Arapaho Stories, Songs, and Prayers

A bison and a bobtailed horse race across the sky, raising a trail of dust behind them?leaving in their wake the Milky Way to forever mark their path. An unknown Arapaho teller shared this account with an ethnographer in 1893, explaining that the race determined which animal would be ridden, which would be food. Traditional American Indian oral narratives, ranging from origin stories to trickster tales and prayers, constitute part of the great heritage of each tribe. Many of these narratives, gathered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were obtained or published only in English translation. Although this is the case with many Arapaho stories, extensive Arapaho-language texts exist that have never before been published?until now. Arapaho Stories, Songs, and Prayers gives new life to these manuscripts, celebrating Arapaho oral narrative traditions in all the richness of their original language.