treeseed's Full Review: Mari Sandoz - These Were the Sioux
LoisLane05 is hosting the Midwestern Writers Really Can Write W/O. Here's where you can find out more about it: http://www.epinions.com/content_3534332036. She says you don't have to be a mid-westerner to participate but if you are that just means you're extra cool. As an extra cool mid-westerner twice over, (born in Ohio, living in Wisconsin), I have chosen to review These Were the Sioux by the prolific Nebraska writer, Mari Sandoz.
Author of over 23 books, both fiction and non-fiction, Mari Sandoz was born in 1896, a child of Swiss immigrants. She was brought up in northwestern Nebraska during the homesteading era, where her father, a famous frontier character, lived peacefully and in harmony with their neighbors, the Lakota, referred to in this book as the Sioux.
Sandoz wrote many accounts of both the indigenous culture and that of the white homesteaders and frontiersmen. Abused, physically and emotionally as a child, perhaps Mari developed the deep relationship, bordering on kinship with the Lakota people because of their respect and gentleness toward children. In this book that focuses primarily on the Lakota way of growing up, it is evident that her spirit had a deep appreciation for the ordered yet freedom embracing lifestyle of these people.
Sandoz is more famous for her books Old Jules about her father and the frontier, and Cheyenne Autumn and Crazy Horse: Strange Man of the Oglalas, moving stories about indigenous people told with an honesty and clarity and deep respect that few other authors have attained. This small book, only 118 pages long, is however one of my favorites because it comes from a fundamental place within Mari when she had her first contacts with Indians in the pre-literate, unprejudiced openness of childhood. As she says in the Foreward, "The Sioux Indians came into my life before I had any preconceived notions about them, or about anyone else."
In this wonderful little book, Mari relates her first meeting with an Indian, when as a toddler who had wandered off on a childish mission of exploration, she encounters Bad Arm, a Lakota warrior. She is picked up and lifted onto his shoulders for a "pony ride" back to her alarmed old country grandmother by Bad Arm. With fondness and irony she says, "My fingers had to be pried out of the man's strong black braids - a little towheaded white girl clinging shamelessly to the hair of a bloodthirsty Sioux who had helped annihilate General Custer." This is just one of several first hand recollections Mari relates of experiences she has had with the people who were contemporaries of the great Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.
As Mari grew up, she was welcomed with increasing familiarity into the Lakota lodges, becoming intimate with families and with the traditions and customs of the people. Indian children were her playmates and she was present side by side with them as they were taught and guided in the ways of the Lakota. In These Were the Sioux Mari describes in simple yet evocative language the many aspects of growing up for both boys and girls of the Lakota. She describes kinship rules of conduct, learning to hunt, puberty rituals, courting, and marriage and divorce customs and membership in the various societies. She tells us about the role of the Contrary or heyoka who having dreamed of thunder in his puberty fasting must live his life in an unexpected, backward way, like walking upside down or riding his horse facing the tail, thus protecting the people from lightning or other storm damage. We meet the berdache or homosexual man, considered of special sensitivities who through his work as a diviner and spy related upcoming encounters with enemies and was often a part of planned attack by a formal war party. She explains child birth customs and takes us to the bedside of a new mother as she gives her newborn baby his first lesson in discipline by gently closing off his air and stopping his crying, all the while singing a soothing song about strength.
Mari's accounts are full of life and not only share with us the facts of the customs but the thoughts and feelings behind them. She continually explains the beliefs that support the actions. Whether she is describing boys at play or girls in a menstruation ritual or warriors in the powerful Sun Dance, Mari Sandoz speaks from the vision of her own two eyes and from the lessons heard with her own ears. We are not given abstract suppositions from some distant vantage point of history. All of her accounts in this book are from either her personal experiences or from the mouths of the people themselves, people who were at the Little Big Horn or at the Fetterman fight or who knew the famous Lakota diviner called both Pipe Man and Pipe Woman. She was present beside the fire as Bad Arm and He Dog, comrades of Crazy Horse, "threw their minds back" to the old days along the Powder River and the Tongue and the Rosebud.
What I like best about this book is the unapologetic sympathy, affinity and pride that Sandoz shows in her writing. She is often subtly contemptuous of the influences and intrusions of the white people upon the Lakota. She has deep understanding, respect and love for the Lakota and in her narrative, often switches back and forth between descriptions of them in the times before the rifle, in the buffalo days, after the white man, and eventually after the reservation. Here she illustrates with simple unencumbered prose the sadness and waste that came upon the Lakota after the white man came, "No old person was ever left homeless among the Sioux in the buffalo days. Later, when there was so much pursuit by the army, with no rests, no time to hunt, just run, run, often the weaker old ones simply rolled themselves off the travois in some patch of tall grass so no one would see and need to turn back, endangering himself and the rest. In an hour or two the old one would be dead, like some gaunt and gray birdling in the grass. It was almost like an act of will. Or perhaps it was sorrow over the greatness of a people gone, so many dead and so many of their friends, the buffalo."
Mari Sandoz made the people come alive for me in this book. She relates conversations with He Dog at 92 and describes him with love and respect. She speaks with wistful sadness of a worldview that saw fit to imprison him and many others on a thin, arid strip of poor ground, calling him "a wise and gentle man" and "a fighting old hostile who had clung to the orderly ways of the wild until starvation drove the last gaunt stragglers in to the reservation with Crazy Horse."
Mari seems almost to think and speak in the rhythm and style of the Lakota, with a lack of hyperbole and with a frank and unpretentious simplicity, yet her words reveal a vivid insight into a bygone world and a people whose voice went for the most part, unheard, as its light was fading. Upon reading this book, as with others by this talented author and historian, I find myself caught up in the cadences of a proud and orderly life, and at the same time, like Mari herself, I find myself helpless and impotent at its destruction and filled with an unspeakable sadness and longing for its beauty.
This book is an excellent introduction to the Lakota and could be appreciated even by 5th and 6th graders because it is short and direct and personal. It is also an excellent introduction to the style of Mari Sandoz. It is a book that more than some of her more detailed works has a wealth of Mari herself within its pages. If you want to hear the winds in the prairie grass or stand within the dark folds of a courting blanket with a shy lover, or shoot under the neck of a racing buffalo pony, or experience the bleak early days of the reservation, I know of few better sources than Mari Sandoz to take you there.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.