«Quando mio padre fu sul punto di morire, mi afferrò la mano. Sentii il suo potere fluire dentro di me, fino a riempire tutto il mio essere. In quell'istante la mia vita cambiò completamente: il mio futuro divenne qualcosa che potevo solo intuire vagamente, come una catena montuosa in lontananza, avvolta in una foschia azzurra. In quel preciso istante, l'uomo che ero stato morì e un uomo nuovo ne prese il posto». Così Archie Fire Lame Deer, ubriacone inveterato, piantagrane e cascatore di Hollywood venne riportato - recalcitrante - al suo vero destino, al compito per il quale suo nonno l'aveva preparato, divenendo un grande uomo-medicina (o, come egli stesso si definiva, un 'uomo spirituale') della tribù Lakota, detentore di una tradizione millenaria e famoso in tutto il mondo. I suoi trascorsi burrascosi gli consentirono di comprendere e aiutare tutti, perché un uomo-medicina 'deve strisciare più in basso di un verme e volare più in alto di un'aquila'.

Born in 1937 and raised by his grandparents on the Leach Lake reservation in Minnesota, Dennis Banks grew up learning traditional Ojibwa lifeways. As a young child he was torn from his home and forced to attend a government boarding school designed to assimilate Indian children into white culture. After years of being 'white man-ized' in these repressive schools, Banks enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, shipping out to Japan when he was only seventeen years old.
After returning to the states, Banks lived in poverty in the Indian slums of Minnesota until he was arrested for stealing groceries to feed his growing family. Although his white accomplice was freed on probation, Banks was sent to prison. There he became determined to educate himself. Hearing about the African American struggle for civil rights, he recognized that American Indians must take up a similar fight. Upon his release, Banks became a founder of AIM, the American Indian Movement, which soon inspired Indians from many tribes to join the fight for American Indian rights. Through AIM, Banks sought to confront racism with activism rooted deeply in Native religion and culture.
Ojibwa Warrior relates Dennis Banks's inspiring life story and the story of the rise of AIM - from the 1972 'Trail of Broken Treaties' march to Washington, D.C., which ended in the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building, to the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee, when Lakota Indians and AIM activists from all over the country occupied the site of the infamous 1890 massacre of three hundred Sioux men, women, and children to protest the bloodshed and corruption at the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation.
Banks tells the inside story of the seventy-one-day siege, his unlikely nighttime escape and interstate flight, and his eventual shootout with authorities at an FBI roadblock in Oregon. Pursued and hunted, he managed to reach California. There, authorities refused to extradite him to South Dakota, where the attorney general had declared that the best thing to do with Dennis Banks was to 'put a bullet through his head.'
Years later, after a change in state govenment, Banks gave himself up to South Dakota authorities. Sentenced to two years in prison, he was paroled after serving one year to teach students Indian history at the Lone Man school Pine Ridge. Since then, Dennis Banks has organized 'Scared Runs' for young people, teaching American Indian ways, religion, and philosophy worldwide. Now operating a successful business on the reservation, he continues the fight for Indian rights.

A powerful collection of text and full-color photographs that offers an intimate glimpse of Native American life.

. Includes rare photos and firsthand accounts of the sun dance, sacred pipe, yuwipi, and vision quest ceremonies.

. By internationally recognized ethnographer Richard Erdoes, author of Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions and Gift of Power.

How do you go about knowing a people? In this phenomenal combination of landscape, ceremony, individual portrait, and prose, Richard Erdoes brings forth the lesser seen world of the Native American experience and vision. With the aid of firsthand accounts collected during three decades of personal interactions with indigenous tribes, Erdoes chronicles the traditional rites, individual lives, and historical persecution of North America's indigenous peoples.

The images and words of Crying for a Dream represent Erdoes' finest work. His focus on the natural and sacred world of North America's indigenous peoples includes elements of the Sioux ceremonial cycle and portraits of native peoples from the plains, mesas, and deserts. The sun dance, sacred pipe, yuwipi, and vision quest are described by the author and his subjects and are illustrated with more than 70 photographs.

From Davy Crockett, Wild Bill Hickok, and Calamity Jane to Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Frank and Jesse James, here are more than 130 colorful stories of the pioneers, cowboys, outlaws, gamblers, prospectors, and lawmen who settled the wild west, creating a uniquely American hero and an enduringly fascinating folk mythology.

In this wonderfully boisterous treasury of tall tales, everyone and everything is larger than life and bragging is elevated into an art form.  Many of these stories are of real people and real events; more than a few, however, grew taller and funnier as they made their rounds from wagon train to campfire to rodeo to miners' quarters.  But even if it is far from established that Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were able to kill three men with one bullet or subdue ferocious grizzly bears with their fists, they come vividly to life here as beloved characters who have become part of the fabric of the American imagination.

Traces the tumultuous history of the Crow Dog clan from Jerome, who witnessed the coming of the white settlers to the Great Plains, through Leonard, who became a leader of the American Indian Movement and a key figure at Wounded Knee. Reprint.

Relates the experiences of a native American woman who grew up on a reservation and joined in the revolution for native American rights during the 1960s and 1970s. Reprint. 50,000 first printing. Winner of the American Book Award.

With surprising candor, Archie Fire Lame Deer describes the magic and power of the Native American spirit life. Archie's compelling narrative recaptures his boyhood years under the tutelage of his medicine-man grandfather on a South Dakota farm. We follow him from Catholic school runaway to Army misfit, from bartender to boozer, from Hollywood stuntman to chief rattlesnake catcher of the state of South Dakota. And we exult with him when he comes home to the world of spirit.