Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions
"A wonderful, clear synthesis-perhaps the best we have-of American Indian spiritual traditions, so precious and so illuminating, because they are not separate from land and life."--Peter Matthiessen, author of Tigers in the SnowIn this medicine bag of empathetic and insightful essay-lectures, the legacy of a preeminent scholar of American Indian religious traditions is opened for new generations of teachers and students. The late Joseph Brown was a legendary mentor, whose gentility and grace in person and on the page lent dignity and depth to the indigenous ways of knowledge and ceremony he passed on to others. Here we have Brown's thoughts on themes that preoccupied his scholarly and lecturing life: Indian concepts of time and space, language and song, animals and hunting and nature, and varieties of ritual practice. But Brown is always probing beneath these topics to a deeper, almost wordless realm, where he provokes us to ask how these American Indian ways of knowledge might, in turn, teach us to become more fully human. A long-awaited, marvelous inheritance. --Peter Nabokov, Department of World Arts and Cultures, UCLA--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.