Lynda C. (Readnmachine) reviewed Wise Women: From Pocahontas to Sarah Winnemucca, Remarkable Stories of Native American Trailblazers on + 1477 more book reviews
Short autobiographies of Native American women, some of whom are in the common knowledge and others pretty obscure. Informative and mostly scholarly, with a brief imagined intro to each one. Overall, there's a discouraging sameness to many of them -- Europeans come, a single woman (usually from a prominent family) drinks the Kool-Aid, ultimately bringing harm to her people. The story of white expansion into the west would probably not have ended any other way had these women not acted, but at the same time it's depressing to see how their best intentions ultimately contributed to the collapse of their cultures.
