Shaman

Name: Shaman
Rating: 4.2 (26 reviews)

by Robert Shea

First published 1991

Amazon

3.7(26)

In 1825, Gray Cloud, the son of a Sauk medicine woman and a French-American father, begins the spiritual training that will make him White Bear, a healer and shaman. His divided inheritance draws him between the Sauk villages of the upper Mississippi and the estate of Victoire, where wealth, law and family rivalry embody the expanding settler world. Robert Shea uses Gray Cloud’s apprenticeship, visions and relationships with Redbird and Nancy Hale to explore identity, loyalty and the cost of trying to live within two cultures.

The later chapters carry White Bear into the dispossession of Saukenuk and the Black Hawk War of 1832. Black Hawk’s British Band, encouraged by the Winnebago Prophet and pursued by militia and regular troops, is driven through Illinois and Wisconsin toward the violence at Bad Axe. Historical figures including Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Winfield Scott, Zachary Taylor and Jefferson Davis enter the narrative, but the novel remains centred on Sauk families facing hunger, flight and the destruction of their homeland.

Historical Periods

Black Hawk War1832 CE

Genres

Coming-of-Age Fiction Historical Fantasy Historical Sagas War Fiction Western & Frontier Fiction

Historical people

Abraham Lincoln1809–1865 Jefferson Davis1808–1889 Winfield Scott Andrew Jackson Zachary Taylor Black Hawk1767–1838 Wabokieshiekc. 1794–c. 1841 Henry Atkinson1782–1842