Walking in the Sacred Manner: Healers, Dreamers, and Pipe Carriers - Medicine Women of the Plains Indians

The authors

Mark St. Pierre is a writer and educator who has spent years documenting Plains Indian life; his co-author and wife, Tilda Long Soldier, is a Lakota whose family connections and cultural knowledge gave the project access and authenticity. Together they worked from extensive first-person interviews rather than outside observation.

The book

Walking in the Sacred Manner gathers the testimony of medicine women — healers, dreamers and pipe carriers — from several Northern Plains tribes, including the Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow and Assiniboine. Through their voices and those of their families, it reconstructs the sacred traditions in which women played a strong and often hidden role, in a culture where the everyday and the spiritual are inseparable.

How to read it

Read it as oral history and cultural record. Its strength is letting the women speak for themselves, correcting the male-centered and stereotyped picture common in older writing on Plains religion. Some ceremonial knowledge is intentionally private, and the book is respectful of those limits.

For more context

It sits well beside broader works on Lakota spirituality, such as the writings surrounding Black Elk, for the wider religious world it describes.

Sources

• Simon & Schuster
• Smithsonian
• Internet Archive