Crying for a Dream: The World Through Native American Eyes

``The Earth is a living thing. The mountains speak. The trees sing. Lakes can think. Pebbles have a soul. Rocks have power,'' says Lame Deer, one of the many contemporary Native Americans quoted here. Evoking the legendary respect of Native Americans for nature, these assertions also dignify a people long abased by whites. In his intelligent, unsentimental volume, Erdoes, coeditor of American Indian Myths and Legends , surveys timeless Indian rituals, summarizes the history of the Native American civil rights movement and offers a gallery in words and pictures of landscapes, ceremonies and faces, from flute-players to tribal dancers. Although the color reproductions sometimes approach halcyon extremes, the photographs make clear the power of nature, thus suggesting its shaping of the Native American religious sensibility. (Jan.)