>>>"No books or internet site to recommend?"
No not really. I will give you this guild line though, take the tribe your interested in, descended from, whatever, go out and get involved with them. Participate in their shit. Always be ready to learn something new. Use multiple sources, just like other cultures, their are plenty of shameless self appoint experts and promoters, maybe more than other cultures.
As far as text, go to original source material. First contact writing by explorers and older doctorial type dissertations. Then while your reading these keep in mind who it was that wrote them and that they really had little or no understanding of what was going on and that they bring their own cultural prejudices, as anybody would.
Stay away from modern or pan-ndn stuff. There's to much mixing with white thinking for modern work to be of much value in learning about culture. Pan-ndn stuff is worthless. There were no pan-ndns their were distinct individual tribes. Pan-ndnism is the scourge of genuine native culture as it supplants it with red and white filtered notions of what native culture should be as shared experience trumps the uniqueness of cultural individuality.
As an ndn raised in as traditional a manner as possible, I will say, I don't care much for modern native ideals of what is ndn.
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>>>"Did your Dad live 'like an Indian' or did your Mom live 'like a European'? It seems there had to be a compromise somewhere."
Dad was an attorney that lived on the rez but the rez here isn't hogans and tipis. Most of dad's clients where wealthy, oil rich ndns. Mom is a trust fund baby. They were only married for a few years. Their break wasn't over culture... directly. Dad couldn't deal with the fact that mom didn't need him as a provider. He was an old fashion type of guy.
To me your question falls into the European notion that being another culture means living differently in a visible tangible means, be that living in a tipi or a pagoda, without taking into account the different ways different peoples have of processing thought. While the outward visible aspects are a part of it, the bigger part - that I think is ignored, is the manner in which a different culture views the world and how they approach problems. Yes I went to the dances, yes I went to the Peyote church, yes I was taught about our native beliefs, yes I went to the sweat lodge, but all these things are just things if you don't understand your unique cosmology and how that train of thought is arrived at.
"Understand" may be overstating it a bit, what I'm trying to say is that culture is about how you see the world and the different methodology that different peoples use in the thought process. I think it's an unappreciated fact that all cultures, where there is an actual culture left, see the world differently than what you, I, he or she does.
I guess what I'm trying to say is culture is as much, if not more, about the way you think as it is about the ceremonies and beliefs you hold.
