Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life by Kingsley M. Bray, and: The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country by Steve Hendricks (review)

b o o k R e v ie w s 3 1 7 is not the high point: “I have been fortunate enough to be involved in many exciting adventures. But when I look back over my life, I have little doubt that the most worthwhile things I have done have not been standing on the sum­ mits of mountains or at the North and South poles, great experiences though they were. My most important projects have been the building and maintain­ ing of schools and medical clinics for my good friends in the Himalaya. ... These are things I will always remember” (247). To everyone who breaks open Himalaya: Personal Stories of Grandeur, Challenge, and Hope, this is a call to action for personal involvement in worthy causes that will lead to making the world a place of harmony and peace. Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life. By Kingsley M. Bray. N orm an : U n iversity o f O klah om a Press, 2006. 510 pages, $34.95. The Unquiet Qrave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country. By Steve Hendricks. N ew York: T h u n ders M ou th Press, 2006. 490 pages, $27.95. Reviewed by Julie Foster Sacram ento, C alifornia Kingsley M. Bray has done it again. With the publication of Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life, Bray has sharpened another portrait of a great Sioux warrior. Bray’s 2002 article on Spotted Tail and the Treaty of 1868 in Nebraska History garnered this comment on the Nebraska State Historical Society’s web site: “Kingsley Bray’s re-evaluation of the role of Spotted Tail provides a new view of these crucial transition years as he and his people were drawn inescapably into a new world of restricted land base and radical economic change.” That Bray utilized this same blueprint for his book— looking at Crazy Horse as a transitional figure during a time of change— in no way diminishes the value and readability of this thoroughly captivating biography. Senior bookseller at BM A Hammricks Medical Bookshop in Manchester, England, Bray has for the past twenty years researched Plains Indian (and especially Lakota) history and ethnology. He admits that the materials avail­ able to reconfigure Crazy Horse’s life are “sketchy and fragmentary” (xvii). This dearth of materials makes the density of his work all the more remarkable. Bray returned to “primary sources to construct a life of Crazy Horse grounded in the reality of the nineteenth-century Lakota world” (xvii). Those records include the Eli S. Ricker and Eleanor H. Hinman interviews, housed at the Nebraska State Historical Society, and interviews Bray conducted with modem Lakotas. Crazy Horse and his world come to life on the page. Readers are offered rich images of his family and spiritual life along with his role as a warrior chief. Bray pulls no punches with his interpretation. While acknowledging that Mari Sandoz’s book, Crazy Horse, the Strange Man of the Oglalas (1942), is still 3 1 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e F A L L 2 0 0 7 a literary classic, he argues that it “reducfes] the complex reality of the period to a dichotomy of good and evil and [does] no favors to contemporary Lakotas struggling with reservation inheritance” (xvii). He frankly discusses Crazy Horse’s two extramarital affairs and his seven-year marriage to Black Shawl, refuting Sandoz’s interpretation of these events. He delves deeply into Crazy Horse’s visions and spiritual life. Bray also plumbs his early life, examining the trauma inflicted by the death of his mother and loss of four stepsisters due to disease, events that formed his personality. Bray has done an admirable job of placing his subject within the broader historical context of the changing times into which Crazy Horse was bom. He writes that “he and his peers knew no other life than the post-Oregon Trail Lakota world, with its inheritance of disease, game attrition, and resource loss” (22). Bray weaves in important events, explaining how the discovery of gold on the South...