boys, he played with toy bows and arrows in the tipi before learning to make and use them and became schooled in the ways of animals and in the properties of plants and herbs.His life would be very different from that of his ancestors, but he was not denied the excitement of killing his first buffalo before leaving to attend the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Luther Standing Bear is the author of Land of the Spotted Eagle, My People the Sioux, and Stories of the Sioux (also Bison Books).