Rodney Frey

Rodney Frey is an educator and writer on world religions, but particularly on North American Indian traditions. Prof. Frey explains that his professional interests center on “the role and the significance of the oral traditions, particularly as those traditions influence a people’s relationships with  their ‘landscape’ and mediate the impact of Euro-American changes.” He is Professor of American Indian Studies and Anthropology at the University of Idaho, and lives in Moscow, Idaho.Prof. Frey received a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Colorado in 1979. He taught at Carroll College in Helena, Montana from 1980 to 1986, and Lewis-Clark State College in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho from 1987 to 1998, where he also served as Director for the college’s north Idaho programs. While with Lewis-Clark State College and working closely with the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, he was involved in helping to establish and coordinate the DeSmet Higher Education Program, a successful college outreach center on the reservation.Rodney Frey’s books include The World of the Crow Indians: As Driftwood Lodges (University of Oklahoma Press 1987), Stories That Make the World: Oral Literature of the Indian Peoples of the Inland Northwest as Told by Lawrence Aripa, Tom Yellowtail and other Elders (University of Oklahoma Press 1995) and Landscape Traveled by Coyote and Crane: The World of the Schitsu’umsh – Coeur d’Alene Indians, in collaboration with the Schitsu’umsh (University of Washington Press 2001; 2005).

Rodney Frey wrote the foreword for Paul Goble’s Tipi: Home of the Nomadic Buffalo Hunters .