Red Mother by Frank Bird Linderman, 1932

[Californian]

This book was perhaps the first record of the women’s side of Indian life, and it has become a classic work in its field. Pretty Shield told her story to Frank Linderman through an interpreter and using the sign language. A medicine woman of the Crows, she was one of the few who remembered what it was like before the white man came and the buffalo went away. She tells about the simple games and dolls of an Indian childhood and the duties of the girls and women—setting up the lodges, dressing the skins, picking berries, digging roots, cooking. From her account we learn about courtship, marriage, childbirth and the care of babies, about medicine-dreams, the care of the sick, and the dangers and joys of womanhood among men whose lives were spent in hunting and fighting.



This book was republished in 1973 and 2003 under the title Pretty-Shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows.