An old Indian man sits alone in his snow-shrowded tipi, dreaming of the past and blowing meditatively on an eagle-bone whistle. A younger White man comes to visit him, bringing gifts and a sympathetic ear for the old man's tales of long ago. This situation, incidentally portraying the early fieldwork of many [American ethnographers] … has been skillfully used by poet-novelist John Neihardt [in When the Tree Flowered] to recreate the experience of the Oglala Sioux in the mid-nineteenth century. The form admirably fits the content: the old man is speaking freely to an outsider, and tries to make clear things that an outsider would not understand; but his listener still occasionally misses the point, becomes impatient, or needs further explanation. There are tales of adventure and of romance, of war parties and vision quests, of hunger and of ritual (the first-person description of the Sun Dance is superb...