Beginning in 1907, the anthropologist Robert H. Lowie visited the Crow Indians at their reservation in Montana. He listened to tales that for many generations had been told around campfires in winter. Vivid tales of Old-Man-Coyote in his various guises; heroic accounts of Lodge-Boy and the Thunderbirds; supernatural stories about Raven-Face and the Spurned Lover; and other tales involving the Bear-Woman, the Offended Turtle, the Skeptical Husband--all these were recorded by Lowie. They were originally published in 1918 in an Anthropological Paper by the American Museum of Natural History.
Myths and Traditions of the Crow Indians is now reprinted with a new introduction by Peter Nabokov. These concretely detailed accounts served the Crow Indians as entertainers, moral lessons, cultural records, and guides to the workings of the universe.
Robert H. Lowie studied anthropology with Franz Boas at Columbia University, did fieldwork among the western Indian tribes from 1906 to 1931, and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for three decades. His many publications include The Crow Indians and Indians of the Plains, available as Bison Books. Peter Nabokov, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is the author of Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior (1982), also a Bison Book, and editor of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian and White Relations from Prophecy to the Present(1991).