From Publishers Weekly
In this "prequel" to her own growing-up story (Bead on an Anthill: A Lakota Childhood), Red Shirt lets readers listen in as her mother, Lone Woman, recounts her life and that of her grandmother, Turtle Lung Woman. With her fluid incorporation of her mother's Lakota phrases and songs, Red Shirt, a Yale professor of American studies and English, brings to life Lakota language, lore and history from the mid-19th century, "when things were still steeped in the old ways," to the mid-20th century, when "the world was changing daily." Details of Lakota life in South Dakota and Nebraska (such as the momentous adoption of canvas rather than buffalo hide moccasins) are etched with clarity, as are the consequences of larger historical forces. A medicine woman, Turtle Lung Woman lived among Crazy Horse, Red Cloud and Sitting Bull. She was 28 when the U.S. government forced the Lakota to move to a reservation in 1879, and she recalls hearing about Wounded Knee in 1890. Family marriages and births, Lakota standards of behavior, the practice of medicine women and "their own legends about how they came to be" mingle harmoniously in this dual memoir. Red Shirt does not lecture; rather, her vivid, simple prose turns the reader into a witness. "I was there and I remember," she writes, and readers will feel that way, too. Though the book is written for a general audience, women's studies scholars, anthropologists and ethnologists should be interested as well.
Product Description
Turtle Lung Woman's Granddaughter is the unforgettable story of several generations of Lakota women, told in their words. Delphine Red Shirt-like her mother, Lone Woman, and her mother's grandmother, Turtle Lung Woman-grew up on the wide open Plains of northern Nebraska and southern South Dakota. Lone Woman told her daughter the story of her life growing up on Pine Ridge in the early and mid-twentieth century. Remarkably, Lone Woman also recounted the life of her own grandmother, Turtle Lung Woman, who had grown up Lakota before her people had been forced to live on reservations in the late nineteenth century. These two women's lives overlapped by fifteen years, allowing the younger to learn many fascinating details and stories about the life and times of the elder. Delphine Red Shirt has delicately woven the life stories of her mother and great-grandmother into a continuous narrative that succeeds triumphantly as a moving, epic saga of Lakota women from traditional times to the present. Especially revealing and riveting are Turtle Lung Woman's relationship with her husband, Paints His Face with Clay Land, her healing practice as a medicine woman (where turtle shells become animated and crawl during the Yuw'pi ceremony), Lone Woman's hardships and celebrations growing up in the early twentieth century, and many wonderful details of their domestic lives before and during the early reservation years. Lone Woman passed away just after telling her story to her daughter. This splendid, magical story is a legacy for her and for all Lakota women. Delphine Red Shirt is a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and is an adjunct professor of American studies and English at Yale University. She is a columnist and correspondent for Indian Country Today and is the author of Bead on an Anthill: A Lakota Childhood (Nebraska 1997).
