"I am Crow Dog. I am the fourth of that name. Crow Dogs have played a big part in the history of our tribe and in the history of all the Indian nations of the Great Plains during the last two hundred years. We are still making history." Thus opens the extraordinary and epic account of a Native American clan. Here the authors, Leonard Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes (co-author of Lakota Woman ) tell a story that spans four generations and sweeps across two centuries of reckless deeds and heroic lives, and of degradation and survival. The first Crow Dog, Jerome, a contemporary of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, was a witness to the coming of white soldiers and settlers to the open Great Plains. His son, John Crow Dog, traveled with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. The third Crow Dog, Henry, helped introduce the peyote cult to the Sioux. And in the sixties and seventies, Crow Dog 's principal narrator, Leonard Crow Dog, took up the family's political challenge through his involvement with the American Indian Movement (AIM). As a wichasha wakan, or medicine man, Leonard became AIM's spiritual leader and renewed the banned ghost dance. Staunchly traditional, Leonard offers a rare glimpse of Lakota spiritual practices, describing the sun dance and many other rituals that are still central to Sioux life and culture.  "An illuminating introduction to Sioux culture." - Publishers Weekly From the co-author of Lakota Woman , which has sold more than 150,000 paperback copies, comes a compelling account detailing the unique experiences and spiritual knowledge accumulated by four generations of powerful medicine men. Leonard C. Dog was born in 1942 on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, where he still lives. Crow Dog Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men By Crow Dog, Leonard Perennial Copyright © 2004 Leonard C. Dog All right reserved. ISBN: 0060926821 I am Crow Dog "Look at things not with the eyes in your face but with the eyes in your heart." --Leonard Crow Dog I am Crow Dog. I am the fourth of that name. Crow Dogs have played a big part in the history of our tribe and in the history of all the Indian nations of the Great Plains during the last two hundred years. We are still making history. I am talking this book because I don't read or write. I never went to school--where they try to make Lakota children into whites, where it takes them eight years to teach you to spell cat. Talking and listening, not writing, that's in our tradition. Telling stories sitting around a fire or potbelly stove during the long winter nights, that's our way. I speak English as it forms up in my mind. It's not the kind of English they teach you in school; we don't use five-dollar words. I always think up the story in my mind in my own language. Then I try to put it into English. Our Lakota language is sacred to me. Even now, as I am talking, our language is getting lost among some of us. You can kill a language. The white missionaries and teachers in their schools committed language genocide. We are trying to bring our old language back. Trying to purify it. So now I'm telling my own story in my own way--starting at the beginning. It's a medicine story. White historians say that we came over from Asia, when ice covered the Bering Strait so that one could walk over it. We don't believe this, not only us Lakotas, but nearly all the Native Americans on this turtle continent. If there was any crossing of people on the Arctic ice it was the other way around, from Alaska to Asia. We were always here; we came from this earth. We were put here for a purpose, by Wakan Tanka, the Creator. We were put here in the center of the world, and at the center of these United States. Look at a map. Rosebud, our reservation, is smack in the middle. My story is a spiritual winter count of our people. It was Ptesan Win, the sacred White Buffalo Woman, who made our people holy and taught them how to live. She was the spirit of waonshila, mercifulness. She was grace. She was beauty. When she appeared, the people were starving. There was no game and nothing to eat. The chiefs sent out two young hunters to look for game. But these scouts found nothing. They saw neither buffalo nor deer. Then the winyan wakan, the woman sacredness, appeared to them in the morning. Ptesan Win came out of a cloud. The cloud turned into a hill. Ptesan Win walked the hill in the shape of a white buffalo calf who turned itself into a beautiful maiden dressed in white buckskin. In her hands she carried sage and her great gift to our people, chanunpa, the sacred pipe. Four days before she appeared, the hunters had foreseen her coming in a dream. The sacred woman spoke to these two young men: "Go back to your people. Tell them to get ready to receive me, to prepare the sacred tipi. Prepare the sacred sweat lodge. Do all these things. You already have the fire, peta owihankeshni, the fire without end. Light this fire for me. Igluha. Act well. Perform all