A Little Bit of Wisdom: Conversations with a Nez Perce Elder
Seventy-two-year-old Axtell is a full-blood Nez Perce Indian. His chance meeting at a powwow with documentary filmmaker Aragon resulted in this book of reminiscences, thoughts, and teachings. Roughly chronological, this collection of conversations meanders through Axtell's childhood in Idaho to his enlistment in the army during World War II and his brush with the law and imprisonment in 1949. An early release and attempts to turn his life around back home culminated in his marching in Clinton's 1993 inaugural parade. Born a Christian in a family that also followed Nez Perce spiritual traditions, Axtell slowly became a practitioner and eventual leader of the traditional Nez Perce Long House religion only in his forties. Aragon functions mostly as a transcriber here, allowing Axtell to tell in his own way about his life and beliefs. Highly readable, this work stands alongside Joseph Iron Eyes Dudley's Choteau Creek: A Sioux Reminiscence (Univ. of Nebraska, 1992) and Joseph Medicine Crow's From the Heart of the Crow Country (Crown, 1992) as 20th-century oral histories from voices rarely given the chance to speak.?Lisa A. Mitten, Univ. of PittsburghCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.