Kiowa Belief and Ritual

This is a long-awaited, revised portion of Kracht’s 1989 doctoral dissertation. The entire volume focuses on Native American belief, using data from the voluminous 1935 Santa Fe Laboratory of Anthropology’s Kiowa Field School Notes, with material from Alice Marriott and James Mooney’s field notes and Kracht’s own fieldwork. The book addresses Kiowa belief and ritual in general, while focusing on major prereservation (pre-1875) religious forms (Sun Dance, tribal bundles, sweat lodge, vision quest, shield societies, and medico-religious practices), linking them to both anthropological concepts and historical developments. Kracht’s work concludes with references to the emergence of prophets, peyotism and the Native American Church, Christianity, and the Ghost Dance. Kracht emphasizes the Santa Fe materials as the broadest and best source on prereservation Kiowa culture in general, and I concur. His discussion of anthropological studies of Plains Indians religion, the context of the field school, its members, their data collection methods,...