Sublime

Birds see the best of any creature with a spine, are sacred because they soar the heavens, and with just one of their feathers, and some smoke, prayers make it to God.

When we arrived, Black Elk was standing outside a shade made of pine boughs. It was noon. When we left, after sunset, Flying Hawk said, “That was kind of funny, the way the old man seemed to know you were coming!” My son remarked that he had the same impression; and when I had known the great old man for some years I was quite prepared to believe t

"Have to use bait,"

At the end of the nineteenth century, John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator, had pioneered the concept of the experimental, or laboratory, school. For most of his career, Dewey had no special interest in China, but in the spring of 1919 he was invited to deliver a series of lectures in Japan. When Dewey was in Tokyo, a delegation of Chi

Captain Richard Henry Pratt’s guiding principle for Indian education, as summed up at the nineteenth annual National Conference of Charities and Correction held in Denver, Colorado, in 1892: “Kill the Indian in him and save the man.” This principle resulted in a policy now widely recognized as the embodiment of cultural genocide.

The final extirpation of Indian Country was a profoundly important event for Native Americans. Two decades later, the Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs set out to tell the tale. Riggs conceived and wrote his play in Paris—he frequented the café Les Deux Magots, where Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were also scribbling away. But his mind was

Joseph Smith and the early Mormons had tried their best to murder all Indians in their path across the country, but in the end did not quite succeed. Arthur V. Watkins decided to use the power of his office to finish what the prophet had started. He didn’t even have to get his hands bloody.