Living the Sky: The Cosmos of the American Indian by Ray A. Williamson (review)

Reviews 189 the East had a preconceived notion of what a Texan was that mostly came from Hollywood films. To understand how this mythic Texan, whose image he was expected to live up to, came into being, Graham began to study com­ mercial films concerning Texas. From classics such as Red River, The Searchers, and The Last Picture Show, through potboilers like Giant, The Alamo, and The Wheeler Dealers, to “Texploitive” films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Debbie Does Dallas, Graham presents a wide range of larger-than-life Texans. With true Texas wit (all Texans are clever aren’t they, or is that just in the movies?) he traces these celluloid Texans from 1908 (Texas Tex), when the Alamo was still the most famous place in Texas, to 1982 (Wild Dallas Honey), by which time Southfork Ranch had become the quintessentially Texan symbol. Graham’s irreverence is born of regional fidelity. He loves both the real and mythic Texas, and knows the difference between the two. This book, published by the mildly iconoclastic Texas Monthly magazine, isclearly meant for a broad, popular audience. It isprofusely illustrated and smoothly written. An appendix contains an annotated “movie log” of every Texas film from 1908 to 1982. This isa book to relax with. It willbring back a flood ofmovie memories: from defending the Alamo with the Duke to racing across the Texas prairie in a Cadillac with Hud; from riding a twenty-megaton bomb to Armageddon with Slim Pickens to straddling a mechanical bull at Gilley’s with Debra Winger. Informative as well as clever, and as insightful as it is irreverent, Cowboys and Cadillacs will prove both enlightening and entertaining reading to those interested in western images and the western film. PAUL ANDREW HUTTON University of New Mexico Living the Sky: The Cosmos of the American Indian. By Ray A. Williamson. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. 366 pages, $19.95.) Ray Williamson’s study comes as a pleasant surprise, since it strikes a deft balance between the needs of two rather disparate readerships—the lay audi­ ence and the serious student of Indian culture. For the former, it presents yet another impressive set of evidence that America’sfirst people hardly lacked the intellectual sophistication, however differently it may have been applied, of their European conquerors. And for the scholar of things Indian, Living the Sky sets forth a coherent explanation of North American tribal views about the structure, function, and meaning of sky phenomena. Most of us who study native culture already appreciate that Indians were keen observers of astronomical events, basing much of their practical lifeways and ceremonies 190 Western American Literature upon happenings in the realm of Father Sky; but few of us understand explicitly the specific techniques and means various tribes employed to estab­ lish accurate calendars for religious rites as well as for planting, harvesting or gathering food, and hunting. An already well-published archaeoastronomer, Williamson combines in this volume the applications of astronomy to ancient (Indian) structures with his more recent interest in ethnoastronomy, the study of living traditional (Indian) groups. Fortunately, he seems quite able to keep both the general and scholarly reader with him by first setting forth the big picture—the cur­ rent state of knowledge about the political, social, and religious ideas of North American Indians. And when Williamson then launches into the more tech­ nical aspects of archaeoastronomy, he continues to take care to relate them to their specific cultural milieu, whether that of the sun-oriented southwestern Pueblo people and Navaho or of the star-oriented Pawnee of the Great Plains. Unfortunately, systematic execution of such a methodology for numerous tribes would produce an unwieldy volume. In this case, a thoroughgoing discourse isoffered only for a few southwestern tribes, a discussion constituting about two-thirds of the book. The remaining third ranges widely, if briefly, to touch upon such matters as the Cheyenne Bighorn Medicine Wheel, the Pawnee star cosmology, the constructions of the Mound Builders, and the calendaric practices of some California Indians. As an amateur navigator, I found the technical parts of the volume especially satisfactory. Here the author, by a combination of diligent sleuthing, insightful speculation, and...