The Way We Lived: California Indian Stories, Songs & Reminiscences

Book Overview

35th anniversary edition! Here, in their own words, Indigenous voices reclaim the narrative of California Indians."Their stories, here brilliantly illuminated by Margolin's comments, contain beauty,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 093058855X
• ISBN13: 9780930588557
• Release Date: October 1992
• Publisher: Heyday Books
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Native Californians

The following collection of reminiscences, stories, and songs reflects the diversity of the people who once lived in California - a diversity so enormous that it can scarely be imagined today. Picture a typical spring afternoon in California two hundred years ago. On the praries of the northeastern part of the state a man, hiding behind a clump of sagebrush, waves a scrap of deerskin in the air, trying to rouse the curiosity of a herd of graing antelope and draw them within range of his bow and arrow. Along the Klammath River a boy crawls through the circular doorway of a large plank house and walks downstream to watch his father and uncles fish for salmon beneath the redwoods. In the Central Valley a group of women, strings of wildflowers in their hair, wade out into the deep sea of rippling grass to gather roots. As they push forward herds of elk scatter before them. In San Francisco Bay two men paddle a rush boat through the quiet channels of a saltwater marsh. East of the Sierra, families - eager for change and weighed down with burden baskets - leave their witer homes in the desert and trek through pine forests toward thawing mountain lakes and the promise of good fishing. At the edge of the Mohave Desert men and women plant corn, bean and pumpkin seeds in the warm fertile mud of the Colorado River. -- excerpt from book's introduction