Part 3 Section 1 Summary and Analysis

This part of the book is sub-titled "The World We Live in Now". It contains various stories, some mostly mythic and some mostly fact based, but all containing illuminations of Indian spiritual belief systems. The first two tell of different aspects of the white man's destructive impact on Indian societies.

"Saynday and Smallpox: The White Man's Gift" (Kiowa) The introduction of this story describes how it's an illustration of the way mythic native figures such as Saynday (a Hero-Trickster) became integrated with contemporary realities-in this case, the late 19th Century reality of smallpox.

As he walks across the prairie, Saynday contemplates how things have changed: cattle have replaced the buffalo, settlers' cabins have replaced Indian tipis, and the People are being fenced in. As he's realizing there's no longer room for him in the world and that it's time...