A Little Bit of Wisdom: Conversations with a Nez Perce Elder

A Little Bit Of Wisdowm is the first individual Nez Perce narrative publised in more than half a century and the first ever told exclusively in English. Although scores of volumes have been written about the Nez Perce people, almost all of them concentrate on the only war between the United Staes and the Nez Perce people, and especially upon young Joseph and the famous 1877 flight and surrender. By contrast, this book tells the personal story of Isluunts ( Horace Axtell), a contemporary Nez Perce elder and spiritual leader, who grew up in northern Idaho on a windy prairie speaking The Prairie dialect of his people. His great-grandfather fought and died in the battle at Bear Paw Mountains, but the story Horace tells inside the pages of this book is about growing up Christian while maintaining a strong tribal identity, about going to war and then to prison, and then coming home to rediscover the Long House and Sweat Lodge and the sacred practice of the Seven Drum Religion. It is a story he tells in his own plain-spoken style about what it means to speak two languages and to live simultaneously but harmoniously in two very different worlds. In these worlds Christianity and the native Nez Perce religion exist side-by-side in a careful relationship. But it is also a story about family and extended familyrelationships, about respect, tradition, patience, kindness, healing, and grace ( as well as their oppistes). Here then is one man's story of contemporary Nez Perce culture told with good will and plenty of gentle humor about some of life's most inewxplicable mysteries.

That's pronounced "nez-purse," not "nez-pierce," and that's just one of the things to learn from this highly readable book about the Indian nation whose traditional lands are part of what is now Washington and Idaho. Axtell and Aragon weave the traditions of the people of Chief Joseph ("I will fight no more forever" ) with contemporary questions of religion and culture into a fabric that reflects the life of a single man, Nez Perce spiritual leader Axtell, whose grandmother was a Christian but whose great-aunt was a medicine woman. Although he has chosen the latter way, his respect for the spirit, however it shows itself, is palpable. Finding the path of the spirit entailed for him a quest whose way stations he documents with Aragon's help and which included the temptations of liquor, the ambiguous benefits of military service, the promptings of relatives who kept the old ways, and the call of the powwow trail. More than an autobiography, his story is the document of a people's struggle. Patricia Monaghan

Seventy-two-year-old Axtell is a full-blood Nez Perce Indian. His chance meeting at a powwow with documentary filmmaker Aragon resulted in this book of reminiscences, thoughts, and teachings. Roughly chronological, this collection of conversations meanders through Axtell's childhood in Idaho to his enlistment in the army during World War II and his brush with the law and imprisonment in 1949. An early release and attempts to turn his life around back home culminated in his marching in Clinton's 1993 inaugural parade. Born a Christian in a family that also followed Nez Perce spiritual traditions, Axtell slowly became a practitioner and eventual leader of the traditional Nez Perce Long House religion only in his forties. Aragon functions mostly as a transcriber here, allowing Axtell to tell in his own way about his life and beliefs. Highly readable, this work stands alongside Joseph Iron Eyes Dudley's Choteau Creek: A Sioux Reminiscence (Univ. of Nebraska, 1992) and Joseph Medicine Crow's From the Heart of the Crow Country (Crown, 1992) as 20th-century oral histories from voices rarely given the chance to speak.?Lisa A. Mitten, Univ. of Pittsburgh
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.