All My Relatives - (New Visions in Native American and Indigenous Studies) by David Posthumus

About the Book

All My Relatives demonstrates the significance of a new animist framework for understanding North American indigenous culture and history and how an expanded notion of personhood serves to connect otherwise disparate and inaccessible elements of Lakota ethnography.

Book Synopsis

In All My Relatives David C. Posthumus offers the first revisionist history of the Lakotas' religion and culture in a generation. He applies key insights from what has been called the "ontological turn," particularly the dual notions of interiority/soul/spirit and physicality/body and an extended notion of personhood, as proposed by A. Irving Hallowell and Philippe Descola, that includes humans as well as nonhumans. All My Relatives demonstrates how a new animist framework can connect and articulate otherwise disparate and obscure elements of Lakota ethnography. Stripped of its problematic nineteenth-century social evolutionary elements and viewed as an ontological or spiritual alternative, this reevaluated concept of animism for a twenty-first-century sensibility provides a compelling lens through which traditional Lakota mythology, dreams and visions, and ceremony may be productively analyzed and more fully understood.

Posthumus explores how Lakota animist beliefs permeate the understanding of the real world in relation to such phenomena as the personhood of rocks, ghosts or spirits of deceased humans and animals, meteorological phenomena, familiar spirits or spirit helpers, and medicine bundles. All My Relatives offers new insights into traditional Lakota culture for a deeper and more enduring understanding of indigenous cosmology, ontology, and religion.

Review Quotes

"In this superb ethnography of North American animism, David Posthumus paints a vivid and poetic picture of what it meant for the nineteenth-century Lakota Sioux to live in a world beyond the human that they shared with scores of animal persons and spirits. A remarkable achievement."--Philippe Descola, author of Beyond Nature and Culture-- (9/19/2017 12:00:00 AM)

"All My Relatives is a work that challenges the modern West's collective memory of American Indian spiritual beliefs, a relic of nineteenth-century Christian colonialism through missionary enterprises. Most impressive is the author's use of Lakota language to offer a more accurate translation of words and phrases that the Christian missionaries defined and employed to portray Lakota religion as void of any spiritual value. To the contrary, Posthumus argues that in an animist ontology, the principle of relatedness is at the heart of Lakota spirituality."--Lisa Barnett, South Dakota History

"All My Relatives is an important contribution to the anthropological and ethnohistorical research on Lakota religion. It sets several standards for the field, showcasing the richness of sources, the complexity of theological Lakota argumentation, and how these sources can be analyzed in a meaningful way."--Sebastian Braun, Journal of Anthropological Research

"All My Relatives provides us with a look into the core beliefs and practices of the Lakota people from an ontological view as well as an ethnographic one. Posthumus's firm grasp of Lakota history and culture adds clarity and historical significance to text, which is vital to understanding the Lakota people, their beliefs, and their rituals."--Victoria Sprague, Great Plains Quarterly

"The serious reader will be richly rewarded in working through the book given Posthumus's sophisticated explication of Lakota interspecies relations and their implications for ritual enactment. . . . His work clearly demonstrates the promise of the new animism for indigenous research, and its application to Lakota lifeways specifically, and to Native American sacred traditions in general."--Fritz Detwiler, Reading Religion-- (4/22/2019 12:00:00 AM)

"The subject of Lakota ontology, belief, and ritual has enduring value and significance for all who are interested in the Sioux, in the literature of Black Elk, and in Plains ethnohistory generally. . . . All My Relatives is very strong in its command of Lakota sources, notably the writings of the Delorias, of ethnohistorical records, and of relevant secondary sources."--Jennifer S. H. Brown, professor emerita of history at the University of Winnipeg and editor of Ojibwe Stories from the Upper Berens River: A. Irving Hallowell and Adam Bigmouth in Conversation-- (9/19/2017 12:00:00 AM)

"This is a must-read for the student of Lakota ontology, belief, and ritual. Posthumus adds to the field of collected works that capture once again the adage, 'We have much to learn from the American Indian.'"--Maka Akan Najin Clifford, Nebraska History

About the Author

David C. Posthumus is an associate professor of anthropology and Native American studies at the University of South Dakota.