This book presents the James R. Walker collection of traditional Lakota knowledge. Walker spent eighteen years in South Dakota as a physician on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the home of the Oglala Sioux. From 1896 until 1914, he collected material relating to nearly every aspect of the old Lakota way of life. This collection records teachings by men whose statements of belief show the energy, depth, and imaginative intensity characteristic of the Lakota response to specific cultural, social, and ecological challenges.