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The Ten Grandmothers: Epic of the Kiowas (Volume 26)
“Once in a blue moon (which means a fairly long cycle in my case) one who deals professionally with new books comes upon something that seems to him truly noteworthy and memorable-a reading experience which he will cherish for the rest of his life. And when this book is original and, indeed, unique-when it achieves something that has never been done before-one's impulse is to rent a billboard, to hire a hall, in some way to underline and emphasize the excitement and enthusiasm of his discovery, so that other readers may share his pleasure.
"This has been my experience with The Ten Grandmothers, by Alice Marriott. It was the custom of certain tribes of Indians of the Great Plains to keep a 'winter count,' or calendar, of important events. Each year an officially designated scribe or historian of the tribe inscribed on a specially selected and prepared buffalo hide (which was a sacred tribal possession) a colored pictograph commemorating the most noteworthy event of the year-the happening or circumstance for which the year would be remembered in the oral literature and traditions of the tribe.
"Miss Marriott's book is based upon such a tribal history of the Kiowas, an important and tenacious nation of the southern Great Plains, for more than a hundred years. She has taken representative incidents from this story and built each into a unified narrative of personal experience, concrete and dramatic. The thirty-three narratives fall into four groups reflecting the major phases of Kiowa history in the last century; they are called, since Kiowa .economy was based on the buffalo, The Time When There Were Plenty of Buffalo; The Time When Buffalo Were Going; The Time When Buffalo Were Gone; and Modern Times. Since the same characters appear recurringly, the book has the effect of a loosely constructed novel.
"Miss Marriott is an ethnologist. Her book is based on eight years of work with the Kiowas–work that certainly consisted of much more than superficial interviews with aged Indians. There is evidence everywhere, not only of accurate scientific knowledge of the material to be presented, but of profound human insight and understanding.
"Miss Marriott is also a creative artist of extraordinary powers. Her book has abundant humor, drama and melodrama, beauty and sordidness, pathos and tragedy: all presented sharply, objectively, with economy, restraint, and dignity. The narrative of the long journey of Wooden Lance, to see for himself and for his tribe whether the leader of the Ghost Dance movement (that inspired the last desperate, irrational struggle of the plains Indians against the whites) had 'true power is unforgettable in its simplicity and reality. The story of the Kiowa girl Leah's return from her years at a boarding school in the East to her family on the reservation is as true and socially significant as it is poignant and dramatic.
"The great achievement of Miss Marriott's book is that it makes accessible to the reader of today the essence of a culture, a way of life and thought, now almost vanished from the earth.
"We have an uneasy feeling that some special meaning and value for Americans of today and tomorrow must lie in the older cultures of our continent which our own has so largely displaced. American writers from Longfellow on have tried with varying degrees of success to capture that meaning for us.
"Miss Marriott's book shows that our feeling was justified. No discerning reader will fail to find in the men and women who are so vivid in its pages-Sitting Bear and Eagle Plume, old Quanah and Spear Woman, and the Kiowa boys riding in their jeep to enlist for the present World War-in their vision and knowledge of life and their essential experience, abundant meaning for today."
"This has been my experience with The Ten Grandmothers, by Alice Marriott. It was the custom of certain tribes of Indians of the Great Plains to keep a 'winter count,' or calendar, of important events. Each year an officially designated scribe or historian of the tribe inscribed on a specially selected and prepared buffalo hide (which was a sacred tribal possession) a colored pictograph commemorating the most noteworthy event of the year-the happening or circumstance for which the year would be remembered in the oral literature and traditions of the tribe.
"Miss Marriott's book is based upon such a tribal history of the Kiowas, an important and tenacious nation of the southern Great Plains, for more than a hundred years. She has taken representative incidents from this story and built each into a unified narrative of personal experience, concrete and dramatic. The thirty-three narratives fall into four groups reflecting the major phases of Kiowa history in the last century; they are called, since Kiowa .economy was based on the buffalo, The Time When There Were Plenty of Buffalo; The Time When Buffalo Were Going; The Time When Buffalo Were Gone; and Modern Times. Since the same characters appear recurringly, the book has the effect of a loosely constructed novel.
"Miss Marriott is an ethnologist. Her book is based on eight years of work with the Kiowas–work that certainly consisted of much more than superficial interviews with aged Indians. There is evidence everywhere, not only of accurate scientific knowledge of the material to be presented, but of profound human insight and understanding.
"Miss Marriott is also a creative artist of extraordinary powers. Her book has abundant humor, drama and melodrama, beauty and sordidness, pathos and tragedy: all presented sharply, objectively, with economy, restraint, and dignity. The narrative of the long journey of Wooden Lance, to see for himself and for his tribe whether the leader of the Ghost Dance movement (that inspired the last desperate, irrational struggle of the plains Indians against the whites) had 'true power is unforgettable in its simplicity and reality. The story of the Kiowa girl Leah's return from her years at a boarding school in the East to her family on the reservation is as true and socially significant as it is poignant and dramatic.
"The great achievement of Miss Marriott's book is that it makes accessible to the reader of today the essence of a culture, a way of life and thought, now almost vanished from the earth.
"We have an uneasy feeling that some special meaning and value for Americans of today and tomorrow must lie in the older cultures of our continent which our own has so largely displaced. American writers from Longfellow on have tried with varying degrees of success to capture that meaning for us.
"Miss Marriott's book shows that our feeling was justified. No discerning reader will fail to find in the men and women who are so vivid in its pages-Sitting Bear and Eagle Plume, old Quanah and Spear Woman, and the Kiowa boys riding in their jeep to enlist for the present World War-in their vision and knowledge of life and their essential experience, abundant meaning for today."
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1945
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 29, 2021
Lovely book. Ethnographic novel that is an easy read but insightful into the way of life of the Kiowa.
March 17, 2022
3.5
Tells the stories of several generations of Kiowas in the 1860s to 1940s. It is written by an ethnographer but it reveals some interesting details about Kiowa culture and some sad details about the destruction white settlement brought to that culture.
Worth a read. There are some parts that drag a little (it is written by an ethnographer not a novelist) but it finishes relatively strong.
Tells the stories of several generations of Kiowas in the 1860s to 1940s. It is written by an ethnographer but it reveals some interesting details about Kiowa culture and some sad details about the destruction white settlement brought to that culture.
Worth a read. There are some parts that drag a little (it is written by an ethnographer not a novelist) but it finishes relatively strong.
January 27, 2009
This is going on my all-time favorite lists because of its accurate portrayal of a people adapting to the loss of their way of life. I love historical fiction for its ability to teach and entertain simultaneously.
January 11, 2017
A stunning non-fiction book which reads like a novel. It is romantic without romanticism, sentimental without bathos, realistic and uplifting. Really wonderful, I highly recommend.
October 22, 2019
Every year, for the past 6 or 7 years, I have traveled from north Oklahoma City to southwestern Oklahoma, involved in a week-long service among Native Americans in the region. Many of the folks I end up rubbing shoulders with are Comanches, Apaches, Kiowa-Apaches, Delawares, and Kiowas, and others. So I was delighted to pick up a copy of this volume at the Wichita Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center bookstore on our last visit. Alice Marriott, the first woman to earn an anthropology degree from the University of Oklahoma, accomplished author on Native American and Southwestern history, and posthumous inductee into the Oklahoma Historians Hall of Fame in 2004, published this work in 1945. It is a one hundred year segment - 1847 through 1944 - of living memory from one "camp" (or band) of the Kiowas, lifted out and laid before interested readers. "The Ten Grandmothers: Epic of the Kiowas" is a 320-page softback that is an ideal resource for anyone studying Native American culture and history, whether they're in High School, College or post graduate studies. But even those outside of academia will find these historical narratives fascinating and memorable.
Marriott collected these accounts mainly from two older Kiowas during the summers of 1935 and 1936, and then picked up a few of the further events over the next eight years. The only thing fictitious in these narratives are the names of those who were living at that time, or had recently passed on. The author gives readers valuable historical information in the introduction, covering the dancing and religious societies, their possible ethnic lineage, and tribal foes and allies.
The tales begin with a young "chief" named Sitting Bear somewhere close to Saddle Mountain, Oklahoma, in 1847. They then develop and unfold, drawing in the recounted perspectives, encounters, mores, heartaches, and dismay that the main subjects experienced. The stories are taken "as an eye-witness account of the event related, and where the feelings of the person are described, it is only because he himself said he felt that way" (xi). The accounts are often intriguing, bringing to mind many aspects of terrain and treatment that held my attention. I also found several of the incidences very touching. I also loved watching as scenes evolved in areas of Oklahoma where I've been. That part of the State will never be the same for me! The final chapter from 1944 almost left me in tears, and gave me a greater appreciation for Buffalo grass and the passing away of an age and a heritage. I highly recommend the book all, especially for anyone who is descended from one of the Plains tribes, and every Oklahoman.
Marriott collected these accounts mainly from two older Kiowas during the summers of 1935 and 1936, and then picked up a few of the further events over the next eight years. The only thing fictitious in these narratives are the names of those who were living at that time, or had recently passed on. The author gives readers valuable historical information in the introduction, covering the dancing and religious societies, their possible ethnic lineage, and tribal foes and allies.
The tales begin with a young "chief" named Sitting Bear somewhere close to Saddle Mountain, Oklahoma, in 1847. They then develop and unfold, drawing in the recounted perspectives, encounters, mores, heartaches, and dismay that the main subjects experienced. The stories are taken "as an eye-witness account of the event related, and where the feelings of the person are described, it is only because he himself said he felt that way" (xi). The accounts are often intriguing, bringing to mind many aspects of terrain and treatment that held my attention. I also found several of the incidences very touching. I also loved watching as scenes evolved in areas of Oklahoma where I've been. That part of the State will never be the same for me! The final chapter from 1944 almost left me in tears, and gave me a greater appreciation for Buffalo grass and the passing away of an age and a heritage. I highly recommend the book all, especially for anyone who is descended from one of the Plains tribes, and every Oklahoman.
March 8, 2022
I read this when I was in college fifty years ago and I’ve never forgotten it.
January 30, 2024
Brilliant ethnography. Excellent reading.
August 17, 2015
I truly regret that I waited so long to read this; it is simply the most profound thing I've ever read. Alice Marriott drew on Kiowa oral traditions to craft an intimate and tragic story of a century in the life of the tribe. The simple story, "Going Away," captures in just a few pages the entire bleak saga of the defeat and subjugation of the Indians.
November 1, 2007
Nice and easy... novel ethnography.
April 15, 2015
Wonder go book.
December 13, 2011
An excellent collection of Native American tales.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews