Most Popular Books by Richard Erdoes

From the co-author of Lakota Woman, which has sold more than 150,000 paperback copies, comes a compelling account detailing the unique experiences and spiritual knowledge accumulated by four generations of powerful medicine men.

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.

The dramatic, brutally honest, and ultimately triumphant sequel to the bestselling American Book Award winner Lakota Woman, this book continues Mary Brave Bird''s courageous story of life as a Native American in a white-dominated society.

A powerful collection of text and full-color photographs that offers an intimate glimpse of Native American life. • Includes rare photos and firsthand accounts of the sun dance, sacred pipe, yuwipi, and vision quest ceremonies. • By internationally recognized ethnographer Richard Erdoes, author of Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions and Gift of Power. How do you go about knowing a people? In this phenomenal combination of landscape, ceremony, individual portrait, and prose, Richard Erdoes brings forth the lesser seen world of the Native American experience and vision. With the aid of firsthand accounts collected during three decades of personal interactions with indigenous tribes, Erdoes chronicles the traditional rites, individual lives, and historical persecution of North America''s indigenous peoples. The images and words of Crying for a Dream represent Erdoes'' finest work. His focus on the natural and sacred world of North America''s indigenous peoples includes elements of the Sioux ceremonial cycle and portraits of native peoples from the plains, mesas, and deserts. The sun dance, sacred pipe, yuwipi, and vision quest are described by the author and his subjects and are illustrated with more than 70 photographs.

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.

Tracing the career of brilliant visionary Pope Sylvester II, Richard Erdoes has composed a vivid tapestry of a century frighteningly similar to our present one. --publisher description.

The personal narrative of a Sioux medicine man reveals his way of life and beliefs about the white man.

More than 160 tales from eighty tribal groups present 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. “This fine, valuable new gathering of ... tales is truly alive, mysterious, and wonderful—overflowing, that is, with wonder, mystery and life" (National Book Award Winner Peter Matthiessen). In addition to mining the best folkloric sources of the nineteenth century, the editors have also included a broad selection of contemporary Native American voices.

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.

Text and illustrations describe the history, land, culture, and present-day life of the Pueblo Indians.

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

Biography, autobiography, and memoir is among the best ways to teach students to appreciate nonfiction reading.