Invisible Reality is a personal account of Blackfeet culture and society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It seamlessly moves from family heritage to ethnic memory of a complex past and back to experiences of life in a modern American Indian reservation. Throughout the book Rosalyn R. LaPier, a self-portrayed mixed-blood Blackfeet tribal member, weaves together her people’s philosophical principles and traditional practices in contemporary autobiographical style. In doing so, the author deploys essential Blackfeet values: authenticity, reciprocity, and accountability. LaPier introduces Invisible Reality with a detailed narrative of her family genealogy and her sources of personal knowledge not simply to explain who she is but to establish authority. In a society characterized by formal learning scaffolds, knowledge is a source of intellectual, spiritual, and material wealth (xvi). Knowledge, especially sacred or high knowledge, comes to an individual at a cost, and through a formal transfer proving its...

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