From Library Journal
Seventy-two-year-old Axtell is a full-blood Nez Perce Indian. His chance meeting at a powwow with documentary filmmaker Aragon resulted in this book of reminiscences, thoughts, and teachings. Roughly chronological, this collection of conversations meanders through Axtell's childhood in Idaho to his enlistment in the army during World War II and his brush with the law and imprisonment in 1949. An early release and attempts to turn his life around back home culminated in his marching in Clinton's 1993 inaugural parade. Born a Christian in a family that also followed Nez Perce spiritual traditions, Axtell slowly became a practitioner and eventual leader of the traditional Nez Perce Long House religion only in his forties. Aragon functions mostly as a transcriber here, allowing Axtell to tell in his own way about his life and beliefs. Highly readable, this work stands alongside Joseph Iron Eyes Dudley's Choteau Creek: A Sioux Reminiscence (Univ. of Nebraska, 1992) and Joseph Medicine Crow's From the Heart of the Crow Country (Crown, 1992) as 20th-century oral histories from voices rarely given the chance to speak.?Lisa A. Mitten, Univ. of Pittsburgh
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
That's pronounced "nez-purse," not "nez-pierce," and that's just one of the things to learn from this highly readable book about the Indian nation whose traditional lands are part of what is now Washington and Idaho. Axtell and Aragon weave the traditions of the people of Chief Joseph ("I will fight no more forever" ) with contemporary questions of religion and culture into a fabric that reflects the life of a single man, Nez Perce spiritual leader Axtell, whose grandmother was a Christian but whose great-aunt was a medicine woman. Although he has chosen the latter way, his respect for the spirit, however it shows itself, is palpable. Finding the path of the spirit entailed for him a quest whose way stations he documents with Aragon's help and which included the temptations of liquor, the ambiguous benefits of military service, the promptings of relatives who kept the old ways, and the call of the powwow trail. More than an autobiography, his story is the document of a people's struggle.
Patricia Monaghan
