The Woman Who Loved Mankind

The Life of a Twentieth-Century Crow Elder

Lillian Bullshows Hogan, Barbara Loeb, Mardell Hogan Plainfeather

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780803216136
• eBook ISBN: 9780803243309
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

The oldest living Crow at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Lillian Bullshows Hogan (1905–2003) grew up on the Crow reservation in rural Montana. In The Woman Who Loved Mankind she enthralls readers with her own long and remarkable life and the stories of her parents, part of the last generation of Crow born to nomadic ways.

As a child Hogan had a miniature teepee, a fast horse, and a medicine necklace of green beads; she learned traditional arts and food gathering from her mother and experienced the bitterness of Indian boarding school. She grew up to be a complex, hard-working Native woman who drove a car, maintained a bank account, and read the local English paper but spoke Crow as her first language, practiced beadwork, tanned hides, honored clan relatives in generous giveaways, and often visited the last of the old chiefs and berdaches with her family. She married in the traditional Crow way and was a proud member of the Tobacco and Sacred Pipe societies but was also a devoted Christian who helped establish the Church of God on her reservation.

Warm, funny, heartbreaking, and filled with information on Crow life, Hogan’s story was told to her daughter, Mardell Hogan Plainfeather, and to Barbara Loeb, a scholar and longtime friend of the family who recorded her words, staying true to Hogan’s expressive speaking rhythms with its echoes of traditional Crow storytelling.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction by Barbara Loeb
• Thoughts about My Mother by Mardell Hogan Plainfeather
• Genealogies
• Chapter One: My Birth and Infancy
• Chapter Two: My Mother
• Chapter Three: My Father
• Chapter Four: My Parents Meet and Marry
• Chapter Five: My First Memories
• Chapter Six: Boarding School
• Chapter Seven: Memories of Youth
• Chapter Eight: My Mother Teaches Me to Be a Good Woman
• Chapter Nine: Tobacco Iipche (Sacred Pipe Society)and the Medicine Dance (Tobacco Society)
• Chapter Ten: We Were Always Hard Up
• Chapter Eleven: The Last Years in School
• Chapter Twelve: My First Marriage Was to Alex
• Chapter Thirteen: We’re Adopted into the Tobacco Society
• Chapter Fourteen: I Married Robbie Yellowtail
• Chapter Fifteen: Paul
• Chapter Sixteen: George
• Chapter Seventeen: The Kids Are Growing Up
• Chapter Eighteen: Sacred Experiences
• Chapter Nineteen: Traditional Healing
• Chapter Twenty: I Gave Indian Names
• Chapter Twenty-One: I’m an Old-Timer
• Chapter Twenty-Two: Education
• Chapter Twenty-Three: Life as an Elder
• Bibliography
• Index