Henry David Thoreau accomplishes the same thing if you read Walden but he isn't playing god with other cultures. The European and Asian traditions have fine sets of environmental and spiritual ideas and documents, on a par with what you'll find in American Indian lore. They just aren't as popular right now.

Meanwhile, you can stop with your belittling pronouncements that if anyone has an opinion that differs from yours they are long-winded, uncreative, unimaginative, insensitive or ignorant. If I know how to use evaluative tools and choose my texts accordingly and choose not to waste my time with one like this unless it adds to scholarship, that's my gain. Is your repetitive blugeoning of the thread about this book and how you know "real" Indians supposed to prove that you understand this topic beyond the context of this book?

Unfortunately I have been SO turned off by the back-biting and arguing between just about every native group I've worked with over the years that, in my mind anyway, anything ANY of them has to say about the 'old ways' is very questionable.   Their motives may be commendable, but they are a race bludgeoned by European colonialism and imperialism, a race reeling from a few centuries of attempts at cultural genocide. IMO none of them remembers the 'old ways' either accurately or completely. They are doing the best they can to recover.

What hubris! You can evaluate better than the people themselves? Based on this novel? You won't believe what Indians say about this text because they're not capable of intellectualizing their way out of this "plight" (you've missed that hackneyed word in all of this, I think). You completely ignore a huge body of work consisting of a viable oral tradition and for the past 300 years the written works by American Indians. But this discussion has nothing to do with literature, and everything to do with politics, so drop the call for "peace" and offering an insult at the close your remarks. You've done that every single post on this big-time thread-creep topic, so no more scolds to me please for arguing passionately about a topic as equally important as a BS thread about whether Dubya gets us into a shooting war or if Bill Clinton was a good president or not. You're egging it on. This novel is just another excuse to keep Indians in their place, as artifacts. It is unfortunate that people read it and think it is real. The ideas are all appropriated and scrambled and put into a mythical unreal context. And by doing this you've rhetorically cast modern autonomous Indian people into the same childlike government ward status that the government and others who got rich off of Indians would like to see them remain in. Go read Custer Died for your Sins if you want to see what "real" Indians think.

Do you know what Sitting Bull's favorite photo of himself was? He was sitting in his automobile with his wives in the car with him. But the photo was never published in his lifetime or for a long time after, because people couldn't accept the idea of Indians actually knowing something about modern day equipment (guns excepted). In Black Elk Speaks one of the lines that Neihardt edited out was when Nicholas Black Elk talked about hearing voices "like a radio." That "radio" had to go because it tied Black Elk into a modern western world. Yes, there's a lot of infighting going on. It is intentional, it keeps Indians from making much progress forward if they're too busy squabbling over the scraps the U.S. government doles out while mismanaging billion$ of Indian dollars. So Alonzo Blacksmith made a few bucks for himself by selling out to Beebe Hill. It's his right, and hers to publish. But don't expect any positive American Indian reviews of the book. The Google search I posted had no evaluative remarks in it. I used "Indians" and "+"Chunksa Yuha". The bad reviews by Indians came through on their own.

I'm sure by now everyone else who was following Pushkin's whimsical thread has thrown their hands in the air and logged off. My apologies to the others who were participating in the silliness of the thread to have to encounter my inability to let these insults go unanswered.

SRS