Plenty Coups

[Diane Merkel]

Here's the beginning of a New York Times review of Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation.

Radical Hope is first of all an analysis of what is involved when a culture dies. This has been the fate of many aboriginal peoples in the last couple of centuries. Jonathan Lear takes as the main subject of his study the Crow tribe of the western US, who were more or less pressured to give up their hunting way of life and enter a reservation near the end of the nineteenth century.

The issue is not genocide. Many of the Crow people survive; but their culture is gone. Lear takes as his basic text a statement by the tribe's great chief, Plenty Coups, describing the transition many years after in the late 1920s, near the end of his life: "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened."

Review: www.nybooks.com/articles/20110

[shatonska]

good book , worth reading , beautifull photos of crows

[d o harris]

The truly sad thing is that cultures are destroyed less by conquest, and more by professional do-gooders, people who have an arrogant and self-righteous attitude. "I know better than you what is good for you, and I will compel you to do what I say, because I have your best interest at heart, and you are too ignorant to see what is your best interest, and if you do not do what I want you will be starved or sent to prison, because I want the best for you. I'm here to help you."

[BrokenSword]

D.O.
"....I'm here to help you..."

Yes , Sir. The scarest thing ANY government can say.

M

[mort aux vaches]

Not having read the book it looks like it's a needed supplement to Hoxie's "Parading Through History" that met with much acclaim a few yeard back.

Nice article.