Five Lakota Oral Discourses Transcribed and Translated : How an American Indian Nation Explains Its Philosophy of Life

The work is the first fully bilingual (Lakota-English) collection of texts of Lakota religion.

It is also the first concentrating on spirituality. The present book is a collection of texts in the Lakota language with translation and notes relating to the Plains Indian religion 'the Way of the Pipe' and Christianity.

It includes an introduction, the texts themselves and a glossary of the words occurring in the texts.

The introduction gives notes on the nature of oral texts, on the type of translation given and on the texts themselves, also examining earlier orthographies that have been used for the language and introducing the orthography used in the book.

The texts themselves are of two types. The first two sections, including those of Bushotter and Fire Thunder, are derived from written sources, while the later sections, those of Fool's Crow, Schweigman, Catches and the Marquette Archive texts are derived from taped material.

All of these texts are available in public archives. The texts differ from the other major collections in that the latter are mainly narrative in nature, while a substantial part of the present collection involves discussion and commentary and thus involves different syntactic constructions and vocabulary.

The translation of the Lakota texts is that of the authors, but in some cases the work was assisted by the existence of prior translations into English in the archives.