Don't let the Sun Step Over You: A White Mountain Apache Family Life, 1860–1975 (review)

The decision by Eva Tulene Watt to share her life stories with Keith H. Basso enriches all who read this award-winning book. Born in 1913, she recorded the interviews with Basso between 1997 and 2002. Mrs. Watt's reason for sharing her stories sums up the importance of oral information: "[I]t's not for me I am doing it—it's not for me myself. It's for those younger generations that come along here in later years. See, they're not gonna know how we used to live. They're not gonna know all the places we went to, or how we got food, or all the things we done. They won't know hardly nothing from long years ago. But it's good for them to know. White people, too. They make up lots of stuff about us Indians that's not true. I don't know why they do that. They should hear our stories first, 'cause then they can make better stories for themselves. It's better that way" (xiv).

The material in the book is taken from more than 200 h of interviews covering more than 1700 transcribed pages. This is Mrs. Watt's book, and the description of the process of putting it together illustrates respect for the use of oral information and the narrator (302). The information in the book is her telling of her history and the history of the White Mountain Apache people. The book is divided into three parts. In the first, she talks about her early years when people just kept on going, as she says (xviii). The second describes a time when she stayed at home and became "immersed in the older ways of her people" (xx). In the third part, she tells about having to leave home to find work and of living away from the reservation for several decades.

The time period covered by the book, 1860–1975, was one of disruption and disturbance. Her stories teach about traditional ways and how people handled difficult transitions and terrible loss while dealing with rigid government policies and programs. Mrs. Watt covers living patterns and conditions, food and foodways, ceremonies, dances, traditional and boarding school education, families and family ties, religion, work on and off the reservation, illnesses and healthcare, births, and deaths. She describes terrible poverty and daily struggles to survive. She describes fun and laughter. She also makes a point about standard histories of the West: "Lots is missing in those books. … You can't see hardly nothing in there about how we used to live" (xvi). She emphasizes this throughout the book, commenting another time that "people were busy" (166). When asked what "history" is, she said, in part: "There's lots of Apaches in there and all they were doing, so you can see what happened to them and know what they were thinking. It's like their tracks, lots of tracks" (xv). The fullness and richness of the lives and history she describes emphasize what is "missing in those [other] books" (xvi).

When reading the book, one can almost hear Mrs. Watt tell the stories. The use of italics to emphasize some words helps translate spoken to written and provides a sense of speech patterns. Each story is self-contained but, taken together, they provide a comprehensive view of Apache life. The title comes from a saying of her mother's and describes a work ethic she was taught.

Mrs. Watt designates her information as history rather than oral history. She is clear about this, fearing labeling her interviews could hinder acceptance of what she had to say or diminish its worth. Practitioners of oral history understand the importance of this negative sentiment because the implication is that history provides validity to a study while oral history...