Winner of the 2024 Dwight L. Smith (ABC-CLIO) Award
Sherman and Grace Coolidge were a remarkable couple in many respects. Sherman Coolidge (Runs On Top), born in the early 1860s into the Northern band of Arapahos, experienced the extreme violence of the Indian Wars, including the death of his father, as a young boy. Grace Wetherbee Coolidge was born into wealth and privilege in 1873, only to reject her life as a New York heiress and become a missionary on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. It was there that Sherman and Grace met and later married in 1902.
After eight years together at Wind River, both went on to achieve prominence: Sherman as the president of the Native-run reform group the Society of American Indians (1911-1923), Grace as the author of Teepee Neighbors, a book describing her time on the reservation that drew praise from critics such as H. L. Mencken. Sherman was an Episcopal priest and a mesmerizing speaker who had the unique ability to blend his assimilated Western perspective with Arapaho values to educate the American public about the significant challenges facing Native peoples, including endemic poverty, racism, and inequality. Offering unprecedented entrEe into the most significant writings and documents of a leading Native American advocate and his wife, this volume is an intimate portrait of their life and contributes to our understanding of American Indian activism at a key moment of Indigenous resurgence against the settler state.
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"This is the first time so much personal information about a Native American and his Anglo-American wife has been exposed in such depth and insight. Sherman Coolidge's bold leadership in the 1910s called attention to the prejudice and abject ignorance of American people. There is no doubt that Lewandowski's valuable work will be a lasting legacy to the Arapaho Nation, Euro Americans, U.S. history, and other Indian nations. Part of Coolidge's papers should be incorporated into every American history textbook."-Rowena McClinton, editor of John Howard Payne Papers: Volumes 7-14 of the Payne-Butrick Papers "Lewandowski's book serves as an important contribution to the field [in] its singular focus, its author-centrism, and its rigorous deployment of careful archival work and assemblage. This volume reveals Coolidge's rhetorical tactics and his deft maneuvering of U.S. government policy concerning tribes, the impetus to convert Native people to Christianity that is at the core of his religiosity, and his growing circumspection regarding assimilationism, national pan-tribal organizations, the Indian Bureau, 'civilization' versus 'traditionalism,' and more."-Julianne Newmark, author of The Pluralist Imagination from East to West in American Literature
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ISBN-13
978-1-4962-3488-9 (9781496234889)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Sherman Coolidge (1860-1932), a leading Native American advocate of his generation, and his wife Grace Coolidge (1873-1937) wrote about Native American life and were married almost thirty years. Tadeusz Lewandowski (1973-2023) was a professor extraordinarius at the Institute of Literatures, University of Opole, Poland, and an associate professor of English and American studies at the University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic. He is the author of The Life of Sherman Coolidge, Arapaho Activist (Nebraska, 2022) and Ojibwe, Activist, Priest: The Life of Father Philip Bergin Gordon, Tibishkogijik.
