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186 Western American Literature northern Mexico, are noted for their stamina as long-distance runners. In spite of three hundreds years of contact with the Spanish, Mexicans and, now, with some tourists, they continue to live in their own traditional ways. Some still dwell in rock shelters and caves as well as log houses. B. L. Fontana is an ethnologist and field representative for the University of Arizona. He has researched the historical, anthropological, botanical and medical literature on the Tarahumara, but he states that this work is not intended as an academic study. It is a personal account based on many visits made by Fontana, Schaefer and an interpreter into the back country communi­ ties reached only by trail or small plane. Fontana and Schaefer made many visits at different seasons, sharing the Indians’daily lives, and observing the annual planting cycle. Their subsistence is still based on the ages-old pattern of corn, beans and squash. Their com­ munal work, social relations and religious observances still center around corn —as food and in the form of corn beer called “tesguino.” Special visits were made by the author and photographer at Christmas and Easter. Schaefer’s photographs magnificently capture the movement and color of the dance dramas and the mood of the spectators as well as of the participants. The sensitive portraits make us feel we truly know these people. The landscapes are beautiful, but it is the juxtaposition of the individuals in their setting that ismemorable. This is a rewarding book for the general reader, and, with its glossary and selected bibliography, it is an important addition to collections of material on the Indians of North America. JEAN T. GROULX Berkeley, California The Good Red Road. By Kenneth Lincoln with A1 Logan Slagle. (San Fran­ cisco: Harper &Row, 1987. 271 pages, $17.95.) The Good Red Road chronicles a modern vision quest by a Euroamerican professor of Indian Studies and his students: A1 Logan Slagle, a Cherokee mixed blood, and three whites with emerging professional commitments to Indian people. Professor Lincoln, who takes a leave of absence under the cloud of uncertain tenure prospects, travels with his students from L.A. to Black Elk’s ancestral territory, where the good red road of traditional Lakota lifeways was intersected a century ago by the disastrous black road of invading Euroameri­ can culture. In Black Elk’s great vision, he was given to understand that his people would be compelled to walk the new road; and this autobiographical ethnography inventories some of the horrific consequences experienced by Black Elk’s descendants who have been unable to find the connection between tradition and imposed change but who subsist on the barren soil of alcoholism, poverty, and despair. Yet Professor Lincoln discovers in the Lakota heartland several heroic individuals carefully preserving their native spiritual heritage. Reviews 187 He interviews medicine men, holy men, and leaders, who explain and enact contemporary rituals which allow one to walk both roads at once. It is not a pretty picture, overall, because few survive, let alone manage the feat of biculturalism. Yet both Lincoln and Slagle (Anglo and Indian) find a measure of success in their joint but separate quests to verify that the native vision of reality must be experienced and institutionalized in all of our lives if we are to warp the black road of technological irresponsibility back to the ecological orientation of aboriginal American ways. Both authors keep an honest, sensitive, and informed sensibility open to the nuances of prairie life. We see the hatred and terror that afflicts Pine Ridge and its neighboring Indian and white communities. But we are also privy to the healing ceremonies that still bind tribal people together, no matter how desperate their situation. This volume, with its idiosyncratic and personalized scholarship, speaks to a wide readership, from serious students of contemporary Indian culture to general readers who sense the connection between native ecological religion and human survival in these American lands. That connection is the good red road of Black Elk’svision. JACK L. DAVIS University of Idaho The Western Apache: Living with the Land Before 1950. By Winfred Buskirk. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. 273 pages...

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