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Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun and Josephine Waggoner. With My Own Eyes: A Lakota Woman Tells Her People's History. Edited and introduced by Emily Levine. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1998.187 + xl pp. Cloth, $45.00.
Emily Levine and the University of Nebraska Press have performed a great service by bringing this volume into print. Encouraged to record their recollections and then thwarted in their attempts to find a publisher, the authors were victims in the 1930s and 1940S of professional historians, whose behavior ranged from distracted to disingenuous to dishonest. Because the manuscript failed to meet the widely accepted criteria for history-a single chronological narrative whose "facts" could be corroborated-it collected dust on the shelves of the Nebraska State Historical Society for decades except when established scholars pirated information from it to advance their own careers. The volume still fails to meet that earlier criteria, but history as a discipline has changed, and scholars are more attuned to divergent voices. Levine's sensitive editing addresses concerns of chronology and "facts" while preserving the account's multiple narratives and largely topical organization. As a result, the authors-long...