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The University of Arizona Press is the premier publisher of academic, regional, and literary works in the state of Arizona. They disseminate ideas and knowledge of lasting value that enrich understanding, inspire curiosity, and enlighten readers. They advance the University of Arizona’s mission by connecting scholarship and creative expression to readers worldwide.

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Paths of Life

American Indians of the Southwest and Northern Mexico

The University of Arizona Press
  • Copyright year: 1996
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Chicanas/Chicanos at the Crossroads

Social, Economic, and Political Change

The University of Arizona Press
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Historic Zuni Architecture and Society

An Archaeological Application of Space Syntax

The University of Arizona Press
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John Ringo

The Gunfighter Who Never Was

The University of Arizona Press
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Paths of Life

The University of Arizona Press

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.

  • Copyright year: 1996
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Earthquake Weather

Poems

The University of Arizona Press
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Festival of the Poor

Fertility Decline and the Ideology of Class

The University of Arizona Press
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Petrified Forest National Park

A Wilderness Bound in Time

The University of Arizona Press
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Grand Canyon, A Century of Change

Rephotography of the 1889-1890 Stanton Expedition

The University of Arizona Press
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The Frontiers of Women's Writing

Women's Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion

The University of Arizona Press
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The Southwest in the American Imagination

The Writings of Sylvester Baxter, 1881-1889

The University of Arizona Press
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Water in the Hispanic Southwest

A Social and Legal History, 1550-1850

The University of Arizona Press
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Bringing the Mountain Home

The University of Arizona Press

"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.

  • Copyright year: 1996
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Danger Zones

Homosexuality, National Identity, and Mexican Culture

The University of Arizona Press
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Night Life

Nature from Dusk to Dawn

The University of Arizona Press
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Peyote

The Divine Cactus

The University of Arizona Press
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Re-imagining the Modern American West

A Century of Fiction, History, and Art

The University of Arizona Press

Winner of the Caughey Western History Prize (Western History Association) and Western Heritage Wrangler Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Book (National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum), this is first thorough overview of novelists, historians, and artists of the modern American West.

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The Abstract Wild

The University of Arizona Press
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The Origins of Human Diet and Medicine

Chemical Ecology

The University of Arizona Press
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The Planet Mars

A History of Observation and Discovery

The University of Arizona Press
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The Planet Mars

The University of Arizona Press

Twenty years after the Viking missions of the '70s, we are finally going back to Mars. No fewer than ten missions are planned for the period between 1996 and 2003, and it is likely that human explorers will follow soon after--perhaps by the middle of the twenty-first century. When they do, they will owe much to the Mars of romance, to ...

  • Copyright year: 1996
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Demons and Development

The Struggle for Community in a Sri Lankan Village

The University of Arizona Press
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Hopi Basket Weaving

Artistry in Natural Fibers

The University of Arizona Press

This book is filled with photographs and detailed descriptions of beautiful Hopi baskets—the one art, above all others, that creates the strongest social bonds in Hopi life. In these pages, weavers open their lives to the outside world as a means of sharing an art form especially demanding of time and talent. Many other glimpses of the Hopi world are also shared by author and photographer Helga Teiwes, who was warmly invited into the homes of her collaborators. Their permission and the permission of the Cultural Preservation Office of the Hopi Tribe gave her access to people and information seldom available to outsiders.

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Native American Verbal Art

Texts and Contexts

The University of Arizona Press
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Peyote

The University of Arizona Press

Dry whiskey, Divine herb, Devil's root, Medicine of God, Peyote: for some people, to use it is to hear colors and see sounds. For many Native Americans, it brings an ability to reach out of their physical lives, to communicate with the spirits, and to become complete. For chemists, pharmacologists, and psychiatrists, the plant is ...

  • Copyright year: 1996
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Riparian Ecosystem Recovery in Arid Lands

Strategies and References

The University of Arizona Press
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Where the Dove Calls

The Political Ecology of a Peasant Corporate Community in Northwestern Mexico

The University of Arizona Press
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Border Visions

Mexican Cultures of the Southwest United States

The University of Arizona Press
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Canals and Communities

Small-Scale Irrigation Systems

The University of Arizona Press
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Settlement Ecology

The Social and Spatial Organization of Kofyar Agriculture

The University of Arizona Press
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Breathing Between the Lines

Poems

The University of Arizona Press
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Burntwater

The University of Arizona Press
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The Telling Distance

The University of Arizona Press

Winner of the 1990 Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, The Telling Distance evokes the yearning expanses of our southwestern deserts and finds them full of sensuous marvels, erratic life forms, eccentric fellow travelers, dry humor, and surprise. In prose that revels in paradox, it reveals desert distances to ...

  • Copyright year: 1997
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Breathing Between the Lines

The University of Arizona Press

Demetria Martínez has entered the public consciousness by way of the heart. In 1994, she captured a Western States Book Award with her first novel, Mother Tongue, which went on to win widespread national attention. Now, in Breathing between the Lines, the writer returns to poetry, her first love.

Many of the poems in this book touch on the themes from Mother Tongue, about an American activist who falls in love with a Salvadoran political refugee. Weaving together threads of love and family, social conviction and activism, loss and renewal, Breathing between the Lines carries the reader deep inside the head and heart of a talented Chicana writer.

Page by page, the journey is an exhilarating one. What we find at the end is up to us.

  • Copyright year: 1997
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