This book belongs to a particular genre of modern Gnostic fantasy, much like the works of Lynn Andrews or Carlos Castaneda.⁴ While Mails's subject�unlike those of Andrew's first book, Medicine Woman, or Castaneda's Don Juan in The Teachings of Don Juan--was an actual human being. Mails's subject has conveniently died, making validation of his writing impossible. Supposedly, Fools Crow had "given" Mails two different kinds of information. The first was information that was to be made public immediately and constituted his initial Fools Crow volume (published in the late 1970s),⁵ The second kind, more esoteric (and fantastic, as it turns out), however, was to be withheld until after his death. Hence, Fools Crow: Wisdom and Power.

After an opening apologetic that argues Mails's lofty stature as the only authentic heir to Fools Crow's wisdom and medicine, the book unfolds as an explicit instruction manual on Fools Crow's spiritual power. For those whose exotic fantasy is to experiment with Indian medicine, the manual will have certain appeal. More significant, however, is the privileged place Mails carves out for himself with repeated self-serving references throughout the narrative to his particular place of privilege�or rather presumed place of privilege�with Mr. Fools Crow. Early in the book, Mails entertains the thought that "some will wonder why Fools Crow chose to entrust me with this extraordinary information" (11). The arrogance of Mails's White paternalism becomes apparent in his insistence that, first, only he is privy to this secret knowledge, and second, he is the only remaining living authority figure for Fools Crow's wisdom (27 et inter alia) and for the authentic Sun Dance tradition of the Lakota (22, 27). Thus, he goes so far as to place himself, in intellectual and spiritual acumen, above all living Lakota medicine people and spiritual elders ("He did not invite other medicine men to sit with us.")⁶ and finally includes himself as Fools Crow's equal!

Whatever his relationship with Mr. Fools Crow and whatever name he used to address him in person, to use his first name in a formal publication is utterly disrespectful�to Mr. Fools Crow and to Indian people generally, given the great deference in which people in his own community held him and still hold him. On the other hand, it would seem that Mails simply failed to understand Fools Crow's great sense of humor, so deeply rooted in use of the ironic. Perhaps the exchange went something like this: "What should I call you?" "Call me Frank. You are not my grandson. And, as a white man, you haven't earned the right of relationship to call me grandfather." Of course, the more contemporary phenomenon is for many Indian elders to take egotistic pride in having New Age Whites trek to their doorsteps and call them by the relationship term of Grandpa or Grandma. And given the great disturbance of Indian stability caused by 512 years of invasion, colonization, land theft, and the like, why should these elders not take some liberties with White admirers?

In Mails's opinion, Fools Crow was the "greatest Native American holy person to live during the last one hundred years" (9), greater than even Black Elk�a.k.a. Mr. Nicholas Black Elk, the Oglala catholic catechist who was given the baptismal name of Nicholas and who was also an uncle of Mr. Fools Crow.⁷ Greatest, in this case, seems to have more to do with having been published, since Black Elk was not considered at all to have been the greatest even of his peers, Indeed, "greatest" does not seem to be as important a category of cognition for Lakota peoples or other Native Americans as it is for Mails and his White American culture. Indeed, different medicine people have different gifts and work with different kinds of spirits and hence have different sorts of power to accomplish different kinds of healing and helping. A healthy and holistic Indian community needs a full variety of these special people in order to survive. Fools Crow was indeed a special gift to his people, but he was one of a long line of wise and powerful interpreters or medicine men among the Oglala.

The book must be critiqued at a number of other levels, however. Technically, it would seem that, even if Mails did spend the time he claims to have spent with Fools Crow, the project should never have been attempted. It cannot help but be fraud, even with the best of intentions. Because of the cross cultural difficulties, it was doomed from the start, simply because it relies so heavily on the oversimplification of cross-cultural translation and reconstruction. Mails himself reports a conversation with Fools Crow about John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks. As Mails read from the book to Fools Crow, the latter responded, "Who is this man you are reading about?...That is not my uncle" (15). Mails should have learned something from the encounter. Mails's volume is not Fools Crow. Many have suggested that Black Elk Speaks should have better been titled Neihardt Speaks. So Fools Crow: Wisdom and Power might have been more honestly been titled Thomas Mails: Wisdom and power--and then left to the reader to decide whether Mail's wisdom and power were authentic or not.

Beyond the believability of Mail's claims about his relationship with Fools Crow are two related technical reasons for the book's failure: One is language and translation; the other is the matter of cross-cultural category imposition. Mails commits the mistake implicitly made by too many professional historians of religion and anthropologists. Specifically, language functions in his text as if it were culturally inconsequential for determining meaning, and that what can be said in one language must have its simple and readily accessible but codified equivalent in the interpreter's language.⁸ Thus, languages become mere codes for one another. Mails's narrative of the dialogue between himself and Fools Crow belies the difficulty inherent in translating even when one is equally proficient in both languages. Mails, however, blithely proceeds: "What Fools Crow needed above all for this second kind of information was someone to help him draw out and shape what he had learned and experienced" (13), preferably, it seems, someone who spoke and understood no Lakota!

Given that Mails is not proficient in Lakota and the Fools Crow spoke only a minimal English (72)�especially with Mails�the dialogue Mails reports between them is entirely too sophisticated, not to say entirely too euro-western. Even with the presence of a translator, I would argue, the linguistic problems are insurmountable. Indeed, it becomes clear in reading the narrative that the dialogue is almost entirely an artistic creation of the author, Mails himself gives the reader a clue when he speaks of "assembling" (37) Fools Crow's thoughts, and he actually admits, "So the, this book�even when quotation marks are used�is seldom precisely what Fools Crow said, but rather what I helped him say" (14)

Ultimately, the falsification of language becomes apparent in the problem of cross-cultural category imposition. The title of chapter 1, for instance, introduces a category imposition. The title of chapter 1, for instance, introduces a category that Mails uses throughout the book to refer to Mr. Fools Crow: "The Old Lord of the Holy Men." This categorization of Fools Crow as "lord" imposes medieval European or earlier Mesopotamian notions of hierarchy on an American Indian figure. Used in the whole phrase Old Lord of the Holy Men (always capitalized), it conjures euro-western fantasies such as those authored in J.R.R. Tolkein, thus reducing Fools Crow to some European Merlinesque figure.

In another example, Mails specifically ascribes to Fools Crow the awkward English descriptor The Highest and Most Holy One for the Lakota waken tanka (for example, 49). This usage most closely images judeo-christian references to their God and is unknown to any North American Indian community's language of the sacred. As far as I know, neither "Highest" nor "Most Holy" are ever used to define any Native American people's notion of "deity." Even the word deity is controversial in a Native American context. Other examples of category imposition abound and consistently put the authenticity of the book into greater and greater question. Briefly, these examples include distinguishing between "secular" and "sacred" (50), the introduction of the english/christian theological category of "faith" (43,139), and borrowing "Higher Powers," from the euro-american theology of Alcoholics Anonymous (34 and other references).

Perhaps the most blatant example of category imposition is Mail's shameless trinitarianizing of Lakota beliefs. This was implicit throughout Fools Crow, the earlier book; in Fools Crow: Wisdom and Power, Mails eschews any pretense: "This concept of a triune God is more common to the Indians than is ordinarily believed" (35). Thus, in one fell swoop, Mails has obviated a fundamental cultural difference between his world and the indigenous world of Native America. Alfonso Ortiz may argue that American Indian peoples are "relentlessly tetradic," that is, that Indian peoples live cultures fundamentally rooted in tetradic structures�linguistically, ceremonially, politically, socially, etc. And Georges Dumezil has equally demonstrated the triadic nature of Indo-european cultures and languages. Nevertheless, Mails has miraculously discovered a human universal in his own christian doctrine of the trinity. If this is ultimately incredible to the reader, then one is pressed to think that either Mails has falsified Fools Crow or that Fools Crow was, after all, a rather thoroughgoing assimilationist and, hence, a christian (catholic) heretic rather than a traditional Lakota spiritual leader.

That we are dealing with euro-western individualism in its New Age manifestation rather than any genuine Native American or Lakota spirituality becomes succinctly clear in the final paragraph of the book:

In the final analysis, this book belongs to the ever-growing genre of DIY (do-it-yourself), individualist spirituality that fills the shelves of the Great American supermarket of spirituality. It is marked by the arrogant confidence that even as Lakota traditional life has passed from this world with the death of Fools Crow, any White conquistador can now take over his work and become a "Lakota" wicasa waken. Having killed the last of the aboriginal peoples, the killers (that is, their spiritually lost descendents) can now celebrate the theft of the aboriginal's spirituality. Thus, the book is prima facie evidence for ongoing contemporary colonialism.