Into The Canyon: Seven Years In Navajo Country

Rating:
Summary: a great cross-cultural adventure
Review: "Into the Canyon:Seven Years in Navajo Country" is a remarkably honest account of a young white woman's experience in Chinle, Arizona, heart of Navajoland. She leaves Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her new husband to go "do some good" on the Navajo reservation in 1968. Filled with idealism, she quickly is confronted with some surprising cultural realities. She tries understand what it means to be white in the middle of Indian country, and describes the journey with a lot of humor and honesty. The description of her feeling like a minority is insightful and powerful, with a funny twist. Her experiences -- as teacher, Justice of the Peace, insurance salesman -- bring her into situations of conflict, and poignancy, as she tries to help out in a culture where she doesn't know what she has to offer. This book also offers a good picture of the activist movement in the early '70's in the southwest, from an eyewitness vantage point.
The style is great -- so honest and just self-deprecating enough to be fun. Moore is a great story-teller.
This book should appeal to anyone interested in Indians, the southwest, politics in the '60's, or cross-cultural adventures.