Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 2003
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 23, No. 1, Winter 2003, pp. 62.
Abstract
This engaging compendium of essays chronicles the professional contributions of Dr. Beatrice Medicine, a Lakota raised on the Standing Rock Reservation. She earned a B.S. degree from South Dakota State University in 1945 and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin- Madison in 1983 after many years as a professional anthropologist. She has served as an academic anthropologist at no less than ten universities since retiring in 1988 and also worked as an applied anthropologist during this time. As a Native American who remains an active participant in her Native culture, she brings to her work a cultural perspective infrequently found in anthropological writings.
The volume gathers together thirty articles written between 1969 and 1998, most of them from the 1970s and 1980s, opening with a biographical essay first published in 1978. Other essays are grouped into related subjects: education, gender and cultural identity, beliefs and well-being, families, and anthropology. Throughout the book Medicine is concerned with the cultural roles of Indians and of Indian women.
Medicine deals with particular ethnographic problems with subtlety and penetration. In "'Warrior Women': Sex Role Alternatives for Plains Indian Women" she examines several traditional roles that go beyond the stereotype for women in Lakota and Plains Indian societies. In a chapter on Lakota alcoholism she notes the powerful coercions toward excessive drinking and the relatively mild pressures toward abstinence. She points out that the Sun Dance is becoming a means for controlling the use of alcohol, but the annual ceremony is too short and its participants too widely dispersed to provide a cultural support system for sobriety. While these essays do not directly address traditional beliefs and practices such as yuwipi, vision quest, or Sun Dance, they are omnipresent. Yuwipi appears nine times in the index, the vision quest nine times, and the Sun Dance twenty-one.
Other essays deal with Indian problems as a whole rather than with the particular situation of the Lakota and, I think, are less successful. A chapter discussing cultural change and adaptive strategies, written in 1981, seems more an overview for social workers than a searching analysis.
These essays are clearly needed, and while a better selection, perhaps, could have been made for this book, the volume stands as a testament to the achievements of an anthropologist who has worked in two worlds.
Comments
Copyright 2003 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln