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Bringing the Mountain Home
"We like to think that in the wilderness we escape streets and signs. We venture beyond familiar places where everything has been named, made human, possessed, where all paths are known, mapped, set in concrete or ink.. A wilderness is roadless, both by agreement and by law. Surely this should also mean trailless, signless, mapless, nameless: no trace of human writing on the land, nothing to say that we have inscribed this place as ours. An absence that signals the purity of the land, an absence at the center of our desire.
Maybe we should go to the wilderness to get lost, to lose the familiar way of cities and towns, to let loose of our everyday sense of our place, and find another way of being in the world. Lost, amazed, I might forget myself and find myself, a creature among other creatures, a reed in the wind, fed by sunlight, dead plants and animals, minerals from the mountains crumbling at my feet." --SueEllen Campbell, from Bringing the Mountain Home A deeply loved landscape holds us fast to the planet, says SueEllen Campbell in this engaging exploration of our relationships with wild places.
What lies at the core of such love? What draws us to a windblown mountaintop, the slickrock desert, the crash and roar of a whitewater river? What desires shape our wilderness journeys--backpacking, rafting, hiking--and what events, emotions, and ideas shape the stories we tell about them? Campbell explores these questions through personal narratives that float between memoir and meditation, nature essay and adventure story. She travels to a remote spot in Kenya, where thousands of flamingos "encircle the geysers and carpet the glassy lake. In the rain forests of Dominica, she marvels at parrots as bits of green forest tipped with scarlet and given wing.
But always she returns to the intimate landscapes of her home in the Rocky Mountain and desert West. There, a trudge into the Grand Canyon becomes a pilgrimage into the earth's immensity. Layers of personal grubbiness offer an introduction to geology, and a comical obsession with equipment hints at how to live in the moment. A climb up a familiar mountain turns into a brush with death.
By turns celebratory, funny, lyrical, and down-to-earth, Campbell's is an exuberant new voice that will appeal to many readers. Lovers of the outdoors, armchair travelers, and students of nature writing will find in this book a field guide to the emotions and ideas set loose in us by wild places.
Water in the Hispanic Southwest
A Social and Legal History, 1550-1850
The Southwest in the American Imagination
The Writings of Sylvester Baxter, 1881-1889
The Frontiers of Women's Writing
Women's Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion
Science and Ecosystem Management in the National Parks
Grand Canyon, A Century of Change
Rephotography of the 1889-1890 Stanton Expedition
Festival of the Poor
Fertility Decline and the Ideology of Class
Paths of Life
Within these pages are living portraits of fifteen Native American groups of Arizona and northern Mexico. The Navajos, the Western Apaches, the Hualapais, Yavapais, and Havasupais, the Yaquis, the O'odham, the Tarahumaras, the Southern Paiutes, the Seris, the Colorado River Yumans--Quechan, Mohaves, Cocopas, and Maricopas--and the Hopis. Literally and figuratively, the paths they walk are the same paths walked by their ancestors, going back hundreds and even thousands of years.
Through history, most of these groups have seen their homelands conquered by outside military forces and their people scattered far and wide. Yet, despite years of exile and subjugation, they have all kept alive their cultures, their sense of being a people. This book explores the symbols, rituals, and words that have ensured continuity and that distinguish each group from others. Equally important, Paths of Life describes the dynamic changes that are occurring in each group as new ideas are incorporated into traditional ways of life.
The book focuses on one major cultural theme for each group. The chapter on the Navajos, for example, illustrates how the work of sheepherding reinforces the Diné way of relating to one another and living off the land, while the chapter on the Yaquis examines how Catholic and Native rituals have become fused into a uniquely meaningful Yaqui religion. Throughout the book, the guidance and advice of respected Indian scholars have ensured both accuracy and authenticity.
The pages in this volume are filled with individuals like Victoriano Churro, "a man who ran like a deer," and artist Grace Mitchell: "I'm going to weave a basket. I'll gather mulberry shoots, split them and roll them . . . " There are glimpses of the Yaqui flower world, "Wilderness world / flower freely, is blowing, / wilderness world," and the Seri creation myth, "Slender whirlwinds coming from the sky touch the land. / Sounds of arrows / striking the ground, / roaring, / raising dust clouds." Here also are Father Sun and Mother Moon, Rock Crystal Boy and Yellow Corn Girl, Spider Woman, Wolf, and of course Coyote.
Among the many books written about these groups, Paths of Life is rare for its breadth of information. The book includes dozens of photographs, both color and black-and-white, as well as a number of short asides, which discuss special points of interest. Readers in search of even more information will appreciate a carefully selected list of suggested additional reading. Encompassing anthropology, history, Native American cultures, arts, and folklore, at heart this is a book for anyone--teacher, student, armchair traveler, general reader--whose imagination has been captured by the lands and peoples of the Greater Southwest.