The Four Hills of Life

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. InThe 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.

Jeffrey D. Anderson is an associate professor of anthropology at Colby College and the author of One Hundred Years of Old Man Sage: An Arapaho Life Story (Nebraska 2003).