Reviews 87 Wintu Trails. By Helen Hogue. Edited by Margaret M. Kardell. (Redding, California: Shasta Historical Society, 1978. 96 pages, $4.00/paper.) From the wide porch of her cabin on the McCloud River, Helen Hogue came to know the legends of the Wintu, that ancient tribe of Indians living in their Shasta county paradise with the Cascades on the west, the Sierra Nevada on the east, with three beautiful rivers in the valley thus formed. According to the author, only a few full-blooded Wintu now live near Redding; all of Shasta county records only 687, including mixed bloods. Few know their tribal history. But Helen Hogue listened well. Joe Campbell, born of a white father and a Wintu mother, told the author, “The country was rugged, wild and beautiful. It will never come back again,” referring to the inundation of the beloved mountains by the Shasta Dam waters. Ellen Melee Thomas, a 102-year-old little Indian woman, who’d worked down the river taking out much gold, who’d lost all her six children, was asked, “Do you get lonely?” “ ‘Lonely,’ she cried, and her thin brown arm lovingly described a circle, which so far as eye could reach, was merely manzanita, brush, oak, pine trees, and sky. ‘How could I get lonely, with the birds, and the wind in the trees!’ ” The legends of the Wintu who lived on the McCloud are delightful reading — storytelling at its best. The book is nicely illustrated with special photography by Charles Anton Miller of Redding and includes a bibliography and a Wintu vocabulary. JACQUELINE KOENIG, lone, California A Good Journey. By Simon J. Ortiz. (Berkeley: Turtle Island Foundation, 1977. 165 pages, $6.95.) A Good Journey is the second collection of poems by Simon J. Ortiz, not including two slim chapbooks that appeared with little notice several years ago. Partly because of the chapbooks, but largely because his poetic voice is unique, Ortiz has been recognized for the past ten years, especially in Indian circles all across the nation, as possibly the best contemporary Native American poet. After several years of delay, Harper & Row finally issued Ortiz’s first full-size book of poems, Going for the Rain, in 1976, and it received enthusiastic response from readers and critics alike. Now A Good Journey is out, available through Turtle Island Foundation, and at 165 pages, it is a remarkably substantial book of poems, both in size and content, and one that should do much in establishing Ortiz as not only the major contemporary Indian poet but as a major American poet as well. 88 Western American Literature While Ortiz is certainly concerned with his particular Acoma Pueblo Indian heritage, and mirrors his tribe’s history and present-day circumstances in almost every line of his work, it would be a disservice to overlook his contribution as a remarkably incisive critic of contemporary society, both in the Indian as well as the non-Indian world. For instance, few poets writing today are more deeply concerned with environmental issues. In “For Our Brothers: Blue Jay, Gold Finch, Flicker, Squirrel,” the poet presents a series of elegies for each of these birds and animals, killed by passing motorists and seen lying dead at the side of the highway. The poem contains a subtitle, or explanatory note, which reads: “Who perished lately in this most unnecessary war, saw them lying off the side of a state road in southwest Colorado,” and the poet tells us in the first line “they all loved life / And suddenly, / it just stopped for them.” As modern American life presses irrevocably upon the Indian world, the poet in “Long House Valley Poem” observes the contrasts: Power line over the Mountain, toward Phoenix, toward Denver, toward Los Angeles, toward Las Vegas, carrying our mother away. * * * * * The Yei and hogans and the People and roadside flowers and cornfields and the sage and the valley peace, They are almost gone. Lately, quite a few non-Indian poets are writing “Coyote” poems, using the quintessential trickster figure of Western Indian tribes as the principal symbolic character. It is refreshing to read Ortiz’s poems about Coyote, in which the persona of Coyote is...
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Sep 1, 1990
Louise Ferguson + 1
Open Access
