Customer Reviews

Shadows of the Buffalo: A Family Odyssey Among the Indians

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This book is a product of the "back to nature" Thoreau-inspired hippy movements of the 1970s. Purportedly it is jointly authored by a married couple, but the real narrative is the voice of a German born man who pesters "old Indians" because he wants to live according to their old time ways.

The author's first wife leaves him, probably because she gets fed up with his costly infatuation with the Indians. Or maybe she just gets just tired of hauling water and taking care of a bunch of kids on her own while he traipses around to powwows browsing for a second wife.

Anyway, he meets a Blackfeet woman who hastens his inclusion in reservation social life. Thank goodness. But before he becomes related to the tribe, the reader may be shocked by the naivete and gullibility with which he falls prey to every suggestion of elderly Indians, simply because of his strong desire to become one of them.

For instance, there is a scene, within the first 60 pages of the book, in which he visits three old people who live in a poverty-stricken shack on the edge of a junkyard. They seem to have nothing to do but sit on the edge of their mattresses and look forward to a lunch made of government commodities. Their water is hauled from a well outside which is perhaps tainted from the garbage around them.

He asks for their advice regarding how to give thanks in an "old Indian" way for the fact that his young son survived a long and worrisome drive to the hospital. They confer in the Blackfeet language (which he doesn't yet know) and decide that would be best for him to purchase a powerful old medicine bundle from one of them for many, MANY "horses."

He promptly decides to sell his wilderness cabin (where his wife and children are living and presumably awaiting his return). He will set aside his half of the sale-price to buy this holy and important medicine bundle. Next thing we know, his wife has split to the nearest town. And he is back to ask a young school teacher to share the medicine bundle duty with him. After this cruel initiation, the reader hopes that he becomes less gullible about acquiring Indian knowledge.

I think it's wonderful that he happened to fall in with the Blackfeet at about the time that interest in their own tribal ways was resurfacing. His questions probably helped the Blackfeet around him to become more aware of the importance of maintaining their unique culture.

Yet, this is NOT an authentic narrative. Buffalo days were long past, and the life and adventures depicted in this book are no more than historical re-enactment and sometimes wishful thinking.
For better and more authentic accounts of historic Blackfeet ways and culture, see books by James Willard Schultz.