Under orders from General Sheridan, Captain W. P. Clark spent over six years among the Plains Indians and other tribes studying their sign language. In addition to an alphabetical cataloguing of signs, Clark gives valuable background information on many tribes and their history and customs. Considered the classic of its field, this book provides, entirely in prose form, how to speak the language entirely through sign language, without one diagram provided.

Under orders from General Sheridan, Captain W. P. Clark spent over six years among the Plains Indians and other tribes studying their sign language. In addition to an alphabetical cataloguing of signs, Clark gives valuable background information on many tribes and their history and customs. Considered the classic of its field, this book provides, entirely in prose form, how to speak the language entirely through sign language, without one diagram provided.

Simplified Signs presents a system of manual sign communication intended for special populations who have had limited success mastering spoken or full sign languages. It is the culmination of over twenty years of research and development by the authors. The Simplified Sign System has been developed and tested for ease of sign comprehension, memorization, and formation by limiting the complexity of the motor skills required to form each sign, and by ensuring that each sign visually resembles the meaning it conveys. Volume 1 outlines the research underpinning and informing the project, and places the Simplified Sign System in a wider context of sign usage, historically and by different populations. Volume 2 presents the lexicon of signs, totalling approximately 1000 signs, each with a clear illustration and a written description of how the sign is formed, as well as a memory aid that connects the sign visually to the meaning that it conveys. While the Simplified Sign System originally was developed to meet the needs of persons with intellectual disabilities, cerebral palsy, autism, or aphasia, it may also assist the communication needs of a wider audience – such as healthcare professionals, aid workers, military personnel , travellers or parents, and children who have not yet mastered spoken language. The system also has been shown to enhance learning for individuals studying a foreign language. Lucid and comprehensive, this work constitutes a valuable resource that will enhance the communicative interactions of many different people, and will be of great interest to researchers and educators alike.

For more than a century, the Northern Arapaho people have lived on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming—the fourth largest reservation in the country. In The Four Hills of Life, Jeffrey D. Anderson masterfully draws together aspects of the Northern Arapahos’ world—myth, language, art, ritual, identity, and history—to offer a vivid picture of a culture that has endured and changed over time. Anderson shows that Northern Arapaho unity and identity from the nineteenth century on derive primarily from a shared system of ritual practices that transmit vital cultural knowledge. He also provides an in-depth study of the problems that Euro-American society continues to impose on reservation life and of the responses of the Northern Arapahos.

Based on an actual historical event but told through fictional diaries, this is the story of May Dodd—a remarkable woman who, in 1875, travels through the American West to marry the chief of the Cheyenne Nation. One Thousand White Women begins with May Dodd’s journey into an unknown world. Having been committed to an insane asylum by her blue-blood family for the crime of loving a man beneath her station, May finds that her only hope for freedom and redemption is to participate in a secret government program whereby women from “civilized” society become the brides of Cheyenne warriors. What follows is a series of breathtaking adventures—May’s brief, passionate romance with the gallant young army captain John Bourke; her marriage to the great chief Little Wolf; and her conflict of being caught between loving two men and living two completely different lives. “Fergus portrays the perceptions and emotions of women...with tremendous insight and sensitivity.”—Booklist “A superb tale of sorrow, suspense, exultation, and triumph.” —Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump