Additional information
by Josephine Waggoner (Author), Emily Levine (Editor), Lynne Daphne Allen (Foreword by)
Winner of the 2015 J. Franklin Jameson Award
Winner of the 2014 Dwight L. Smith (ABC-CLIO) Award
Winner of the 2014 Nebraska Book Award in Nonfiction/Reference
Published for the first time and augmented by extensive annotations, Witness offers a rare participant's perspective on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lakota and Dakota life. The first of Waggoner's two manuscripts presented here includes extraordinary firsthand and as-told-to historical stories by tribal members, such as accounts of life in the Powder River camps and at the agencies in the 1870s, the experiences of a mixed-blood Húŋkpapȟa girl at the first off-reservation boarding school, and descriptions of traditional beliefs. The second manuscript consists of Waggoner's sixty biographies of Lakota and Dakota chiefs and headmen based on eyewitness accounts and interviews with the men themselves. Together these singular manuscripts provide new and extensive information on the history, culture, and experiences of the Lakota and Dakota peoples.
Author Biography
Emily Levine is an independent scholar and the editor of With My Own Eyes: A Lakota Woman Tells Her People's History, by Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun and Josephine Waggoner, available in a Bison Books edition.
