The Way of the Human Being

Having spent a summer on a Navajo reservation and having lived among Yup'ik Eskimos in Alaska for two years, Martin has written a searching exploration of Native American ways of being and seeing. The Navajo, reports this former Rutgers history professor, ""see man and woman intertwined, yin and yang, between them accomplishing the purposes of the earth, housing the powerful events of the landscape and firmament surrounding them."" Traditional Eskimos don't talk about ""nature,"" ""conservation"" or ""environment,"" he surmises, ""because they are nature; they are coterminous with the mind, the spirit, the being of it all. This is being a real person."" Yet Native cultures, in his assessment, have been grievously fragmented. The Eskimos, for example, a people who once synthesized the cosmos through their music and dance, their clothing, homes and tools, even their names, have been psychologically devastated by the impact of Western civilization, with its ""severed intellect"" detached from nature. From Winnebago Trickster tales, Martin teases out lessons on the need for equilibrium and modesty. Blending insights from N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko and Loren Eiseley, and quoting liberally from early European explorers' journals, he plumbs the perceptual divide that he has found between natives and non-natives. He intriguingly speculates that the outlook of quantum physics, while starkly different from our controlled, materialist reality, is in some ways congruent with the Native American relativistic and sentient cosmos. These deeply personal essays represent an engaging departure from Martin's more academic books on Native America. (May)