traditional virtues illustrated by tales

Wonderful ( )

One of the great outgrowths of doing the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge is that I have found some genres and subject matter I would not have read before, and have made them central to my reading choices. Books by indigenous writers are one of those subsets. The BR challenge coincided with my spending a couple of years living in North Dakota, and for the first time in my life bearing witness to rez life, and having the opportunity to count among my friends, colleagues and acquaintances a number of Native American people, most from one or another of the Sioux tribes. So over the last couple years I have read about a dozen books from indigenous authors, mostly from Native American writers, but a couple from Down Under as well. This year I am looking to expand to Canada and Central America, and then expand again beyond indigenous people to all colonized people. It has been incredibly illuminating so far and I expect this will continue to teach me about the world.

This book, The Lakota Way, was a particular joy. Marshall has distilled the most prized values of Lakota ethics/religion/life to its most bedrock tenets. For each tenet he has included a couple of folkloric stories, and personal reminiscences. Marshall concludes the book with a brief history of European efforts to destroy the Lakota, and really all the Sioux and Ojibwe people. I recently finished The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, so the historical portions covered things mostly quite fresh in my mind, but still, the way he boiled it down to essential events was effective and illuminating. Also illuminating, the wonderful stories in this book. I find myself looking at my own life and choices differently, and I am generally not as given to self-reflection as, perhaps, I ought to be. I hate the trope of the the wise old Indian, I have no doubt there are as many foolish Native Americans as there are foolish European, or Latin, or Asian, or African Americans. Marshall though is in fact a wise old (or at least middle-aged) Indian. So wise. And a wonderful storyteller. I listened to this book, read by the author, and his storytelling made this very special for me.

I recommend this to all readers. It is a simply remarkable book. My son will be 21 in a couple weeks, but when he was younger we often read books simultaneously and then discussed them, and this would be an exceptional choice for for readers middle school and above. (Nothing inappropriate for younger readers, but there are grand concepts most kids under the age of 11 or 12 would not fully grasp.) ( )

Memories and oral teachings from the Lakota People. (I highly recommend the audio version). ( )

The wide variety of stories in this collection is its greatest strength. Marshall's tone is also appealing. ( )