The Native American hunter had a true appreciation of where his food came from and developed a ritual relationship to animal life—an understanding and attitude almost completely lacking in modern culture. In this major overview of the relation between Indians and animals on the northern Great Plains, Howard Harrod recovers a sense of the knowledge that hunting peoples had of the animals upon which they depended and raises important questions about Euroamerican relationships with the natural world. Harrod's account deals with twelve Northern Plains peoples—Lakota, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Pawnee, and others—who with the arrival of the horse in the eighteenth century became the buffalo hunters who continue to inhabit the American imagination. Harrod describes their hunting practices and the presence of animals in their folklore and shows how these traditions reflect a "sacred ecology" in which humans exist in relationship with other powers, including animals. Drawing on memories of Native Americans recorded by anthropologists, fur traders, missionaries, and other observers, Harrod examines cultural practices that flourished from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. He reconstructs the complex rituals of Plains peoples, which included buffalo hunting ceremonies employing bundles or dancing, and rituals such as the Sun Dance for the renewal of animals. In a closing chapter, Harrod examines the meanings of Indian-animal relations for a contemporary society that values human dominance over the natural world—one in which domestic animals are removed from our consciousness as a source of food, wild animals are managed for humans to "experience," and hunting has become a form of recreation. His meticulous scholarship re-imagines a vanished way of life, while his keen insights give voice to a hunger among many contemporary people for the recovery of a ritual relationship between themselves and the natural sources of their lives.

The power of religion to preserve individual and group identity is perhaps nowhere more evident than among Native American peoples. In Becoming and Remaining a People, Howard Harrod shows how the oral traditions and ritual practices of Northern Plains Indians developed, how they were transformed at critical points in their history, and how they provided them with crucial means of establishing and maintaining their respective identities.

This book offers a bold new interpretation of anthropological studies, demonstrating how religious traditions and ritual processes became sources of group and individual identity for many people. Harrod reconstructs the long religious development of two village peoples, the Mandans and the Hidatsas, describing how their oral traditions enabled them to reinterpret their experiences as circumstances changed. He then shows how these and other groups on the Northern Plains remained distinct peoples in the face of increased interactions with Euro-Americans, other Indians,.and the new religion of Christianity.

Harrod proposes that other interpretations of culture change may fail to come to terms with the role that religion plays in motivating both cultural conservatism and social change. For Northern Plains peoples, religion was at the heart of social identity and thus resisted change, but religion was also the source of creative reinterpretation, which produced culture change. Viewed from within the group, such change often seemed natural and was understood as an elaboration of traditions having roots in a deeper shared past. In addition to demonstrating religious continuity and change among the Mandans and the Hidatsas, he also describes instances of religious and social transformation among the peoples who became the Crows and the Cheyennes.

Becoming and Remaining a People adopts a challenging analytical approach that draws on the author's creative interpretations of rituals and oral traditions. By enabling us to understand the relation of religion both to the construction of social identity and to the interpretation of social change, it reveals the richness, depth, and cultural complexity of both past Native American people and their contemporary successors.

A valuable resource for anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and western historians who wish to better understand ritual life in the Plains region. —Western Historical Quarterly

"Harrod's discussion of kinship and reciprocity in Northwest Plains cosmology contains valuable insight into Native American worldview, and his emphasis on the moral dimension of ritual process is a major addition to the too-often ignored subject of Native American moral life." —Journal of Religion

"Includes the major works on Blackfoot, Crow, Cheyennes, and Arapaho religion, the works to which anyone who wishes to understand the religious life of these tribes must continue to turn." —Choice

"Plains people, Harrod suggests, refracted nature and conceived an environmental ethic through a metaphor of kinship. He is particularly skillful in characterizing the ambiguity Plains people expressed at the necessity of killing and eating their animal kin. Renewing the World also contributes to another new and uncultivated science we might call 'ecology of mind'." —Great Plains Quarterly