Saynday's People brings together two related volumes by the distinguished ethnologist and author Alice Marriott. The Saynday of the title and the central figure of Winter-Telling Stories is a combination of trickster and hero peculiar to Asiatic and American Indian mythology. He could do almost anything when he was using his medicine power for good, but Saynday was a great joker and when playing tricks often got what was coming to him. Indians on Horseback is both a history of the Kiowas and a vivid account of their way of life. The narrative is enriched not only by detailed descriptions of how these first Americans made moccasins and cradles, thread and arrows and tipis, but also by a Plains Indian cookbook which includes recipes for such dishes as pemmican and stone-boiled buffalo.

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In this in-depth interdisciplinary study, Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote reveals how Kiowa people drew on the tribe's rich history of expressive culture to assert its identity at a time of profound challenge. Examining traditional forms such as beadwork, metalwork, painting, and dance, Tone-Pah-Hote argues that their creation and exchange were as significant to the expression of Indigenous identity and sovereignty as formal political engagement and policymaking. These cultural forms, she argues, were sites of contestation as well as affirmation, as Kiowa people used them to confront external pressures, express national identity, and wrestle with changing gender roles and representations. Combatting a tendency to view Indigenous cultural production primarily in terms of resistance to settler-colonialism, Tone-Pah-Hote expands existing work on Kiowa culture by focusing on acts of creation and material objects that mattered as much for the nation's internal and familial relationships as for relations with those outside the tribe. In the end, she finds that during a time of political struggle and cultural dislocation at the turn of the twentieth century, the community's performative and expressive acts had much to do with the persistence, survival, and adaptation of the Kiowa nation.

Benjamin Kracht's Kiowa Belief and Ritual, a collection of materials gleaned from Santa Fe Laboratory of Anthropology field notes and augmented by Alice Marriott's field notes, significantly enhances the existing literature concerning Plains religions.

Anadarko, Oklahoma, bills itself today as the “Indian Capital of the Nation,” but it was a drowsy frontier village when budding photographer Annette Ross Hume arrived in 1890. Home to a federal agency charged with serving the many American Indian tribes in the area, the town burgeoned when the U.S. government auctioned off building lots at the turn of the twentieth century. Hume faithfully documented its explosive growth and the American Indians she encountered. Her extraordinary photographs are collected here for the first time. In their introduction, authors Kristina L. Southwell and John R. Lovett provide an illuminating biography of Hume, focusing on her life in Anadarko and the development of her photographic skills. Born in 1858, in Perrysburg, Ohio, Hume moved to Oklahoma Territory with her husband after he accepted an appointment as physician for the Kiowa, Comanche, and Wichita Agency. She soon acquired a camera and began documenting daily life. Her portraits of everyday life are unforgettable — images of Indian mothers with babies in cradleboards, tribal elders (including Comanche chief Quanah Parker) conducting council meetings, families receiving their issue of beef from the government agent, and men and women engaging in the popular pastime of gambling. In 1927, historian Edward Everett Dale, on behalf of the University of Oklahoma, purchased Hume’s original glass plates for the university’s newly launched Western History Collections. The Annette Ross Hume collection has been a favorite of researchers for many years. Now this elegant volume makes Hume’s photographs more widely accessible, allowing a unique glimpse into a truly diverse American West.

A captivity narrative that provides eyewitness accounts of the twilight years of Kiowa freedom on the Plains, and early reservation life.

Examining the place names, geographical knowledge, and cultural associations of the Kiowa from the earliest recorded sources to the present, Kiowa Ethnogeography is the most in-depth study of its kind in the realm of Plains Indian tribal analysis. Linking geography to political and social changes, William Meadows applies a chronological approach that demonstrates a cultural evolution within the Kiowa community. Preserved in both linguistic and cartographic forms, the concepts of place, homeland, intertribal sharing of land, religious practice, and other aspects of Kiowa life are clarified in detail. Native religious relationships to land (termed "geosacred" by the author) are carefully documented as well. Meadows also provides analysis of the only known extant Kiowa map of Black Goose, its unique pictographic place labels, and its relationship to reservation-era land policies. Additional coverage of rivers, lakes, and military forts makes this a remarkably comprehensive and illuminating guide.