Autobiography of a Kiowa Indian (American Indian Lives)

Born during the final years of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Reservation, Charles E. Apekaum, grandson of Kiowa chief Stumbling Bear, served as the principal interpreter for the Santa Fe Laboratory of Anthropology field expedition in 1935. Educated, bilingual, and world traveled, Apekaum’s services as a translator were sought by anyone who dealt with the Kiowa Indian Agency personnel, politicians, and scholars. The following year, Apekaum traveled throughout Oklahoma with anthropologist Weston La Barre and ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, serving as their liaison as they documented the peyote religion. During off days, Apekaum narrated his life story to La Barre, recounting the final days of the reservation, allotment, the early days of Anadarko, Oklahoma, his seventeen years attending boarding schools, service in the navy during World War I and then as a state game warden, his work translating for politicians, and his involvement in the Native American Church. La Barre never published the manuscript, which contains rich details about intertribal variants of the sacred peyote rite as well as about Apekaum’s life experience. In Autobiography of a Kiowa Indian Benjamin R. Kracht presents Apekaum’s autobiography for the first time. This eyewitness account is an important addition to Native American life narratives and the reconstruction of Kiowa cultural, social, and religious life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the southern Great Plains.
ASIN: 1496243188
VSKU: DBV.1496243188.VG
Condition: Very Good
Author/Artist:Apekaum, Charles E.|Kracht, Benjamin R.|La Barre, Weston
Binding: Hardcover
Note: Any images shown are stock photographs and product may differ from what is shown.
Condition Notes: Pages are clean with no markings. May show minor signs of wear or cosmetic defects marks, cuts, bends, or scuffs on the cover, spine, pages, or dust jacket. May have remainder marks on edges.