Jane Holden Kelley – författare

The four life histories collected here—personal accounts of the Yaqui wars, deportation from Sonora in virtual slavery, life as soldaderas with the Mexican Revolutionary army, emigration to Arizona to escape persecution, the rebuilding of the Yaqui villages in post-Revolutionary Sonora, and life in the modern Yaqui communities—constitute remarkable documents of human endurance, valuable for both their historical and their anthropological insights. In addition, they shed new light on the roles of women, a group that is underrepresented in studies of Yaquis as well as in life history literature. Based on the belief that the life history approach, focusing on individual rather than cultures or societies, can contribute significantly to anthropological research, the book includes a discussion of life history methodology and illustrates its applicability to questions of social roles and variations in adaptive strategies.

"The reminiscences of a Yaqui Indian born in 1896 in northwestern Mexico whose story begins during the Yaqui revolutionary period, continues through the last uprising in 1926, and ends with [his] recollections of his life on a Texas farm from 1952 to 1969. The introduction by Professor Kelley adds scholarly analysis to the poignant autobiographical narrative."-Booklist "A powerful chronicle...It deserves an important place in the annals of American Indian oral history and literature."-Bernard L. Fontana, New Mexico Historical Review "A valuable document ...about the effects of the Diaz Indian policy in Sonora on the human beings who were its object. [It] tells the story of the social limbo created by the shattering of families and corruption of personal relations under the relentless pressures of the Yaqui deportation program."-Edward H. Spicer, Arizona and the West "The nightmare world of witchcraft and dream-dependence is one of the major fascinations of this strange and moving book...[Its understatement] acquires a kind of fascinating power, as does the laconic stoicism of the Yaqui himself."-Southern California Quarterly Jane Holden Kelley, a professor of archaeology at the University of Calgary, is the author of Yaqui Women: Contemporary Life Histories (1978), also a Bison Book. Her father, William Curry Holden, a trained historian and anthropologist, met the Yaqui narrator of this chronicle, Rosalio Moises, in 1934. They remained close friends until Moises's death in 1969.

In this monumental work, Jane Holden Kelley preserved archaeological data from many important sites in southeastern New Mexico, many of which no longer exist. She also established a basic chronological framework for the upland portion of this area. Sites discussed include Bloom Mound and the Bonnell site, as well as many sites in the Upper Gallo Drainage, the Upper Hondo Drainage, the Upper Macho Drainage, and north of Capitan Mountain.