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2021 Scholarly Writing Award in the Saskatchewan Book Awards This book presents two of the most important traditions of the Dakota people, the Red Road and the Holy Dance, as told by Samuel Mniyo and Robert Goodvoice, two Dakota men from the Wahpeton Dakota Nation near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada. Their accounts of these central spiritual traditions and other aspects of Dakota life and history go back seven generations and help to illuminate the worldview of the Dakota people for the younger generation of Dakotas, also called the Santee Sioux. "The Good Red Road," an important symbolic concept in the Holy Dance, means the good way of living or the path of goodness. The Holy Dance (also called the Medicine Dance) is a Dakota ceremony of earlier generations. Although it is no longer practiced, it too was a central part of the tradition and likely the most important ceremonial organization of the Dakotas. While some people believe that the Holy Dance is sacred and that the information regarding its subjects should be allowed to die with the last believers, Mniyo believed that these spiritual ceremonies played a key role in maintaining connections with the spirit world and were important aspects of shaping the identity of the Dakota people. In The Red Road and Other Narratives of the Dakota Sioux, Daniel Beveridge brings together Mniyo and Goodvoice's narratives and biographies, as well as songs of the Holy Dance and the pictographic notebooks of James Black (Jim Sapa), to make this volume indispensable for scholars and members of the Dakota community.

The Hudson's Bay Company had been operating for nearly two centuries when young Isaac Cowie joined it in 1867. He sailed from the Shetland Islands to Rupert's Land, finally reaching York Factory, where he awaited his assignment. Company of Adventurers describes the early, lusty history of the HBC and the years of Cowie's service, when manufactured goods were driving out the demand for furs and buffalo hides. It contains rare information about the Assiniboin and Plains Crees Indians during the period before their confinement to reservations.
Alive to the historical and ethnographic value of his writing, Cowie tells about his tenure as a clerk (later manager) at Fort Qu'Appelle in southern Saskatchewan, the colorful personalities who served with him, the wide-ranging fur brigades, remote outposts, and the Company's relations with Indian tribes. He was the first white man known to have set foot within the Swift Current District when in 1868 he hunted buffalo there. His dealings with the Metis during the Red River Rebellion placed him where history was being made.

In an introduction to this Bison Book edition, David Reed Miller discusses how Cowie fitted into a great commercial enterprise and how he became a victim of unpleasant circumstances that forced his retirement in 1891.

"Indian Boyhood" (1902) was the literary debut of Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa), a Santee Sioux whose eleven books aimed at bringing whites and Indians closer together. The favorable reception of the autobiographical Indian Boyhood would lead him to write such classic works as "Old Indian Days" (1907), "Wig warn Evenings: Sioux Folk Tales Retold" (with Elaine Goodale Eastman, 1909), "The Soul of the Indian" (1911), "From the Deep Woods to Civilization" (1916), and "Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains" (1918), all reprinted as Bison Books.

At the beginning of "Indian Boyhood" Eastman recalls the 1862 Sioux Uprising in Minnesota that sent his family into exile in Canada. He describes his childhood there, which ended when his father, who had been presumed dead, appeared to take him back to the United States. An Indian boy's training, child-hood games, harvesting and feasts, legends told around a campfire--Eastman relates all aspects of the rich traditional life of the Santee Sioux, which had already passed away by the time this book was published.