The “Price of a Gift: A Lakota Healer's Story” is a posthumous biography of Joseph Eagle Elk, a Lakota healer who lived on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. It is through legend and oral history in which the writer, Gerard Mohatt writes of his close friend of Eagle Elk. The story is a rich and seamless story of this Lakota healer and the many struggles he faced as a traditional healer among the Lakota Sioux Indians.

The cultural importance of story, spirit, dream, vision quest, and shamanism among nativepeoples literature reflects the core of  their spirituality.

From a Native perspective, oral legend is contained within the oral tradition. For the Dakota, "oral tradition" refers to the way in which information is passed on rather than the length of time something has been told. Personal experiences, pieces of information, events, incidents, etc., can become a part of the oral tradition at the moment it happens or the moment it is told, as long as the person adopting the memory is part of an oral tradition.

Who belongs to an oral tradition? Charles Eastman, a Wahpetonwan Dakota, reveals in his autobiography Indian Boyhood the distinct way in which the oral tradition was developed:

Very early, the Indian boy assumed the task of preserving and

transmitting the legends of his ancestors and his race. Almost

every evening a myth, or a true story of some deed done in the

past, was narrated by one of the parents or grandparents, while

the boy listened with parted lips and glistening eyes. On the

following evening, he was usually required to repeat it. If he was

not an apt scholar, he struggled long with his task; but as a rule,

the Indian boy is a good listener and has a good memory, so that

his stories are tolerably well mastered. The household became his

audience, by which he was alternately criticized and applauded.

The text above highlights the rigorous and extensive training required of young Dakota people. The Dakota oral tradition is based on the assumption that the ability to remember is an acquired skill--one that may be acutely developed or neglected. Eastman also describes the differentiation between myths and true stories, necessitating an understanding of history as being encompassed in oral tradition. However, few scholars working in oral legend and history make any distinction between oral information collected from those belonging to a written culture and those belonging to an oral tradition.