ABSTRACT
When Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow nation, recounted the history of his people to Frank Linderman, he declined to speak about anything in the life of the Crow after they were confined to the reservation. He said: “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened” (Linderman 2002; Lear 2006: 2). In saying this, Plenty Coups was giving voice to the idea that a traditional form of life had ended. Yet why should it matter that one form of life has ended if another has begun? One answer might be found in the account, given by an elderly Crow woman named Pretty Shield, of the shame she felt for using a saddle-strap on her disobedient grandchild, who had run off to a dance “with a bad young man.” She had grown up in a society in which one never struck a child. “I felt ashamed,” she said, before adding: “I am trying to live a life I do not understand” (Lear 2006: 61). Pretty Shield knew she had saved her granddaughter from “one of the emerging degradations of reservation life,” but did so in the context of a life she did not understand and did not know how to evaluate (Lear 2006: 61). Even if it is possible for humans to live by many and varied traditions, it is not easy-for some it may even be impossible-to move from one familiar form into another, alien, way of life. Plenty Coups, as leader of the Crow, addressed this issue as a practical problem: how could the Crow as a people manage the transition to the modern world? It is also the problem that, admittedly with less urgency, theorists of multiculturalism address in more general form: how should the diversity of traditions within a society be handled, given that minorities will surely struggle and suffer (both individually and collectively) in their efforts to accommodate themselves to the realities of their condition, and to flourish?
