Waterlily

Having found this book after reading quite a lot of white literature about Native Americans (or American Indians depending on your political stance!), I was thrilled to finally read a book from so authoritative a source as Ella Cara Deloria, a significant Sioux anthropologist and oral historian."Waterlily" is ostensibly the story of a Lakota Sioux mother and daughter and the history of their lives; but it's anthropology in disguise: it's really a priceless insider guide to the Lakota in their glory days of plenty and power, on the cusp of the period in history when their world changed forever. It really does try hard to be a story and succeeds in being quite a good one - but the scientist in Deloria will out, and her deep interest in the structure of Lakota society is the predominant voice. It's an involving, fascinating, moving tableau of a society at large, seen from the absolutely believable eyes of two women. I was dizzied by her explanation of the complexity and reach of tribal and kinship etiquette. (I am no longer surprised that the most successful captives in that time were children: who else could so completely and quickly undergo so fundamental a lifestyle change as the transition from Anglo-Saxon life to Lakota life? There are rules at every turn; for a newcomer it must have been impossbile not to cause offence.) But Deloria goes to considerable trouble to show how these myriad obligations were intended to make life better for everyone, not harder.Considering that narrative storytelling isn't her prime skill, some of her descriptions have stayed with me for years in remarkably vivid detail: the young man who offered one hundred pieces of his skin at the holy Sun Dance, a rash obligation that his brave female relatives stepped forward to help meet; the young married woman so crippled by shyness and the rigid application of her kinship obligations that it blights her marriage; the hungry woman who found a store of beans collected by mice, and replaced the beans with some corn to make sure the mice didn't starve.Many of these images are universal and have informed my world view. But the book as a whole has helped ensure that my understanding of the Lakota falls somewhere better, and much better informed, than either the rose-tinted tribal 'simplicity' of "Dances With Wolves" or the shocking images of broken-down decay on view at the Pine Ridge reservation in 21st Century America. If you want to read more modern interpretations of American Indian life, try Sherman Alexie, whose stories are funny and bittersweet.