Books!

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Sigh, than I wish even more to listen to you.

s,p,d, & f orbitals can be visualized and explained without math. Quantization, Symmetry and absorption can be explained with analogies of the normal world. Again no math.

On Selection rules, I have to search my old notes from physics.

You are going to give a lecture in the style of Richard Feynman as in Laws of Physics or Claude Shannon with his first chapter of The Mathematical Theory of Communication.

Plain, easy and with your special wit. Your audience will have a great time.

I have an idea about the completeness of preparation you have to do for the audience.

[OLChemist]

I'll be good. I won't even say aufbau, ungerade, gerade -- which is just about the extent of my German, LOL.

[OLChemist]

I'm about half way through Good Friday on The Rez by the founder of PC Magazine, PC World, and Macworld.

David H. Bunnell, Good Friday on The Rez, St. Martin's Press, 2017.

It's the story of a rather odd road trip from Alliance, NE to Kyle to visit a former student and friend. Parts of it rehash, albeit it from a highly personal, subjective perspective, some of the same events detailed in Stew Magnusen's The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder. He relates a few tales from the years he taught at Little Wound School.

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One third of Burry my Heart at Wounded Knee by by Dee Brown.

Sigh. Mankind and decision makers for a greater part have not learned really in the last 150+ years for the better ways.

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Completed Burry my Heart at Wounded Knee.
Switched to Luther Standing Bear and finished his books.
Worth reading as he was at places and times which lives on through his writing yet hard to experience from today, at least to me.

Explaining children of today what living was between 1960 and 1970 they can not imagine as it really was by their experience in today's world.

Decided to read Touching the Fire and Omaha Tales. I like the first one though it says to be a novel by the way it is narrated, from the present to the past.

[OLChemist]

Touching the Fire is indeed a novel. If you liked it, I'd recommend:

Susan Power, The Grass Dancer, Berkley, 1994.

Louise Erdrich, The Antelope WifeHarper, 1998.

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Touching the Fire is indeed a novel. If you liked it, I'd recommend:

I ask myself what is novel and what is used by the term novel to embed truth within the novel. To a certain part, my view is that it is based on a part of Omaha and authors history history with the Omaha and combining other elements of plain tribes to make it a novel with a possible yet hypothetical tribe.

Reading another later book of Welsch where he comments on Touching the Fire let questions arise about how much of real tribes, people and tales are in this novel or have been taken in customized or imaginary form to explain the reality.

Susan Power, The Grass Dancer, Berkley, 1994.

Louise Erdrich, The Antelope WifeHarper, 1998.

I am going to read them after Omaha Tales. I suppose they are emotional more difficult to read.

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Omaha Tribal Myths and Trickster Tales.

A very interesting way to present the Myths and Tales. As it was written by the "younger" Roger Welsch, it is in my view quite different to the four other books I read and he has written in later years. In my opinion, this is the most difficult book to read by him.

This above book dates 19881 while two other books date 1994 (Uncle Smoke Stories) and 1997 (Touching the fire) and yet two further books 2012 (Embracing Fry Bread) and 2017 (The Reluctant Pilgrim).

He presents some tales told in the different versions they have been communicated or have been taken by short hand to the ability of the listener. The comments to every tale are of different depth.

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Browsing through books on Amazon, I came across the following book:


Witness

A Hunkpapha Historian's Strong Heart Song of the Lakotas

by Josephine Waggoner

edited by Emily Levine.

At the time; I am reading Ella Deloria and Julien Rice. Need to be reread from time to time.

[OLChemist]

Witness

A Hunkpapha Historian's Strong Heart Song of the Lakotas

by Josephine Waggoner

edited by Emily Levine.

This is a wonderful book.

[Broken Arrow]

This is a wonderful book.

I got one.

There is a second book
With My Own Eyes: A Lakota Woman Tells Her Peoples History.


Sigh, I can't read so fast.

I read Ella Deloria and Julien Rice and the translation from Lakota over English into German thinking requires to read and reread and consult the dictionaries. Else I miss to much.

There are losses in meaning and play on words already from Lakota to English and my knowledge of English is limited.

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Found a nice book about cross stitching with pictures.

Joan Elliott
Native American Cross Stitch.
David & Charles Books
2007
ISBN 10 0-7153-2758-5

Page 8 and 94 are great.

[OLChemist]

Deloria's material is dense. There is a lot to chew on.

I can't remember about this particular volume, but in general her English prose reflects the style expected of an educated woman of the early 1900's. Add to it an attempt to convey some of the stylistic conventions of Lakota oral storytelling and the result makes native English speakers falter. It is a bit silted and florid by current standards.

That's part of why I recommend the Rice books to folks who are going to dive into her work. Deloria was an ethnographer and versed in not only her culture but the scholarly writing of the day about her culture. Rice puts some of this together for the uninitiated.

If you really want to jump off in the deep end there is this:

Ivan Stars, Peter Iron Shell, edited Eugene Buechel, Paul Manhart, Lakota Tales and Texts in Translation, Tipi Press, 1998.

The Lakota texts were originally published in 1978. The translation came 20 years later. This is not scholarly writing; its fairly unvarnished Lakota storytelling from the mid-20th century.

I seldom recommend this to folks who want to learn about the Lakota. This material wasn't collected for non-Lakota. I believe it was originally intended as grist for Lakota language education and thus was to be accessible only to Lakota speakers. Understanding this material requires a deep understanding of Lakota ways and can open the way for a fair amount of ill-informed interpretation.

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I can only in the strongest manner support your recommendation to read Rice parallel to Deloria's English translations of Lakota stories.

Without Rice a lot of the depths of educational concepts of the stories is out of reach.

To get deeper in to the stories than Rice can do in English is to learn Lakota and read it in the original Language. Than there are still limitations because one needs to be able to think in the language.

With a lot of help by Greg Mellen, may he rest in peace, I know that that what English I know is by far not enough English to express what I think in German.

And what Rice makes clear and I can remember from my youth is, that oral stories carry meaning, emotion and judgement (approval or rejection or criticism of acting people in the stories) by the way the stories are told. The stories need to be told by grandfather and / or grandmother.

I will dive into the deep water. You put me on the path of much reading and a task, may be a mission in the future of learning and reconsidering of what is, what could or can be and what should be.

If there is something to regret than that it is only reading. As a hint, watching a powwow on a Livestream is better than not watching at all but it is still far away from being really at the real powwow.

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I sidestepped to Joseph Marshall III. book "Walking with Grandfather".

The book is accompanied by a CD where Joseph Marshall speaks to his readers, I think much more tells his stories with additional embedding. This oral story telling in my opinion serves the reader very well.

I can read even the most accurate book on Lakota history, culture, behavior, believe but I will always be limited in understanding.

What might help to understand a little bit more will be listening and talking (not arguing in what is right or wrong) about as I understood at a particular moment.

I can try an Einsteinian thought experiment. What may happen to me as a whole person if living within a tribal community? What of me might be changed, what can be changed and what must remain unchanged?

Only a few questions of endless questions and who knows if there are answers or if answers are new questions?

To return to Joseph Marshall, especially his western novels. I think he has adapted non Lakota techniques which reads good but is employed to carry Lakota wisdom to his readers. There is no question, where the good ones and the bad ones are in his novels. In my point of view, he is telling stories to everyone who wants to listen and offers several layers of wisdom as one is ready, willing and prepared to step from the easy layer to the more complex layer.