Kiowa, Apache and Comanche Military Societies: Enduring Veterans, 1800 to the Present - Hardcover

Meadows, William C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0292752121 ISBN 13: 9780292752122

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 1999

Synopsis

An in-depth ethnohistorical survey of Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche military societies, drawn from interviews with tribal elders and military society members, as well as unpublished archival sources and linguistic data.

About this title

Review:

This book deserves praise, especially for the author's own fieldwork and thorough use of the Native voice in depicting the multifaceted roles these sodalities played in Southern Plains Indian cultures.

Because of the book's descriptive content, readers interested in the clothing, songs, dances, recruitment strategies, and symbols used by the various military societies recognized by the Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowas will find this work incredibly useful.

Meadows produced a book that captures and records for all time the specifics of military society ceremonies, history and organization. In documenting and preserving these aspects of Indian life, he created a work valuable not just to anthropologists but to native preservationists as well.

Meadows combines extensive ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and analysis of symbols to reconstruct the history and significance of the military societies of the Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche tribes of southwestern Oklahoma. More important, he shows how these groups adapted in the twentieth century to provide each tribe with its own distinctive identity while serving as tools for social integration and enculturation at the same time.

About the Author:

William C. Meadows is Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at Missouri State University.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0292752121
• ISBN 13: 9780292752122
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 576