The Sun Came Down: The History of the World as My Blackfeet Elders Told It

At the age of sixty-seven, Percy Bullchild (1915–1986), a Blackfeet Indian from Browning, Montana, with little formal education in English, set out to put the oral traditions and history of his people into a permanent written record. He regarded this undertaking—to “write the Indian version of our own true ways in our history and legends,” as he puts it—as both a corrective and an instructive tool. Bullchild culled this remarkable collection of historical legends from his memory of the oral...