Waheenee, an Indian Girl's Story Told by Herself [B0718]

1981 PB reprint of the 1927 original, in nice clean condition. "I was born in an earth lodge by the mouth of the Knife River, in what is now North Dakota, three years after the smallpox winter." So begins the story of Waheenee, a Hidatsa Indian woman, born in 1839 amid a devastated tribe. In 1906 ethnographer and Presbyterian minister, Gilbert L. Wilson, first visited the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation and began to study the remnants of the Hidatsa tribe. He returned in 1908, sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, and for every summer of the next ten years he worked among the Hidatsas, making notes of all he saw. One of his chief informants was Waheenee-wea, or Buffalo-Bird Woman, who told him this, her life story.

From Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "This was such a fascinating book. It is deemed culturally significant, being in the words that were spoken to Gilbert Livingstone Wilson in the early 1900s, by a Hidatsa woman. It is entirely from her perspective, and I was pleased to find that there are no ignorant moralizations from the outside, as is often the case with describing how the peoples of the Americas lived prior to the Europeans' arrival. There is an incredibly moving afterword from her, as she is an old woman and reflecting back over her lifetime and the great upheavals that occurred during her lifetime. I read this book aloud to my housemate, as we shared coffee in the mornings that allowed us time to spend a few minutes traveling back in time to hear this woman's words. We were both saddened to get to the end of her reminiscences."; "It takes a rare anthropologist to set his ego aside and record what his subjects say about themselves. This book, and his others, are an excellent and unusual perspective into valuable history that would otherwise have been lost."; "I was excited to find a wealth of knowledge about the Hidatsa people in the 1850s. Not to mention a pocket full of survival notes for the Northern Plains. Things I learned include how extensively plains tribes used dogs, how to cut wood without an ax, and how the Hidatsa sang to their corn fields like mothers sing to children. This book gave a look into pre-European life, but also a look into white perspectives of Native people during the 1920s. It's a great primary source!"; ""