Saynday's People brings together two related volumes by the distinguished ethnologist and author Alice Marriott. The Saynday of the title and the central figure of Winter-Telling Stories is a combination of trickster and hero peculiar to Asiatic and American Indian mythology. He could do almost anything when he was using his medicine power for good, but Saynday was a great joker and when playing tricks often got what was coming to him. Indians on Horseback is both a history of the Kiowas and a vivid account of their way of life. The narrative is enriched not only by detailed descriptions of how these first Americans made moccasins and cradles, thread and arrows and tipis, but also by a Plains Indian cookbook which includes recipes for such dishes as pemmican and stone-boiled buffalo.

Among the Kiowa, storytelling takes place under familiar circumstances. A small group of relatives and close friends gather. Tales are informative as well as entertaining. Joking and teasing are key components. Group participation is expected. And outsiders are seldom involved. This book explores the traditional art of storytelling still practiced by Kiowas today as Gus Palmer shares conversations held with storytellers. Combining narrative, personal experience, and ethnography in an original and artful way, Palmer—an anthropologist raised in a traditional Kiowa family—shows not only that storytelling remains an integral part of Kiowa culture but also that narratives embedded in everyday conversation are the means by which Kiowa cultural beliefs and values are maintained. Palmer's study features contemporary oral storytelling and other discourses, assembled over two and a half years of fieldwork, that demonstrate how Kiowa storytellers practice their art. Focusing on stories and their meaning within a narrative and ethnographic context, he draws on a range of material, including dream stories, stories about the coming of Táimê (the spirit of the Sun Dance) to the Kiowas, and stories of tricksters and tribal heroes. He shows how storytellers employ the narrative devices of actively participating in oral narratives, leaving stories wide open, or telling stories within stories. And he demonstrates how stories can reflect a wide range of sensibilities, from magical realism to gossip. Firmly rooted in current linguistic anthropological thought, Telling Stories the Kiowa Way is a work of analysis and interpretation that helps us understand story within its larger cultural contexts. It combines the author's unique literary talent with his people's equally unique perspective on anthropological questions in a text that can be enjoyed on multiple levels by scholars and general readers alike.

Plains Indians were artists as well as warriors, and Silver Horn (1860-1940), a Kiowa artist from the early reservation period, may well have been the most prolific Plains Indian artist of all time. Known also as Haungooah, his Kiowa name, Silver Horn was a man of remarkable skill and talent. Working in graphite, colored pencil, crayon, pen and ink, and watercolor on hide, muslin, and paper, he produced more than one thousand illustrations between 1870 and 1920. Silver Horn created an unparalleled visual record of Kiowa culture, from traditional images of warfare and coup counting to sensitive depictions of the sun dance, early Peyote religion, and domestic daily life. At the turn of the century, he helped translate nearly the entire corpus of Kiowa shield designs into miniaturized forms on buckskin models for Smithsonian ethnologist James Mooney. Born in 1860 when huge bison herds still roamed the southern plains, Silver Horn grew up in southwestern Oklahoma. Son of a chief and member of an artistically gifted family, he witnessed traumatic changes as his people went from a free-roaming, buffalo-hunting culture to reservation life and, ultimately, to forced assimilation into white society. Although perceived as a troublemaker in midlife because of his staunch resistance to the forces of civilization, Silver Horn became to many a romantic example of the "real old-time Indian." In this presentation of Silver Horn’s work, showcasing 43 color and 116 black-and-white illustrations, Candace S. Greene provides a thorough biographical portrait of the artist and, through his work, assesses the concepts and roles of artists in Kiowa culture.

First published in paperback by UNM Press in 1976, The Way to Rainy Mountain has sold over 200,000 copies. "The paperback edition of The Way to Rainy Mountain was first published twenty-five years ago. One should not be surprised, I suppose, that it has remained vital, and immediate, for that is the nature of story. And this is particularly true of the oral tradition, which exists in a dimension of timelessness. I was first told these stories by my father when I was a child. I do not know how long they had existed before I heard them. They seem to proceed from a place of origin as old as the earth. "The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself."--from the new Preface

"Brings together materials gleaned from the Laboratory of Anthropology (Santa Fe) fieldnotes, augmented by Alice Marriott's fieldnotes, to significantly enhance the existing literature concerning Plains Indians religions."--Provided by publisher.

?Once in a blue moon (which means a fairly long cycle in my case) one who deals professionally with new books comes upon something that seems to him truly noteworthy and memorable-a reading experience which he will cherish for the rest of his life. And when this book is original and, indeed, unique-when it achieves something that has never been done before-one's impulse is to rent a billboard, to hire a hall, in some way to underline and emphasize the excitement and enthusiasm of his discovery, so that other readers may share his pleasure. "This has been my experience with The Ten Grandmothers, by Alice Marriott. It was the custom of certain tribes of Indians of the Great Plains to keep a 'winter count,' or calendar, of important events. Each year an officially designated scribe or historian of the tribe inscribed on a specially selected and prepared buffalo hide (which was a sacred tribal possession) a colored pictograph commemorating the most noteworthy event of the year-the happening or circumstance for which the year would be remembered in the oral literature and traditions of the tribe. "Miss Marriott's book is based upon such a tribal history of the Kiowas, an important and tenacious nation of the southern Great Plains, for more than a hundred years. She has taken representative incidents from this story and built each into a unified narrative of personal experience, concrete and dramatic. The thirty-three narratives fall into four groups reflecting the major phases of Kiowa history in the last century; they are called, since Kiowa .economy was based on the buffalo, The Time When There Were Plenty of Buffalo; The Time When Buffalo Were Going; The Time When Buffalo Were Gone; and Modern Times. Since the same characters appear recurringly, the book has the effect of a loosely constructed novel. "Miss Marriott is an ethnologist. Her book is based on eight years of work with the Kiowas?work that certainly consisted of much more than superficial interviews with aged Indians. There is evidence everywhere, not only of accurate scientific knowledge of the material to be presented, but of profound human insight and understanding. "Miss Marriott is also a creative artist of extraordinary powers. Her book has abundant humor, drama and melodrama, beauty and sordidness, pathos and tragedy: all presented sharply, objectively, with economy, restraint, and dignity. The narrative of the long journey of Wooden Lance, to see for himself and for his tribe whether the leader of the Ghost Dance movement (that inspired the last desperate, irrational struggle of the plains Indians against the whites) had 'true power is unforgettable in its simplicity and reality. The story of the Kiowa girl Leah's return from her years at a boarding school in the East to her family on the reservation is as true and socially significant as it is poignant and dramatic. "The great achievement of Miss Marriott's book is that it makes accessible to the reader of today the essence of a culture, a way of life and thought, now almost vanished from the earth. "We have an uneasy feeling that some special meaning and value for Americans of today and tomorrow must lie in the older cultures of our continent which our own has so largely displaced. American writers from Longfellow on have tried with varying degrees of success to capture that meaning for us. "Miss Marriott's book shows that our feeling was justified. No discerning reader will fail to find in the men and women who are so vivid in its pages-Sitting Bear and Eagle Plume, old Quanah and Spear Woman, and the Kiowa boys riding in their jeep to enlist for the present World War-in their vision and knowledge of life and their essential experience, abundant meaning for today."

ca. .06 cubic ft

Mission of the Women's American Baptist Home Mission Society at Saddle Mountain, Kiowa County, Oklahoma.

In this highly original and moving volume, an anthropologist, a historian, and a Native singer come together to reveal the personal and cultural power of Christian faith among theøKiowas of southwestern Oklahoma and to show how Christian members of the Kiowa community have creatively embraced hymns and made them their own. Kiowas practice a unique expression of Christianity, a blending that began with the arrival of missionaries on the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation in the 1870s. In these pages, historian Clyde Ellis offers a compelling look at the way in which many Kiowas became Christian over the past century and have woven that faith into their identity. The personal and cultural significance of traditional songs and their close connection to the power of hymns is then illuminated by anthropologist Luke Eric Lassiter. Like traditional Kiowa songs, Christian hymns help restore and minister to the community; they also can be highly individualistic since many are composed and shared by church members themselves at different times in their lives. In the final section of the book Kiowa singer Ralph Kotay tells of the personal meaning and value of the hymns and of the Christian faith in general. This remarkable, sensitive book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the complexity of Native lives today and offers a subtle yet penetrating look at the legacy of Christianity among Native peoples.