The Journey of Navajo Oshley: An Autobiography and Life History ed. by Robert S. McPherson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 2 8 1 journey, one also marked by stories of connections to people, to land, and to her past, we learn that being at home can be defined as much by movement and migration as by roots. When Douglas Carlson realizes that he must leave home in order to find home, he and his wife leave their longtime residence in upstate New York for the Midwest and then the far West. In traveling to new places, though, Carlson is struck by how he “kept coming across pleasantly remembered things in this unknown land” (187). Through the familiar, he comes to realize that it is often ordinary and simple stories that define home, stories we might easily forget or look past. And he, too, suggests, through an extended metaphor of erosion, that home is less about stability and more about the fluid relationship between the present and the past, the individual and the land, and the extra­ ordinary and the ordinary. Last, Wendy Bishop considers home in a segmented, personal essay that moves between prose and poetry. Bishop, like Marano, is trying to find home in a landscape in which she does not see herselfbelonging. A native Californian and a former resident of Alaska, she finds the temperatures and the foliage of Florida foreign. It is only when she experiences the end of an important rela­ tionship and resulting instability that she comes to see how the versions of her past might fit together in a way that she recognizes as her self. Bishop provides a powerful and fitting end to a collection that works to define the shifting rela­ tionship between memory, story, and place, when she writes that her lives, like clothes on a clothesline, “snap off the line and fly into the space between this place and my/other lives” (302). The Journey of Navajo Oshley: An Autobiography and Life History. Edited by Robert S. McPherson. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2000. xiii + 226 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by A lan Barlow Utah State University, Logan American Indian autobiographies have long contributed to western stud­ ies as agents of Native perspective within the history of cultural interaction and contested spaces, and it is within this framework that Robert S. McPherson’s project excels in exemplifying Navajo Oshley as “a cultural bridge, a living intersection between people, a promoter of cordiality and harmony” (xiii). Indeed, “[a]t a time when prejudice built fences between two cultures,” The Journey of Navajo Oshley cultivates the example of a simple man who “created a gate that swung both ways” with refreshing emphasis, thus facilitating an illus­ tration of how the Navajo people work(ed) to retain and utilize the subtleties of tradition while simultaneously adapting to inevitable change (212). Bom in the late nineteenth century, Oshley experienced many of the pro­ found changes that occurred in southeastern Utah during the twentieth cen­ 2 8 2 WAL 3 7 . 2 SUMMER 2 0 0 2 tury, including “working with the Civilian Conservation Corps during the New Deal, encountering the devastating effects of the livestock reduction of the 1930’s, and witnessing the impact of technology” as it was introduced to the region (4). As a young Navajo from the community of Dennehotso, he devel­ oped a worldview that accentuated the rigors of work for survival. Hours spent hauling water, herding sheep, and chopping wood prompted him to explain, “This is how I used to live; it was not a beautiful life” (33). Nevertheless, Oshley also endeavored to blend the difficulties of his secular existence with spiritual direction: “These prayers, songs, tools, and other things pertain to the essence of our lives and have been handed down from many generations” (58). As the conditions of Navajo life in the region began to change, Oshley relocated to Monument Valley before finally settling with his family in the community of Blanding. Throughout these experiences, he performed wage labor for Anglo traders and livestock owners such as Floyd Nielson, who “had always been good to [Navajo Oshley]” and spoke very highly of him (144). In every encounter, Oshley embraced an attitude of progress and harmony and is portrayed by McPherson as one who often took...