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David La Vere. Life among the Texas Indians. The WAA Narratives. College Station: Texas A & M Press, 1998. xvii + 270 PP. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $29-95.
Among the wealth of American Indian resources available at the Oklahoma Historical Society, one of the finest is the 112-volume Indian-Pioneer History, compiled as part of the wPA Federal Writers Project in Oklahoma, In 1937-1938, fieldworkers collected oral and written reminiscences of Oklahoma's Indian, white, and black pioneers. Among them were Indians whose tribal roots were in Texas - Caddos, Wichitas, Apaches, Tonkawas, Kiowas, and Comanches, as well as the Delawares who briefly found refuge there before all were relocated to reservations in the Indian Territory. The reminiscences of those interviewees and the non-Indians who observed and interacted with them are the subject of David La Vere's Life among the Texas Indians.
La Vere's purpose in writing this book was to allow Indian voices to describe their experiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to add first-person flavor to events and conditions already described by academics. He took as his model Theda Perdue's Nations Remembered: An Oral History of the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles in Oklahoma,...