Cheyenne Memories

This book reads more like oral history or narrative, than 'native american studies' as it says on the back cover. Margot Liberty has added just the right academic footnotes to explain and clarify, without getting in the way. There aren't any books by a Native and an anthropologist that I know of that are as enjoyable, entertaining, and informative as this one. It is the perfect accurate, objective, in-depth, real counterpoint to much of the cotton candy fluff one finds about native ways and history in the New Age, and the dead, ponderous, dry, over-intellectual tomes that usually come out an institution as prestigious as the Yale University Press. I have rarely learned so much, and enjoyed doing it. I could hardly put it down.

John Stands in Timber is my daughter's great-grandfather on her father's side. I am purchasing this book to let her know the history she shares as a Northern Cheyenne and to show her how much her great-grandfather cared about his people. I have read the book previously and appreciated the sense of cultural awareness John portrayed through his words. It is a lesson for us all to remember where we came from and appreciate how we got where we are now. I would recommend reading this book, to learn the history of the people and to appreciate that he wasn't just a historian, but a father, a grandfather, and a great-grandfather and also a good person.

The Cheyenne was undoubtably one of the most remarkable tribes of the Great Plains. Now you can have a very convenient one volume tribal history of them by John Stands In Timber with the help of anthropologist Margot Liberty. Stands In Timber,an old time Cheyenne, in his whole life collected the memories of his elders about the history of their Nation and he succeeded in editing it to a narrative from the creation to the reservation times. The effort of the author is of a rare kind and the result is also a rare one: you can learn the history of a native nation from the inside.