Volume 34, Number 5 · March 26, 1987
Natives and Others
By Robert M. Adams
The Tewa World
by Alfonso Ortiz
University of Chicago Press, 197 pp., $7.00 (paper)
Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature
edited by John Bierhorst
University of Arizona Press, 371 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Diné Bahane': The Navajo Creation Story
translated by Paul G. Zolbrod
University of New Mexico Press, 431 pp., $22.50
Bless Me, Ultima
by Rudolfo Anaya
Tonatiuh International, 248 pp., $12.00 (paper)
Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe
by Laurie Lisle
University of New Mexico Press, 408 pp., $29.95
Edge of Taos Desert: Volume Four of Intimate Memories
by Mabel Dodge Luhan
Harcourt Brace/University of New Mexico Press, 338 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Mimbres Pottery: Ancient Art of the American Southwest
essays by J.J. Brody, by Catherine J. Scott, by Steven A. LeBlanc, introduction by Tony Berlant
Hudson Hills Press, in association with The American Federation of Arts, 128 pp., $35.00
Santa Fe Style
by Christine Mather, by Sharon Woods
Rizzoli, 264 pp., $35.00
New Mexico Style
by Nancy Hunter Warren
Museum of New Mexico Press, 113 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Nobody in Santa Fe really belongs there unless his line stretches back, by one genealogical trapeze act or another, to the seventeenth century; so my wife and I—native New Yorkers both—have adapted without strain to being outsiders and aliens. Who doesn't feel like a transplant in America? Here there's nothing else to be. It's an oasis culture; nobody gets much more than his minimal quota of earth, air, and water, and who needs more? Every so often, just to make contact with our fellow transients, we drive down the valley of the Rio Grande to the flat marshlands of Bosque del Apache, south of Socorro, some 140 miles from our house in Santa Fe. Into these wide lagoons and stagnant pools thousands of wild fowl come every year to spend the winter months—visitors, like ourselves, with strong memories of northern places and deeper forests, but content for the time being with a for-the-time-being existence. There are Canada geese, sandhill cranes, a few rare whooping cranes, multitudes of mallard, teal, and a dozen other species whose names I don't know. To stand under the cloud of wings when five thousand wild white geese explode into the air all at once in a storm of honkings and flappings is an experience to stir the blood.
Review, 4619 words
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