Letters to the Editor
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Anasazi didn't vanish!
I love the Literary Guide to the World feature but I cannot let a small comment stand without correction. Stephen Amidon repeats a tired but popular misconception that after abandoning their famous cliff dwellings, the Anasazi simply disappeared without a trace. Though I haven't read David Robert's book (though now I plan to) it seems unlikely that he would perpetuate that myth, especially since he used Hopi guides.
All one need do to discover the fate of the Anasazi is to learn the preferred term for them—The Ancestral Puebloans. Granted, even that name is not without controversy (the Navajo Nation Preservation Department opposes it), but it certainly tells the story succinctly. The majority of material evidence and oral history suggest that for a variety of reasons, the cliff dwellers left the Colorado Plateau in the 12th and 13th centuries and headed South to merge with Pueblo peoples.
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Follow up...
Well, the entrance to the Monument Valley park is in Utah. Perhaps as your drive through the park, you cross into Arizona. It is true that its within the Navajo Reservation. Also, the park is managed by the Dine government, not the National Park Serice. This gets into the tricky issue of jurisdiction of reservations and states over land and location. In any case, state boundary lines within the reservation are not irrelevant.
However, I don't really think it matters. (One characteristic that seems to define the Southwest is the multiple overlapping histories and boundaries that exist everywhere.) The point of my letter wasn't really to criticize the author. The article was well written and thoughtful. I was mainly commenting on Cadillac Desert and how I thought that it will change your view of west forever. rhenley commented that the author seems to ignore the issue of water and man's influence on the desert. However, Cadillac Desert is a book that does exactly that.
The issue of native voices (also mentioned by rhenley) is obviously important. However, finding non-fiction literature that was actually written by Hopi and/or Navajo authors about their land and culture is very difficult. (Hopi, in particular, are rather secretive about the these issues.) Most of that literature was written by non-natives who have spent time living near or with these peoples. The Hillerman books, which were mentioned by the author, do address the issues of culture. Hillerman is a great friend of the Dine and as far as I know, the cultural material within his stories is generally correct.
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The Tao that is cannot be expressed, if Tao is Edward Abbey, that is.
"Edward Abbey's 1975 cult classic 'The Monkey Wrench Gang,' which details the often bumbling attempts of a ragtag crew of eco warriors to stop construction of a dam."
Where actual plot is, of course, the "often bumbling attempts of a ragtag crew of eco warriors" to BLOW UP the Glen Canyon Dam (A project regretted even by Barry Goldwater himself) at its opening ceremony. I suspect that either Mr. Amidon has little familiarity with this book, or that he merely decided the actual plot was too vivid for our era's pc sensitivities--because god forbid that terrorism ever be cast as funny.