Alice Marriott - Böcker

Saynday's People brings together two related volumes by the distinguished ethnologist and author Alice Marriott. The Saynday of the title and the central figure of Winter-Telling Stories is a combination of trickster and hero peculiar to Asiatic and American Indian mythology. He could do almost anything when he was using his medicine power for good, but Saynday was a great joker and when playing tricks often got what was coming to him. Indians on Horseback is both a history of the Kiowas and a vivid account of their way of life. The narrative is enriched not only by detailed descriptions of how these first Americans made moccasins and cradles, thread and arrows and tipis, but also by a Plains Indian cookbook which includes recipes for such dishes as pemmican and stone-boiled buffalo.

Once in a blue moon (which means a fairly long cycle in my case) one who deals professionally with new books comes upon something that seems to him truly noteworthy and memorable-a reading experience which he will cherish for the rest of his life. And when this book is original and, indeed, unique-when it achieves something that has never been done before-one's impulse is to rent a billboard, to hire a hall, in some way to underline and emphasize the excitement and enthusiasm of his discovery, so that other readers may share his pleasure.""This has been my experience with The Ten Grandmothers, by Alice Marriott. It was the custom of certain tribes of Indians of the Great Plains to keep a 'winter count,' or calendar, of important events. Each year an officially designated scribe or historian of the tribe inscribed on a specially selected and prepared buffalo hide (which was a sacred tribal possession) a colored pictograph commemorating the most noteworthy event of the year-the happening or circumstance for which the year would be remembered in the oral literature and traditions of the tribe.""Miss Marriott's book is based upon such a tribal history of the Kiowas, an important and tenacious nation of the southern Great Plains, for more than a hundred years. She has taken representative incidents from this story and built each into a unified narrative of personal experience, concrete and dramatic. The thirty-three narratives fall into four groups reflecting the major phases of Kiowa history in the last century; they are called, since Kiowa .economy was based on the buffalo, The Time When There Were Plenty of Buffalo; The Time When Buffalo Were Going; The Time When Buffalo Were Gone; and Modern Times. Since the same characters appear recurringly, the book has the effect of a loosely constructed novel.""Miss Marriott is an ethnologist. Her book is based on eight years of work with the Kiowas-work that certainly consisted of much more than superficial interviews with aged Indians. There is evidence everywhere, not only of accurate scientific knowledge of the material to be presented, but of profound human insight and understanding.""Miss Marriott is also a creative artist of extraordinary powers. Her book has abundant humor, drama and melodrama, beauty and sordidness, pathos and tragedy: all presented sharply, objectively, with economy, restraint, and dignity. The narrative of the long journey of Wooden Lance, to see for himself and for his tribe whether the leader of the Ghost Dance movement (that inspired the last desperate, irrational struggle of the plains Indians against the whites) had 'true power is unforgettable in its simplicity and reality. The story of the Kiowa girl Leah's return from her years at a boarding school in the East to her family on the reservation is as true and socially significant as it is poignant and dramatic.""The great achievement of Miss Marriott's book is that it makes accessible to the reader of today the essence of a culture, a way of life and thought, now almost vanished from the earth.""We have an uneasy feeling that some special meaning and value for Americans of today and tomorrow must lie in the older cultures of our continent which our own has so largely displaced. American writers from Longfellow on have tried with varying degrees of success to capture that meaning for us.""Miss Marriott's book shows that our feeling was justified. No discerning reader will fail to find in the men and women who are so vivid in its pages-Sitting Bear and Eagle Plume, old Quanah and Spear Woman, and the Kiowa boys riding in their jeep to enlist for the present World War-in their vision and knowledge of life and their essential experience, abundant meaning for today.""

María: The Potter of San Ildefonso is the story of María Martínez and her husband, Julián, who revived the ancient Pueblo craft of pottery-making and stimulated interest in Southwestern Pueblo pottery among both white people and Indians.María Montoya Martínez, or Marie, as she sometimes signs her pottery, is a woman who has become in her own lifetime a legend. She lives in the pueblo of San Ildefonso, near Santa Fé, New Mexico, and although her life has been, as closely as she could make it, the normal life of a woman of her culture, her unusual qualities have set her apart and gained her fame throughout the world.Through her mastery of pottery-making, María brought economic gain to her family and her village. However, distressing problems accompanied success and fame. Liquor ultimately wrecked Julían. There was dissension within the pueblo. And there was the succession of admiring white people who invaded her home and interrupted her work. Not least, in María view, was the departure of her own children from many Pueblo customs.Inextricably woven into the story of María is the story of the pottery of the Southwestern Pueblos, a native craft that has become a national art interest, including the development of the unique black-on-black ware by Julián, the first of which is reproduced among the illustrations.Margaret Lefranc's many accurate drawings of actual pieces of pottery provide an almost complete documentary history of the craft and show some of the finest examples of María's art. Her skilled pen has also interpreted faithfully the spirit of María, the Pueblo Indians, and the pottery.

The world of the West has been from the beginning a man's world, but there are homes and wives and children there, too. And although the time of water hauled in barrels and of homemade candles is long past, the ranch wife of today must be prepared to deal with housekeeping, shopping, and personal problems in wholly original ways as the need arises. For ranches are usually far from town and neighbors are scattered, so that good humor and a good sense of humor, as well as the more conventional virtues of courage and fortitude, must be possessed by the ranch woman.For more than eighteen months Alice Marriott traveled the cattle country from Wyoming to Florida-visiting, observing, and talking with the women on the ranches and with their men. This book is the story of these women, who share with their men-folks the problems and pleasures of ranch life. It's about the city girl transformed into ranch wife, about the women who were born on ranches, and about their families and the cattle they raise.She reports on the modern roundups, the cattle sales, the courage of both men and women in the face of a howling blizzard, and the tragedy of a cow with a broken leg. Here they are-the real people of the cattle country and the real things that happen to them in a society in which the man's work is sharply distinguished from the woman's.And, concludes Miss Marriott, ranch life ""can be hard and tough and truly hell for the women who live it, but it can also come about as close to Heaven as any life a woman can live today."" This is a book for Western enthusiasts, for women everywhere, and for just good reading.