Review: Children of the Tipi: Life in the Buffalo Days

Children of the Tipi: Life in the Buffalo Days by Michael Oren Fitzgerald

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This book was a deceptively engaging idea on Fitzgerald's part: stitching together a book only of photos and quotations from Native American sources--particularly captivating to look at. But the overall effect of the editing is a normative, redacted view of who the Plains Indians were--an attractive romanticized version.

One of the quotations from Yellowtail let on about this. "You carried a sense of the sacred with you. All of the forms had meaning, even the tipi and the sacred circle of the entire camp. Of course, the life was hard and difficult. And, not all Indians followed the rules."

What he let peek through in that quotation is that a monolithic view of what it meant to be an Indian was often put forward by leaders. They may have needed this kind of unifying rhetoric, but it may not have been shared uniformly by all [i.e., not by all people and not all the time]. More interesting windows on daily life might come not from the prophet, chief, or spokesperson, but from the everyday person who didn't speak in pithy quotes or generalities. Yes, a good number of Fitzgerald's quotations do have this everyday feel to them, and there are plenty of sources out there, including [b:The Middle Five - Indian Boys at School|6870886|The Middle Five - Indian Boys at School|Francis LaFlesche|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348998784s/6870886.jpg|7087018] by [a:Francis LaFlesche|3077708|Francis LaFlesche|https://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-d9f6a4a5badfda0f69e70cc94d962125.png].



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