Lakota Life after the Buffalo has forty-two stories written by Victor Swallow, an elderly Oglala Lakota with French/Indian background. He was raised in tents and a log cabin on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwest South Dakota--the poorest county in the U.S. Coming from a warrior society, he served in the U.S. Navy in the early years of the Vietnan War. After many odd jobs available to a Lakota, he became a life-long bricklayer. Now retired and widowed, Victor lives near his family. With sharp memory, he has written oral stories from Lakota's provisional victory at Greasy Grass (a.k.a. Custer's Last Stand) into the twenty-first century. Mainly oral mini-stories, passed on from his mother, mother's mother, and mother's mother's mother, date back to when Lakota and buffalo roamed free on the western Dakota prairie. Beginning at age six educated in a distant boarding school, Victor's passion is to pass on his ancestral memories of Lakota life and trials since the buffalo (American bison) were exterminated.
