ABSTRACT
In Radical Hope, a fascinating study of the demise of the Native American Crow tribe’s way of life, Jonathan Lear examines what it takes to keep hope for the future alive. At the age of nine, the last great Crow chief, Plenty Coups, had a dream that there would be no more buffalo and that his people would fall to the ground and nothing more would happen. Plenty Coups had his dream in 1857, and it correctly predicted the tribe’s future: the Crow were hunters and, as the buffalo were wiped out, so was their way of life. What was significant about this dream was that it gave Plenty Coups and the members of his tribe a new way of being, a new cultural identity that enabled them not only to survive but to construct a new vision of life that held hope.
