nguage, and culture intact.

Among Mexico's indigenous populations, the Yaqui Indians of Sonora have most successfully repelled threats to their identity, land, and community. Interested in explaining how the relatively "small" nation withstood four centuries of contact with white culture, Evelyn Hu-DeHirt focuses here on the Indians' response to shifting environmental pressures in the period 1820 to 1910--an increasingly violent, and ultimately decisive, chapter in their lives.

This is the major literary achievement of a sensitive, gifted man. The author is a Yaqui Indian, a railroad gandy dancer who sees beauty in iron spikes and rail clamps as well as in twilight-purple mountains and glossy-leafed cottonwood trees. In the seventy years following his flight from the Yaqui-Mexican wars in Sonora, Savala became a talented poet and loving recorder of his people's cultural heritage. A large sampling of his original works appears in the interpretations section of this book. Together with the beautifully written autobiography, they offer a unique view of Arizona Yaqui culture and history, railroading in the American West, and the personal and artistic growth of a Native American man of letters.

This important new book on the Yaqui people of the north Mexican state of Sonora examines the history of Yaqui-Spanish interactions from first contact in 1533 through Mexican independence in 1821. The Yaquis and the Empire is the first major publication to deal with the colonial history of the Yaqui people in more than thirty years and presents a finely wrought portrait of the colonial experience of the indigenous peoples of Mexico's Yaqui River Valley. In examining native engagement with the forces of the Spanish empire, Raphael Brewster Folsom identifies three ironies that emerged from the dynamic and ambiguous relationship of the Yaquis and their conquerors: the strategic use by the Yaquis of both resistance and collaboration; the intertwined roles of violence and negotiation in the colonial pact; and the surprising ability of the imperial power to remain effective despite its general weakness. Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

Sixty-one tales narrated by Yaquis reflect this people's sense of the sacred and material value of their territory.

Fellow priests called his ministry "just short of a miracle." A superior castigated him as "an adventurer," Apaches and migrant Mexicans claimed him "one of us." To his fellow soldiers he was "a man's man." Of himself he chuckled, "I've been in mischief all my life." He was Father Albert Braun, OFM, in turn mule-headed, explosive, or penitent. Vigorously outspoken, he once charged a group of august bishops to "get off your butts and out among the people." His sense of duty was profound, his humor crusty. He arrived in New Mexico as missionary to the Mescalero Apaches just after Pancho Villa's raid, was a highly decorated chaplain in both World Wars, and after World War II he participated in the top-secret birth of the first hydrogen bomb on a south Pacific atoll. Drawing on archival and military records, letters, memoirs, and interviews, Dorothy Cave chronicles the amazing life of this last of the frontier priests from his birth in the lusty, brawling California of 1889, to his death and burial in 1983 in the church he built for his beloved Mescaleros. This book is at once a biography and a kaleidoscopic history of the tumultuous times in which he lived. From it there emerges the inspiring saga of a man who changed thousands of lives with faith, humor, dedication, and a generous dash of pure hard-headed cussedness. Dorothy Cave spent much of her childhood exploring with her geologist father the isolated villages and mountains of northern New Mexico, a practice she continues today. Although her formal education was at Agnes Scott College and the Universities of Colorado and Wyoming, she feels her true education has come from these remote but rapidly vanishing hamlets and pueblos and from the soil-rooted wisdom of those who live in them. Cave has traveled widely, danced with the Atlanta Ballet, acted, and taught. She is the author of two histories: "Beyond Courage," which won the New Mexico Presswomen's Zia Award, and "Four Trails to Valor," both from Sunstone Press. Her two novels, "Mountains of the Blue Stone" and "Song on a Blue Guitar" were also published by Sunstone Press. Cave served as historical consultant for two documentary films: "Colors of Courage," produced by Scott Henry and E. Anthony Martinez for the University of New Mexico's Center for Regional Studies; and for Aaron Wilson's award-winning "A New Mexico Story," based largely on her "Beyond Courage." She appears in both films as narrator/commentator. "Beyond Courage" also inspired composer Steven Melillo's musical opus of the same title, acclaimed on two continents.

A comprehensive guide to the historic and contemporary indigenous cultures of the American Southwest, intended for college courses and the general reader.