Such is the jumping-off point for Jonathan Lear's look at the ending of traditional Crow society. Lear is interested in what it would mean for history, specifically the history of a culture, to come to an end. Using interviews with Plenty Coups, the last Crow chief, Lear examines how a culture deals with its own destruction, and, potentially, its disappearance. Implicit in his examination is the position that history and the world only make sense as they are seen through any particular lens. Once the concepts of a people cease to relevantly address the world they live in, what rationale is there for saying that they inhabit a cohesive history? It is not simply to say that, "after that, everything was different." Saying that "nothing happened," Lear argues, is tantamount to pronouncing the death of a culture; the death of meaning.
If it can be meaningfully said, for any people, that things could cease to happen, then such a possibility exists for all people and cultures. Beyond here lies nothing means not simply that a culture is inadequate to dealing with a changing world, more crucially, it means lacking the concepts to extract meaning from experience. It is not that Crow culture was simply overrun by the spread of the West and the coming of the United States, rather their concepts of the world and their place within it were unable to address the changes around them at all. In such a case, how can one meaningfully speak of having a cultural, or personal, ethic?
"Are there courageous ways of facing a future for which the traditional conception of courage has become inapplicable?" p. 112
It is in response to this problem that Plenty Coups offered his people a radical answer to their cultural devastation. Inasmuch as people are limited, yearning entities, attempting to make sense of their place in creation, there are excellent ways of inhabiting reality. Lear sees the message of Plenty Coups as one which allows the past to be put behind, so that a new concept of the good might emerge. By acknowledging the death of one way of life a people can meaningfully move forward. Once this death is met with equanimity, then the values of a people can be brought to bear on a new situation. In this way Plenty Coups has offered his people the chance to continue forward in a wholly new way. Lear ably demonstrates that such an ideal is not a contradiction. Indeed, it may be the only way to exist meaningfully in a transformed world.
