America in 1492

...Two themes of the volume begin to emerge here: the peoples' expert understanding of their environments, however difficult, and their developed spiritual lives, evinced in artifacts and oral traditions...

...With "twice the death rate of teens in any other racial group," the children are suffering: one out of five Indian girls and one out of eight boys have attempted suicide by the end of high school...

...With mixed resignation and expectation, Christian Feest concludes, "Only dead cultures are impervious to modification...

...A full account of the peoples of the Americas before European colonization, the volume is written by anthropologists and historians who have themselves done primary research in the regions and topics they survey...

...The second half of America in 1492 begins with a discussion of the diversity of languages, about two thousand mutually unintelligible ones, spoken throughout the Americas at the time of Columbus...

...The book is immensely readable...

...As the Southwest terrain changes, for example, from country with sources of irri"Wouldn 't you like to be a hundred again and know what you know now...

...Perhaps the clue to this lies in the vitality of the material itself, which, like the Hopi story about Sunset Crater recently retold by Michael Lomatu'wayma, stimulates its hearer to ask questions that have no simple answers...

...While discussion of individual Indian groups are necessarily brief, the chapters devoted to geographical regions are long, full, and varied...

...Francis Jennings works away from centers to the peripheries of trade and tribute, noting a motif of the whole book—that Indian societies were "historical laboratories of cultural pluralism, with lessons for modern times...

...While a reconciling third part is yet to be realized in our culture, the seeds of it are alive in the disinterested scholarship and passionate curiosity of the writers of this book, whether Indian or non-Indian...

...Part 1 begins with an essay by the poet and novelist, N. Scott Momaday, about the human meaning of Columbus's landfall, the deep ironies embedded in his mistaken sense of where he was...

...The consequences of that failure are oppression, false stereotyping, and wasteful extinction of languages, values, and people...

...The cumulative excitement created by the book intensifies toward its end as the chapters perform increasingly sophisticated tours deforce: Jay Miller describes gender relations in Native American societies, and emphasizes the importance of Commonweal centerings on pivotal locales...

...Together they have made an anti-textbook, the kind of fresh and unhurried discussion that only writers in full control of their subjects can undertake...

...and on the Andean highlands...

...fifteen distinguished Native American and non-Native American writers have collaborated to produce a set of fourteen essays, accompanied by a notable introduction and afterword, that summarize the most up-to-date information and interpretation we have on the environments, economics, belief systems, languages, arts, sciences, social life, and politics of 75 million "Indians" estimated to have been living in the Americas in 1492...

...Yet despite the lift of a wonderful book, perhaps there is reason for gloom in 1992...

...These chapters surprise and delight with their evidence that specialization has not overcome these scholars, that perceptions of relatedness and the capacity for useful generalization have survived years of faithful fieldwork study...

...He explains the technology that made extreme environments habitable and related spiritual and political attitudes...

...He also quotes Inuit song as Knud Rasmussen collected it in the 1920s and offers the story of a vision quest he himself collected in 1964, examples of enduring traditions that cast light back on the life of 1492...

...In the chapter on the Andean world of Tawantinsuyu, there are fascinating illustrations drawn from the chronicle of Guaman Poma de Ayala, a Peruvian Indian who sent his record and call for reform, along with 400 drawings, to King Philip of Spain in 1613...

...Clara Sue Kidwell brilliantly explains the mathematics, astronomy, architecture, weaving technology, metal-work, agriculture, and medicine of 1492...

...As most of these essayists do, Ridington reaches back to evidence of developments that preceded 1492 by millennia, such as the four-thousand-year-old Arctic small tool tradition...

...Robin Ridington's beautifully written essay, "Northern Hunters," opens part 1 by describing the Arctic and Subartic hunting cultures which underlay hemisphere-wide patterns of interactions among humans, animals, and natural forces...

...In the final chapter of the book, detailed attention is given to diversity of expression in the artsy stone-carving, arrow-shaping, body-painting, featherwork, basketry...

...Part 2 cross-cuts the regions to focus on aspects of American civilization-language, religion, social organization, political interaction, systems of knowledge, and arts—an astonishingly ambitious and original way of seeing the accomplishments of individual cultures as synchronic, culminating in one coherent, if richly diverse, picture...

...The prose flight over South American lowlands takes us on an unaccustomed journey around the coasts and through the Amazon basin, among peoples unfamiliar to me—the Mapuche, Jivaro, Warrau, Mundurucii, and Tupinamba...

...The first half of the book ends with three magnificent chapters on Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean...

...The book is divided into two large sections...

...While no one can dispute their radical skepticism, especially on such matters as the ravaging of the environment and the outrage of Indian skeletal remains in museums, their sense of the continued polarization of Indian and "white" culture is somewhat contradicted by the weight of the book itself...

...The reader grasps the unity of pueblo culture and follows the edges of one group's territory into that of the next...

...In a later chapter, there is room for a satisfyingly detailed description of the Bladder Festival of the Inuit, a celebration honoring the "inua" or spirits of the animals...

...Momaday makes the great drama of Indian dispersal in the Americas personal and immediate by locating in it his own history as a Kiowa, balancing the scientific account of migration with the Kiowa origin myth...

...17July 1992 Commonweal gation water to the drier Sonoran desert to the coastal islands of the Sens, we follow the natural adaptations of the people...

...Although there are extraordinary survivals, much verbal art, music, dance, and drama have been lost...

...on the people of the South American lowlands...

...not only did the Europeans of Columbus's era fail to understand the people they met, but their descendants continued to fail to appreciate the complexity and beauty of cultures they tried to destroy...

...Elsewhere, essayist Jay Miller provides a tour of the clan mal-ocas (rectangular communal houses) of Tucanoans, built along the Vaupes River in the Amazon...

...26...

...The two-part form of the book is expressive of the irony, or juxtaposition without resolution, that Momaday underlines...

...Can we hope for an enduring and revitalized American Indian heritage without putting resources toward the health and well-being of our children...

...The North American reader is well reminded of the interest and complexity of these groups (the Mapuche presently number 1 million in Chile), of the Tehuelche who occupied Patagonia, and the Yaghan, who survived on the windy, stormy islands off the Southern Cone...

...So, ultimately, the vitality of living traditions compensates for the gloom of 1492...

...What will our posterity say of America in 1992...

...The week I was reading America in 1492, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a statistical survey of 13,000 Indian and Eskimo teen-agers, finding them "the most devastated group of adolescents in the U.S...

...These painful realities of American politics are laid out by Alvin Josephy and Vine Deloria, in introduction and afterword...

...With its range of bibliographic reference, both in the essays and in a special section of notes, and with its valuable collection of maps and illustrations, America in 1492 is an indispensable starting point for any discussion of American history and culture...

...The first section of the book then unfolds in seven long essays on the peoples of each geographical region of North and South America, from Arctic to Andes, as they were at the end of the fifteenth century...

...Bette S. Weidman ' hileColumbus'sland-fall in the Caribbean may be an occasion for rueful remembrance, this substantial book and the information it represents are cause for celebration...