Overview
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.
Synopsis
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.
Richard Erdoes is the author of more than 21 books, including Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, and American Indian Myths and Legends. An Austrian-born historian, ethnographer, and artist, he has contributed to many publications, including the New York Times, Time, Life, Fortune, Smithsonian, and the Saturday Evening Post. He lives in New Mexico.
Publishers Weekly
``The Earth is a living thing. The mountains speak. The trees sing. Lakes can think. Pebbles have a soul. Rocks have power,'' says Lame Deer, one of the many contemporary Native Americans quoted here. Evoking the legendary respect of Native Americans for nature, these assertions also dignify a people long abased by whites. In his intelligent, unsentimental volume, Erdoes, coeditor of American Indian Myths and Legends , surveys timeless Indian rituals, summarizes the history of the Native American civil rights movement and offers a gallery in words and pictures of landscapes, ceremonies and faces, from flute-players to tribal dancers. Although the color reproductions sometimes approach halcyon extremes, the photographs make clear the power of nature, thus suggesting its shaping of the Native American religious sensibility. (Jan.)
Editorials
Peter Matthiessen
"Richard Erdoes, who has worked with American Indian people for thirty years—and whose Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions is a modern masterpiece—has made a new and vital contribution to our understanding of the first Americans."Tony Hillerman
"Erdoes' contributions have been so valuable because Erdoes is unique in this field. He filters his perceptions of American Indian spirituality through an intellect which is fundamentally European."Alfonso Ortiz
"This sensitive and unique book provides an intimate glimpse of Native American spirituality, one in which Indians speak for themselves about their lives and rituals."Arizona networkingNews
"This powerful collection of prose and full-color photographs offers an intimate glimpse of Native American life."Arizona networking News
"This powerful collection of prose and full-color photographs offers an intimate glimpse of Native American life."Professor Alfonso Ortiz
"This sensitive and unique book provides an intimate glimpse of Native American spirituality, one in which Indians speak for themselves about their lives and rituals."From the Publisher
"This powerful collection of prose and full-color photographs offers an intimate glimpse of Native American life."