New Mexico Books

Published review, in Latin-American Indian Literatures Journal: "The book merits wide circulation. The impressive scholarship embraces both pictorial and written sources, and the lengthy quotations in English translation from the early explorers and chroniclers are helpful."

Another published review by DANIEL K. RICHTER (Dickinson College), in American Historical Review, December 1998.

This book by John F. Moffitt and Santiago Sebastián appears, at first glance, to be a blast from the historiographical past. Readers of such standard works as Robert Berkhofer, Jr.'s The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (1979) and Olive Patricia Dickason's The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (1984) will find much that is familiar. Early modern Europeans invented perniciously enduring stereotypes about Indians, images rooted almost entirely in their own fantasies and fears rather than in empirical data. Those familiar with such more recent, theoretically sophisticated studies as Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991), Anthony Pagden's European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (1992), or Gordon M. Sayre's Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (1997) will be disappointed in a book that openly disavows "the imposition of the kind of theoretical constructs that so bedevil current, postmodernist academic writing" (p. 3). Nonetheless, this product of a long collaboration between Moffitt and the late Sebastián has at least three great strengths. First, as art historians, the authors bring to visual materials an attention to detail seldom available to more text-oriented scholars. Second, as specialists in Renaissance art, they take medieval and classical influences on those materials seriously as systems of belief rather than mere artistic conventions. These first two strengths especially come together in their analysis of the meaning of the term India to fifteenth-century Europeans. When Christopher Columbus reported that he had found "Paradise-on-Earth" on "the Indian Islands, Located Beyond the Ganges River, Which Have Just Been Newly Rediscovered," Moffitt and Sebastián argue, he was not merely compounding a geographic error with rhetorical exaggeration. Instead, "as employed by Columbus, the term precisely meant a specific place described in the Book of Genesis as having been initially inhabited by Adam and Eve," a place Columbus and contemporary artists and map-makers sincerely believed still existed at the extreme tip of the Indian subcontinent (p. 16). This framework of ideas about an Indian Eden provides a compelling context for the many descriptions of "Indians" as pre- or post-lapsarian inhabitants of an early paradise. It also helps to explain why explorers, map-makers, and illustrators peopled the Americas with every lurid humanoid type found in the pages of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (13561357) and other Indian subcontinent travel fantasies. The third strength of Moffitt and Sebastián is their effort to reconstruct the ways in which early modern viewers actually experienced images of alleged Native Americans. They are particularly effective in contextualizing dozens of woodcut and copperplate illustrations that previous historians have considered in isolation from the books in which they first appeared. When placed against the texts-and in light of the fact that European illustrators nearly always worked solely from written descriptions rather than illustrations from life-it becomes clear that the visual images were entirely products of European imaginations rather than American experience. Illustrators appear to have made almost no attempt to render details about Native American appearance and behavior contained in explorers's written accounts with any accuracy. Instead, they reproduced stock images of "savages," "wild men," "Amazons," and "cannibals" familiar from books written well before 1492. Few publications went as far as a 1554 edition of Francisco López de Gómara's Historia General de las Indias y Nuevo Mundo mas la conquista del Peru y de Mexico that recycled a set of illustrations originally drawn for a 1520 edition of Livy's history of Rome. Yet most had little more relevance to the subjects they purported to illustrate. The same disconnection from American reality apparent in negative stereotypes also applied in more positive, and presumably accurate, contexts. The famous illustrations of Theodore de Bry-most of which took as their originals the watercolors that Englishman John White painted at Roanoke in 1585-were, Moffitt and Sebastián argue, part of a concerted effort by Philip lI's Dutch Protestant opponents to promulgate the "Black Legend" of Spanish cruelty to Native Americans. In this politicized context, de Bry's images, far from attempting to convey accurate information about Native Americans, added to "the Noble and Ignoble Indian tropes" a new, third stereotype: "the figure of the 'doomed Indian'" (p. 303).

"The magic of Pablita Velarde is all here in this book." --R.C. Gorman (acclaimed Navajo artist)

"Pablita Velarde has told the story of her Santa Clara people throughout her career and has become a legend in her own time." --United Features Syndicate

The cover and title page painting -- titled Old Father Storyteller -- may be Pablita Velarde's best known work. The elder is shown telling people of the pueblo stories about the stars and constellations, which march in an arc across the sky. This painting, which Velarde was inspired to by her father's stories, won the Grand Prize at the 1955 Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial.

It is also recognized by archaeoastronomers (scholars studying pre-contact native star lore) as one of the few records in which pueblo constallations can be identified, and star lore is told. (Long Sash is basically the familiar Orion, for example.) So that story has uses in Native-centered science. Beautiful uses.

There are 6 stories in the book, each with several of Pablita's fabulous paintings. "Turkey Girl" is the Tewa version of a Zuni storyteller's remake of Cinderella. Turkey Girl -- clad in finery by her flock of turkeys, instead of a fairy godmother -- goes to a dance, and is not recognized as the ragged orphan, courted by many men. But when she is found out by her mean stepmother, there's quite a different ending from Perrault's (and Disney's).

She doesn't wind up with any of those Indian men, indeed, those Prince Uncharmings are all chasing her to kill her for a witch! Some kind of big turkey spirit hides her; she disappears into a canyon with her flock. Turkeys are found no more by people hunting them for food. The moral and ethical meanings in this Indian transfiguration are very different from Cinderella. The only moral of that one is that nice clothes get you in anywhere. The Indian storytellers disagree.

Velarde says in her preface: "I was one of the fortunate children of my generation [she was born in 1918] who were probably the last to hear stories firsthand from Great-grandfather or Grandfather. I treasure that memory, and I have tried to preserve it in this book so that my children as well as other people may have a glimpse of what used to be."

Velarde's father was a respected Tewa storyteller in the Santa Clara Pueblo. She and her sisters as children had heard these stories during summer nights when they returned from Indian boarding school (where Native children were forced to go in US government attempts to destroy Indian culture by separating children from their families, language, and homes) to help their father farm his fields. In the late 1950's, when her marriage to Herbert Hardin, a non-Indian policeman, was breaking up, she returned to the Pueblo, recorded her father's stories and translated 6 of the most memorable into English for this book, which her paintings illustrate. The stories are told simply and clearly, as Pablita told them to her own children, and had been told them, as a child, by her father.

At that point in her life she was already an acclaimed artist, with the Bandolier National Monument murals, many prizes, and paintings in museums to her credit. In 1954, the French government had awarded her the Palmes Academiques for her outstanding contributions to art, the first time a European government had recognized Indian art as fine art, rather than primitive craft.

Dale Stuart King, who had hired her as to paint the accurate -- and artistic -- murals of traditional Pueblo life at Bandelier National Monument, liked the stories and published them in 1960. The book was chosen as one of the best Western books of 1960. This handsome reprint, 35 years later, uses improved color printing techniques to make Velarde's art available to children and others in highest quality. It's one of Clear Light Publishers' best-selling books, and they have (not on Amazon.com) a special slipcased, signed gift edition for $200, for rich folks with art-loving friends.

You can see some of Velarde's murals. at http://www.viva.com/nm/PCCmirror/murals.html. These murals in the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center are explained and shown, large and in details. In addition, see a painting by Pablita's daughter, artist Helen Hardin, who died untimely young, in 1984 at http://www.wingspread.com/fa/fa048.html.

Content and art reproductions and quality are identical in the paperback and hardcover versions of this book. Schools may need to get the paperback for cost reasons; parents and art-loving adults interested in Indian culture should get the hardcover, for permanence.

Reviewed by Paula Giese, editor, Native American Books website, http://www.fdl.cc.mn.us/~isk/books/bookmenu.html

MY HAT IS OFF TO MR. RAMIREZ FOR WRITING A POIGNANT AND COMPELLING BOOK THAT FREELY EXPOSES HIS INNER FELLINGS. HIS WILLINGNESS TO SHARE HIS LIFE, FOR GOOD AND BAD, IS TRULY STIMULATING AND INSIGHTFUL.