Life Among the Texas Indians: The WPA Narratives Hardcover - 1998

From the publisher

About 1830, Kiowas, Comanches, Wichitas, Caddos, Tonkawas, and Lipan Apaches lived in Texas. A century later, their descendants were in Oklahoma, telling interviewers from the Works Progress Administration about how life had been in Texas. For this new book, historian David La Vere has gathered a wealth of vivid detail about life among the former Texas Indian peoples. Culled from 112 volumes of the Indian-Pioneer Histories in the Indian Archives at the Oklahoma Historical Society, these oral histories also include some interviews with non-Indian neighbors. Together, their recollections provide an exceptional picture of the details of daily life -- war and raiding, hunting and planting, foodways, dress, parties and spiritual practices, education, health, and housing. La Vere has edited the narratives to group excerpts topically. Under farming, for example, he gives this report from a Wichita man: We raise corn, pumpkin, sweet potato. I don't know where we got corn, probably given to my people four hundred years ago. Other Indians didn't know how to work, to raise corn and pumpkins. They would have to get this from Wichitas. A Caddo woman describes in great detail the three general styles of dress for Caddo women, and a Caddo-Delaware woman tells about the different woods and dyes used in making baskets. Children's games and adults' dance rituals all are described in the words of those who played, danced, and watched them. La Vere sets the stage for this ethnographic detail with a lively, readable history of the succession of peoples who lived in Texas from the Paleo-Indians until the present. It is a clear overview of the basic social structures of the tribes and the relationsamong tribes and, later, of the Indians with the Europeans who came to the region. Accompanied by dramatic and poignant photographs from Oklahoma archives, the gift that comes through these pages is an immediacy of observation and impression that re-inspires the historical imagination about life among the first Texans.