Crow Man’s People: Three Seasons with the Navajo by Nigel Pride

Abstract

Reviews 269 “sacred stories” so that they may be preserved. The narrator notes, pointedly, that the link between the grandmother and the listener is strengthened by their mutual “outsider” status, for the narrator/listener is the daughter of the trader at the “two-hundred-year-old store,” the Mercantile. Beyond the frame we have little context for the stories—save for the back cover’sclaim that “the majority of the stories were told to her in Tewa ... at the San Juan Pueblo.” (Uncle Tito, a flat character in the frame, serves to assert implications of accuracy and authenticity in the translations.) As reconstituted fiction, the Storyteller’s “performance” works well enough. But as for inferences that these are “secret stories” and may contribute another set of variants to our knowledge of Pueblo myth, I have serious reser­ vations. Certainly images of Yellow Corn Woman and Grandmother Spider as well as other figures are to be found along with “Father Sky” and “Mother Earth,” but there is no attempt to provide even slight ethnographic notes, despite the author’s presumed familiarity. The Montezuma/Melinche myth, for example, is not solely of Pueblo origin as it appears here. Such omissions sever the stories from the culture which created them and undercut the stories’ power to sustain the culture (for non-Pueblo readers at least).Should teachers wish to use this collection—and they might do so with purpose, for it raises many issues problematic in studying oral narratives-—they should prepare themselves with other texts such as Marc Simmons’s Witchcraft in the South­ west and Alfonso Ortiz’s The Tewa World. MICHAEL LOUDON Eastern Illinois University Crow Man’s People: Three Seasons with the Navajo. By Nigel Pride. (New York: Universe, 1985. 222 pages, $15.00.) This book is not a product of anthropological or ethnographic fieldwork, nor of historical research. Crow Man’s People is an unpretentious, nonacademic personal adventure story by an Englishman, who had written a similar, earlier book on a Mayan Indian community in Mexico. Nigel Pride, a Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts at a British art school, is a skillful writer in an easy journalistic style, and a sensitive observer of his surroundings. The day-to-day life of the Navajo people comes alive, including healing and other ceremonies, through the daily activities of one family with whom the author lived for several months, through parts of three seasons. He organizes his book around his three visits during one year. The overall problems of the reservation—unemployment, poverty, poor infrastructure, the conflict over the Hopi-Navajo joint use area—come up in the book only through conversations with the author’s hosts, but are not ade­ quately explained. One discussion of Navajo alcoholism comes very close to being racialist in tone. The omission of the profound problems and issues of 270 Western American Literature the Navajo reservation leads to a glossing over of the difficulties of Navajo life and a romantic view of the people, whom the author clearly deeply admires and loves. Crow Man’sPeople isenjoyable and even informative reading. However, given the fine and extensive body of literature—ethnographic and historical— on the Navajo, the book is not an important addition, and would not be a useful tool of instruction or research at any level. ROXANNE DUNBAR ORTIZ California State University, Hayward Cuentos Chícanos: A Short Story Anthology. Edited by Rudolfo Anaya and Antonio Márquez. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. 186 pages, $9.95.) The present volume is a substantially revised edition of a collection of short stories issued in 1980. Of the 21 stories in the new anthology, only seven appeared in the first edition. Some well-known Chicano writers are repre­ sented here: Rudolfo Anaya himself, Ron Arias, Albert Rios, Mario Suarez and Bruce-Novoa, also well-known as a literary scholar and critic. This col­ lection demonstrates how varied Chicano literature has become in the past several years. The stories here are in Spanish as well as English;some display a powerful ethnic consciousness, while others disregard ethnic issues altogether. Some selections deal with Chícanos at the bottom of the economic ladder in barrios and migrant...