Review of Indian Lives: Essays on Nineteenth- and Twentieth- Century Native American Leaders and North American Indian Lives

Authors

Charles G. Ballard, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Date of this Version

1989

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly SUMMER 1989 .Copyright 1989 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska—Lincoln.

Abstract

Readers will no doubt react favorably to the descriptions of eight unusual people, classified generally as American Indians, that the editors of Indian Lives have assembled. They range from Maris Bryant Pierce of the Seneca (1811-1874) to Peterson Zah (born 1937), the former tribal chairman of the Navajo. Three women are included, the Hopi-Tewa potter Nampeyo (1860- 1942), Dr. Susan LaFleshe Picotte (1865-1915) from the Omaha tribe, and Minnie Kellogg (1880-1949) from the Oneidas of Wisconsin. The three remaining men are Henry Chee Dodge (1857-1947), the crusty first chairman of the Navajo tribal council in 1923, Charles Curtis (1860-1936), who became vice-president of the United States during the Hoover administration and who is also remembered for writing the bill that destroyed Indian Territory, and Luther Standing Bear (1868-1939), the far-sighted Teton Sioux who championed the rights of traditionalists in his books and who was in his later years a film actor and lecturer.