BOOK REVIEWS: Storm Maker's Tipi

By Mary Garrigan,
Journal Staff Writer
http://www.rapidcityjournal.com

RAPID CITY -- Strolling through Canyon Lake Park one day a few years ago, Paul Goble, the Rapid City author and illustrator of more than 30 children's books on American Indian legends, came across a group of young Lakota men trying to set up a traditional tipi.

Seeing their struggle with the long poles and heavy canvas, Goble wandered over and politely gave a few pointers on the process. His suggestions, offered in Goble's thick English accent, were immediately rejected by the group as the uninformed, unwelcomed ramblings of a white guy who couldn't possibly know anything about pitching a Lakota tipi.

Two hours later, when the men still hadn't raised the tipi, Goble returned, this time with a piece of paper containing step-by-step illustrated instructions for pitching a tipi. This time, they took his advice. Within half an hour, their tipi was standing tall, its pine poles stretching skyward and its door, if the traditionalist Goble had anything to say about it, facing east toward the first rays of the rising sun.

The tipi diagram Goble shared with the young Lakota men in the park that day is the same one that appears in his newest children's book, "Storm Maker's Tipi," just published by Atheneum, a division of Simon and Schuster. The book is available in local bookstores for $18.

Goble, it seems, not only knows how to pitch a tipi, (something he's done on numerous occasions with the one he owns) but readers will discover he also knows many other things about them, including the meanings of the vision-related symbols often painted on them.

This newest book retells the Indian legend of the Storm Maker, who granted the first tipi to the Blackfoot people to protect them from bad weather. It's the story of two Blackfoot hunters, Sacred Otter and his son, Morning Plume, caught in a blizzard but spared by a vision of an immense, mystical tipi that would change the life of the Blackfoot tribe forever.

Like all his children's books, including the 1979 Caldecott Medal-winning "The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses," this latest book contains Goble's characteristic simplified figures and richly colored Indian designs, accompanied by a legend delivered in his straightforward, unsentimental prose style.

Appropriately enough, in a book about the Bringer of Blizzards, Goble renders the first snow scene he's ever painted. And for the first time in any of his books, two paintings have been printed so that the reader must turn the book 90 degrees to view it. "I'd wanted to do that before in books, but my editors always said, "'No.' This editor suggested it."

"It's done to emphasize the fact that it's no ordinary tipi — this is a mythical tipi," he said of the artwork depicting the tipi Sacred Otter sees in his dream and is instructed to recreate for his people.

Born in England, Goble first traveled to America in 1959 to pursue his lifelong interest in all things American Indian. As a child, Goble's heroes were not the stars of sports or screen but the great Indian chiefs of history. One of his earliest memories is walking around his Surrey, England, neighborhood in a fringed shirt and war bonnet. "My love and admiration for all things Native American started at that age," he said.

That interest brought him to the Indian reservations of South Dakota, and in 1977, he moved to the Black Hills, eventually becoming a United States citizen. He's also been adopted into Sioux and Yakima tribes.

He's spent most of his time living and working in the Black Hills with his wife, Janet. They have one grown son, Robert.

For the past three years, he's lived in Rapid City, painting from his Ninth Street home.

Now 68, he publishes about one book a year, down from the prolific pace of two books a year he set earlier in his career. In more than 30 books, he's drawn largely upon stories from the Lakota, Cheyenne and Blackfoot tribes, as well as the trickster legend of Iktomi. His next book, "The Mystic Horse," which Goble is working on for publication in 2002, is a retelling of a Pawnee legend.

Like many of the myths on which he bases his books, the Pawnee legend needs some "cleaning up" to make it palatable for young children, as well as their parents, Goble said. "They all need some editing," he said of the warfare, violence, mistreatment of women or gruesome deaths the original stories may contain.

"Legends throughout history have a tendency to change and evolve through time, so I'm not bothered by cleaning them up a bit," he said.

He's also careful to include the original sources for the legends in the credits of all his books so anyone interested in the unaltered version can locate them, he said.

Tipis long have interested Goble, who considered writing a more complete adult book on the subject but found it too daunting. Unlike the three-pole Lakota tipis, Blackfoot tipis have four poles and traditionally are decorated with paintings that come to their owners in dreams or visions. That makes them especially appealing to Goble.

It's also why his own tipi is a plain, unpainted canvas one. "I've never seen a tipi in my dreams," he said. "and I'm so aware of the tradition that says these things were never meant to be just a design that I get a little cross when I see a tipi that's been painted in an unthinking way without any knowledge of the design that's on it at all."

Goble has never lost his fascination with Indian culture, but he has lost some of his personal connection to it. As many of his Sioux friends have died, he spends less time on the reservation.

But the legends of a culture he loves continue to capture his imagination, and whenever one does, it's likely to become another of his acclaimed children's picture books.

Garrigan can be reached at 394-8410 or mary.garrigan@rapidcityjournal.com.
 

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