Howard L. Harrod is Oberlin Alumni Professor of Social Ethics and Sociology of Religion and Professor of Religious
Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is also the author of Becoming and Remaining a People: Native American Religions
on the Northern Plains and Renewing the World: Plains Indian Religion and Morality, both published by the University
of Arizona Press.
Review
"Finally someone has brought together a wealth of data on the sacred relationship between Native Americans
and the world of plants and animals. This brief and cogent volume traces Plains Indian traditions through extensive
references to a variety of origin myths and rituals that defined hunter-animal relationships in the 18th and 19th
centuries. . . . This is a brilliant and very accessible volume that is destined to become a classic."
--Choice
"An important statement about the nature of Indian history that should inform anyone who ventures to study
or write about the subject."
--American Indian Quarterly
"A perceptive, graceful monograph."
--Great Plains Quarterly
"This is a watershed text for the study of Native American religions in general, for Plains Indian-animal
relations in particular, for understanding mythology and ritual, and for contributing to public discourse about
ecological concerns. It will be taken as a classic work of this generation of scholarship."
--Kenneth M. Morrison, Arizona State University
University of Arizona Press Web Site, June, 2002
Summary
The Native American hunter had a true appreciation of where his food came from and developed a ritual relationship
to animal life�an understanding and attitude almost completely lacking in modern culture. In this major overview
of the relation between Indians and animals on the northern Great Plains, Howard Harrod recovers a sense of the
knowledge that hunting peoples had of the animals upon which they depended and raises important questions about
Euroamerican relationships with the natural world.
Harrod's account deals with twelve Northern Plains peoples�Lakota, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Pawnee, and others�who
with the arrival of the horse in the eighteenth century became the buffalo hunters who continue to inhabit the
American imagination. Harrod describes their hunting practices and the presence of animals in their folklore and
shows how these traditions reflect a "sacred ecology" in which humans exist in relationship with other
powers, including animals.
Drawing on memories of Native Americans recorded by anthropologists, fur traders, missionaries, and other observers,
Harrod examines cultural practices that flourished from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. He reconstructs
the complex rituals of Plains peoples, which included buffalo hunting ceremonies employing bundles or dancing,
and rituals such as the Sun Dance for the renewal of animals.
In a closing chapter, Harrod examines the meanings of Indian-animal relations for a contemporary society that values
human dominance over the natural world�one in which domestic animals are removed from our consciousness as a source
of food, wild animals are managed for humans to "experience," and hunting has become a form of recreation.
His meticulous scholarship re-imagines a vanished way of life, while his keen insights give voice to a hunger among
many contemporary people for the recovery of a ritual relationship between themselves and the natural sources of
their lives.
