Letters to the Editor
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A Non-Native Landscape Without the Native Voice
Since Arizona also contains the Hopi's among many other native populations, I find at least some mention of their unique native voice rather disturbing when I peruse this book list.
As noted, the issue is popularly contemporary as to how modern people have failed to understand the landscape that holds them now in these places we have manufactured for our lives.
It should only take one visit to Phoenix tap water to understand that not only is the water being improperly mined, but deadened with chemicals at the same time. So quickly then the relationship of water in the modern desert is directly, intimately presented to us as out of balance.
Where can we then turn for the understanding we need to beat a path out of the manufactured desert into that real one ?
The contemporary failure to understand one's landscape is more rooted in the loss of the ancient language and images associated with inhabited space than we would like to acknowledge.
By dropping out whole sections of the native voice of the landscape from this list you only entice us down a meandering trail that dissipates much too soon.
While there are other books that don't so readily come to my mind with a non-bioregional Arizona centric focus, and are long missing from my bookshelf, or are quite unavailable; I would at least think that the books of Frank Waters: The Book of the Hopi, Masked Gods, etc. should have rated some mention here.