A Yaqui Life

Book excerpt: "The reminiscences of a Yaqui Indian born in 1896 in northwestern Mexico whose story begins during the Yaqui revolutionary period, continues through the last uprising in 1926, and ends with [his] recollections of his life on a Texas farm from 1952 to 1969. The introduction by Professor Kelley adds scholarly analysis to the poignant autobiographical narrative."?Booklist. "A powerful chronicle. . . . It deserves an important place in the annals of American Indian oral history and literature."?Bernard L. Fontana, New Mexico Historical Review. "A valuable document . . . about the effects of the Diaz Indian policy in Sonora on the human beings who were its object. [It] tells the story of the social limbo created by the shattering of families and corruption of personal relations under the relentless pressures of the Yaqui deportation program."?Edward H. Spicer, Arizona and the West. "The nightmare world of witchcraft and dream-dependence is one of the major fascinations of this strange and moving book. . . . [Its understatement] acquires a kind of fascinating power, as does the laconic stoicism of the Yaqui himself."?Southern California Quarterly. Jane Holden Kelley, a professor of archaeology at the University of Cal-gary, is the author of Yaqui Women: Contemporary Life Histories (1978), also a Bison Book. Her father, William Curry Holden, a trained historian and anthropologist, met the Yaqui narrator of this chronicle, Rosalio Moisäs, in 1934. They remained close friends until Moisäs's death in 1969.