To Harvest, to Hunt: Stories of Resource Use in the American West by Judith L. Li

Abstract

Dieker begins her talewith Sister Bernar dineW?chter, the strong-willed German nun who helped carry the Benedictine rule of her Swiss mother-house to America. In 1876, W?chter immigrated and joined a group of Swiss monks and nuns who had settled in Missouri. In 1882, she was part of a group that came west to theGerman-speaking town of Gervais, Oregon. Two years later, both communities settled in the nearby town of Fillmore, which the fathers renamed Mount Angel, afterEngelberg, theirhome monastery in Switzerland. A Tree Rooted in Faith traces the sisters' struggles and successes as theybuilt up their monastic community in Mount Angel, founded a boarding school and a college, educated Indian children, staffed parochial schools throughout the Willamette Valley and beyond, and opened theirdoors toOregon girlsdesiring a religious life,all thewhile maintaining their strict Benedictine prayer life.Dieker docu ments big and smallmilestones: theblessing of thenew convent in 1888, the death ofMother Bernardine in 1901, thefirst movie the sisters ever saw in 1921 ("a series of biblical represen tations described as Very devotional'"), the election of thefirst American-born prioress in 1931,and the liberalization of dress standards in thewake ofVatican II (p. 119). She details often-painful adjustments inprayer and com munity lifeas the sisters' ministry evolved to meet modern challenges. Dieker does not shrink from telling hard truths about the sisters' lives, especially in the early days: the endless work, the constant money problems, the taken-for-grantedsexism ? the sisters were expected to serve as unpaid domestic help for the Mount Angel priests, in addition tomaintaining their teaching careers and prayer lives.Shewrites of power struggles and disciplinary actions as candidly as the record allows; sometimes the "pious prose" of an early chronicler glosses overwhat actually happened, promptingDieker to make educated guesses (p. 15). In the end, thekey topics in thisbook are of greater historical interest to religious than to laypeople. The introduction, a fine essay on the historical context ofmonasticism in the nineteenth century, ledme to expect a similarbroad treatment in the restof thebook ? an exploration of how a twentieth-century American religious community shaped and was shaped by itspolitical and social environ ment. But the book's focus seems to narrow as the author moves closer to the present, and she tends to recount later events as a mere chronicle rather than using them asmaterial forcritical reflection. It isnot easy for a historian to balance an insider'spoint ofviewwith thatof an outsider. Dieker wrote thishistory as an insider,and itis clear thather primary audience isfellow mem bers of theQueen ofAngels community. The book isnot an interpretivehistory ofmonas ticism in the Pacific Northwest, but perhaps thatwas not thebook Dieker set out towrite. It is, nevertheless, an engaging, well-written storythatwill interestCatholics, members of other religious communities, and students of Willamette Valley history. Gail Wells Corvallis, Oregon TO HARVEST, TO HUNT:STORIES OF RESOURCEUSE IN THEAMERICAN WEST byJudith L. Li Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2007. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 200 pages. $18.95 paper. Bioregional histories are a recurrent theme in environmental history. Examinations of the ways differentpeoples create different"places" in the same geography reveal how different groups define andmanage resources aswell as the impacts thosedefinitions andmanagement actions have over time. Li has adopted a dif 342 OHQ vol. 109, no. 2 ferentapproach inher collection of stories,To Harvest, To Hunt. First,ratherthan focusingon a relativelyconfined region such as thePacific Northwest, California, or theGreat Basin, the fourteen stories range broadly over the West, stretching from King Island (Uguivak) in the Bering Strait (Deanna Kingston, "Walrus Hunting in a Changing Arctic") toTaos, New Mexico, (John Nichols, "Aamodt, Schmaamodt: Who Really Gets theWater") and the Gila River inArizona (PattySakurai, "In the Wind and Sand: Landscape and theReading ofGila Internment Camp"). Second, the collection ranges widely among the diverse ethnicities that characterize the West, telling stories of Aleuts, Basques, Chinese, Haida, Hispanics, Japanese,Mexicanos, Miwok, Ohlone, Porno, Quinaults, Siletz,Tlinget, and Ugiuvangmiut. Finally, the authors are less concerned with resource exploitation and itsecological impacts than with the cultures that centered on the resource. Thus, one story (CharlesWilkinson, "Return of the Canoe Journey") examines the recovery of theQuinault Tribe's legacy of constructing ocean-going...