Sitting Bull: Lakota Warrior and 
Defender of His People
by S. D. Nelson; illus. by the author
Intermediate   Abrams   56 pp.
11/15   978-1-4197-0731-5   $19.95
e-book ed. 978-1-61312-855-8   $15.54

This handsome biography combines the story of Sitting Bull’s life with a brief history of the Lakota people in the nineteenth century. Sitting Bull (who belonged to the Hunkpapa, one of seven bands within the larger Lakota tribe) episodically narrates his own story in the voice of a respected elder reminiscing about the past (although Nelson’s voice intrudes in an instructional preamble, full of facts and figures, to the Battle of Little Bighorn). Sitting Bull passionately tells how the “wasichus,” the white men who “wore two faces,” systematically demolished the Lakota way of life and forced him and the Hunkpapa to retreat to Canada to escape the U.S. army; after a few years they returned to the United States and submitted to life on the reservation. Quotes in large print from Lakota culture, Sitting Bull, and his contemporaries create attractive and informative subheadings. As he did in Joseph Bruchac’s Crazy Horse’s Vision (rev. 7/00), Nelson draws in ink and colored pencil on ledger paper in order to re-create the profile drawings Native Americans produced on discarded wasichu ledgers. Reproductions of archival photographs are presented as if they were cartes de visite, popular keepsakes of the times, adding to the historical sense of place. Appended with a timeline, detailed explanatory notes, end notes, a select bibliography, and an index.

From the November/December 2015 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.