Bead on an Anthill: A Lakota Childhood - Softcover

Red Shirt, Delphine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803289766 ISBN 13: 9780803289765

Publisher: Bison Books, 1999

Synopsis

Bead on an Anthill is the story of a Lakota girl’s experiences growing up in Nebraska and on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the 1960s and 1970s. Raised in a home without books, Delphine Red Shirt relied on family and friends as her "books" and wove their stories into her own. Like her ancestors, she felt a powerful connection to the openness of the Plains. She participated in coming-of-age ceremonies and learned the special rules for stringing beads together and the messages conveyed by hairstyles. At the same time, Red Shirt became increasingly aware of the distance between her world and that of her ancestors. Ringing with insight and honesty, this memoir gives voice to an emerging generation of Lakota women who attempt to navigate the difficult paths of a bicultural world.

About this title

About the Author:

Delphine Red Shirt is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and represents her tribe as a nongovernmental representative at the United Nations.

From School Library Journal:

YA-Delphine Red Shirt, a Lakota woman, grew up on the plains of Nebraska and the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the 1960s and 1970s. Here she evokes the poetic imagery of her native language to describe the customs of her people. Her aunt teaches her the traditional art of stringing beads together and she and her childhood friends learn to follow ants home to find the stray beads embedded in their anthills. At the age of seven, she performs ancestral dances in a heavy outfit of buckskin and beads, and suffers from the heat. Red Shirt adeptly interweaves the story of her childhood with the cultural history of her tribe in a personal narrative that is part memoir and part anthropology. YAs will appreciate this woman's tale as she successfully navigates her childhood, cherishing her traditions but also learning to embrace a world in which Lakota is not the native tongue.-Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA

Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bison Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0803289766
• ISBN 13: 9780803289765
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 146