Beadwork Techniques of the Native Americans

Though there are other how-to books on basic beadwork, this work by Scott Sutton in in a class by itself. Scott covers not only the rudiments but reveals tricks he’s learned from his extensive experience as a bead worker. He shares techniques not found anywhere else and complements it all with large, highly detailed step-by-step color photos and illustrations. Even if you’ve done beadwork before, you’ll doubt learn ways to improve your craft.

This volume covers beadwork styles found among Native Americans on the Western Plains, both past and present: loom work, applique, lazy/lane stitch, gourd (peyote) stitch (conventional, brickwork, and lool-variation) plus Scott’s efficient method for making and beading a fine fitting pair of moccasins. To help those just getting started, Scott begins with a full discussion of appropriate beading supplies, and a simple chart takes the mystery out of matching needle and thread sizes.

One shortcoming of other books is that most present few authentic beadwork designs. However, this work also features dozens of full-color photos of first-rate Indian and non-Indian made beadwork from museums, collections, and today’s marketplace. Subjects include 19th century and modern pieces as inspirations for you to create historic reproductions or today’s pow-wow pieces.

ISBN – 1-929572-11-5
96 Pages
Softback
8 1/2″ x 10 3/4″

Crazy Crow Trading Post, 2008

Bent’s Fort was a landmark of the American frontier, a huge private fort on the upper Arkansas River in present southeastern Colorado. Established by the adventurers Charles and William Bent, it stood until 1849 as the center of the Indian trade of the central plains. David Lavender’s chronicle of these men and their part in the opening of the West has been conceded a place beside the works of Parkman and Prescott.

ISBN: 978-0-8032-5753-5
479 Pages
Softback
5 1/4″ x 8″

University of Nebraska Press, 1972

Black Robes Enter Coyote’s World – Chief Charlo & Father De Smet in the Rocky Mountains

Black Robes Enter Coyote’s World brings to life the complicated history of Jesuit missionaries among Montana’s Native peoples — a saga of encounter, accommodation, and resistance during the transformative decades of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Sally Thompson tells the story of how Jesuit values played out in the lives of the Bitterroot Salish people. The famous Black Robe (Jesuit) Father Pierre-Jean De Smet actually spent little time among his “beloved Flatheads.” Instead, he traveled extensively between the Pacific and the Rockies, mapping the pathways and noting the valuable resources. His popular writings helped spark the westward movement of the white settlers.

Thompson picks up the story of the Salish peoples and black-robed missionaries at a Potawatomi mission on the Missouri in 1839 and follows their intertwined experiences throughout the lifetime of Salish chief Charlo, who eventually cursed the day white immigrants came into his country. Chief Charlo attributed the missionaries’ disconnected beliefs and exploitive actions to their status as orphans rejected from their place of creation, as he had learned from the story of Eden. Despite Charlo’s valiant efforts to protect his homeland, the Salish endured a forced removal from their beloved Bitterroot Valley to the Flathead Reservation in 1891. Charlo died in 1910, just before the massive giveaway of more than half of the Salish’s treaty-guaranteed lands through implementation of the Allotment Act. Despite it all, his people endure.

ISBN – 978-1-4962-3961-7
350 Pages
Hardback
6.5″ x 9.25″

The University of Nebraska Press, 2024

Blood Memory – The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of The American Buffalo

The American Buffalo — our nation’s official mammal — is an improbable, shaggy beast that has found itself at the center of many of our most mythic and sometimes heartbreaking tales. The largest land animals in the Western Hemisphere, they are survivors of a mass extinction that erased ancient species that were even larger. For nearly ten thousand years, they evolved alongside Native people who weaved them into every aspect of daily life; relied on them for food, clothing, and shelter; and revered them as equals.

Newcomers to the continent found the buffalo fascinating at first, but in time they came to consider the animals a hindrance to a young nation’s expansion. And in the space of only a decade, buffalo were slaughtered by the millions for their hides, with their carcasses left to rot on the prairies. Then, teetering on the brink of disappearing from the face of the earth, they were at last rescued by a motley collection of Americans, each of them driven by different — and sometimes competing — impulses. This is the rich and complicated history of a young republic’s heedless rush to conquer a continent, but it is also one of the dawn of conservation era — a story of America at its very best and worst.

ISBN – 978-0-593-53734-3
329 Pages
Hardback
6 1/2″ x 9 3/8″

Knopf Publishers, 2023