Journey to the Sun

Rating:
Summary: American Pre-history Through the Eyes of a Young Woman
Review: Those of you who are Native Americans and others who are interested in the history of native peoples, should delight in this novel. If you are like me, a conventional liberal with tolerance but no particular enthusiasm for traditional societies, you may find the first pages of "Journey to the Sun" a bit slow, but soon you will not only be caught up in the story but will find yourself enormously more informed than ever before. Ernest Schusky is an anthropologist who has not only lived among the Sioux but done field work with many other groups in the Southwest and Midwest. More pertinently, he has been engaged for many years in studying the sophisticated urban complex at Cahokia Mounds which flourished during prehistoric times on the western shore of the Mississippi River near St. Louis, Missouri. His novel is more informative than a dozen academic works adorned with hundreds of footnotes and a bibliography-although his principal sources are acknowledged in a brief "afterword" to the text.

The protagonist of this novel is a young woman who begins as Songbird, then is nicknamed "Burnt Cheek" (because of an accident), and later called Gifted Tongue because of her unusual capacity for mastering languages. Through her eyes we are introduced to many different Indian nations as she is married and accompanies her husband, Tied to Sun, to "The Center of the World," Cahokia Mounds, where he is a prince, in distant line to the ruler, Sun. His brother, Next to Sun is, of course, first in line. Not only the grandeur of the city but the problems of campfires for a population of 20,000 and the sanitary measures required to keep that population healthy are revealed to her, as they are to us. She is amazed by the stockade around the city's limits and is told how it was constructed. She learns of the way pole markers are used to gauge the solstice and equinox, moments very significant to an agricultural society. Most interesting to me, personally, was Gifted Tongue's way of dealing with two other wives, Roaring Woman-a manipulative creature worthy of Phillip Roth's imagination-and Rising Moon, a gentle person. But the most intriguing individual in the book is a seer named Whirlwind. An intimate of the powerful, he guides the young woman through her anxiety fraught dealings with her husband and Roaring Woman. The interactions and sexual relations of these people are rendered with sureness and conviction by an author who really and truly understands both the risks and satisfactions of a polygamous marriage.

Many will be able to relate to the consequences of gaming that the story eventually turns upon and most of us will, I think, find a certain contentment in the way the story is ultimately resolved. Along the way we will have learned a great deal about the languages, customs, and fundamental life problems of the men and women who possessed the continent before the Europeans descended upon them and destroyed a noble way of life.

Rating:
Summary: American Pre-history Through the Eyes of a Young Woman
Review: Those of you who are Native Americans and others who are interested in the history of native peoples, should delight in this novel. If you are like me, a conventional liberal with tolerance but no particular enthusiasm for traditional societies, you may find the first pages of "Journey to the Sun" a bit slow, but soon you will not only be caught up in the story but will find yourself enormously more informed than ever before. Ernest Schusky is an anthropologist who has not only lived among the Sioux but done field work with many other groups in the Southwest and Midwest. More pertinently, he has been engaged for many years in studying the sophisticated urban complex at Cahokia Mounds which flourished during prehistoric times on the western shore of the Mississippi River near St. Louis, Missouri. His novel is more informative than a dozen academic works adorned with hundreds of footnotes and a bibliography-although his principal sources are acknowledged in a brief "afterword" to the text.

The protagonist of this novel is a young woman who begins as Songbird, then is nicknamed "Burnt Cheek" (because of an accident), and later called Gifted Tongue because of her unusual capacity for mastering languages. Through her eyes we are introduced to many different Indian nations as she is married and accompanies her husband, Tied to Sun, to "The Center of the World," Cahokia Mounds, where he is a prince, in distant line to the ruler, Sun. His brother, Next to Sun is, of course, first in line. Not only the grandeur of the city but the problems of campfires for a population of 20,000 and the sanitary measures required to keep that population healthy are revealed to her, as they are to us. She is amazed by the stockade around the city's limits and is told how it was constructed. She learns of the way pole markers are used to gauge the solstice and equinox, moments very significant to an agricultural society. Most interesting to me, personally, was Gifted Tongue's way of dealing with two other wives, Roaring Woman-a manipulative creature worthy of Phillip Roth's imagination-and Rising Moon, a gentle person. But the most intriguing individual in the book is a seer named Whirlwind. An intimate of the powerful, he guides the young woman through her anxiety fraught dealings with her husband and Roaring Woman. The interactions and sexual relations of these people are rendered with sureness and conviction by an author who really and truly understands both the risks and satisfactions of a polygamous marriage.

Many will be able to relate to the consequences of gaming that the story eventually turns upon and most of us will, I think, find a certain contentment in the way the story is ultimately resolved. Along the way we will have learned a great deal about the languages, customs, and fundamental life problems of the men and women who possessed the continent before the Europeans descended upon them and destroyed a noble way of life.