Pretty-Shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows

Abstract

'Little was known of the female contribution to the Crow Indians' brave survival against great odds until Pretty-shield, medicine woman of the consented to tell her story' - Journal of the West. Originally published in 1932 as Red Mother, this book was perhaps the first record of the women's side of Indian life, and it has become a classic work in its field. Pretty-shield told her story to Frank Linderman through an interpreter and using the sign language. A medicine woman of the she was one of the few who remembered what it was like before the white man came and the buffalo went away. She tells about the simple games and dolls of an Indian childhood and the duties of the girls and women - setting up the lodges, dressing the skins, picking berries, digging roots, cooking.From her account we learn about courtship, marriage, childbirth and the care of babies, about medicine-dreams, the care of the sick, and the dangers and joys of womanhood among men whose lives were spent in hunting and fighting. In relating the nature and importance of dream visions, Pretty-shield is easily the feminine equivalent of Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks' - The History Teacher. Frank B.Linderman was born in Ohio in 1869 and in 1885 went to Montana. His early years there were spent as trapper, hunter, and cowboy. He was intimately associated with the Crows and other Indian tribes. Linderman's Plenty-Coups: Chief of the Crows, is also a Bison Book.

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