The Way of the Human Being - Hardcover

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.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A former professor of history at Rutgers University, Martin spent a summer on a Navajo reservation and lived for two years with Yupik Eskimos in southwestern Alaska. Here he looks at Native Americans, their myths, and the philosophical challenge of their way of thinking, wrestling with ontological and ideological ways of interpreting the Native American world. Martin discusses the Native American belief that no true accidents can occur, a belief that springs from the conviction that there are no true bondaries. He also addresses the despiritualization of present-day Native Americans. Adopting an Emersonian approach to history, he tries to take a deeper view of the expansion of the human narrative in both space and time. In one of the books best chapters, Einsteins Beaver, Martin writes that Paleolithic mythology, being the language of native philosophy, understands the universe very differently than the Newtonian mechanical model does. A fresh viewpoint on Native American landscape and legend. Recommended for public and academic libraries.Vicki L. Toy Smith, Univ. of Nevada, Reno
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.