Crazy weather /
In four days of "glory-hunting" with an Indian comrade, South Boy, who is white, realizes that he must choose between two cultures.
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
The Macmillan Company,
1944.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | In four days of "glory-hunting" with an Indian comrade, South Boy, who is white, realizes that he must choose between two cultures. "Crazy weather only happens in the valley of the Colorado River. Sometimes in late summer a great mass of steaming jungle air rolls up from Mexico, crowding out the dry heat of the desert until it in turn is dispelled by a lightening-riven hurricane. A few hours of this festering heat ripen all the conflicts in a young white boy's mind. His mother wants to send him away to school. His father wants him to shoulder more responsibility for running the ranch, now that he is fourteen and almost a man. Crazy weather makes both prospects doubly appalling. So he runs away with his Mojave friend to make war on the Piutes and win for himself a man's name. During four tense days of maddening heat the boy travels the length of the Fort Mojave Reservation, encountering every phase of life among people who had once made themselves feared from the Rio Grande to the Pacific, who stood shoulder to shoulder and fought with clubs when the Apaches shot their arrows and ran away. He hears the dream singers chant the story of creation. Religion, birth, death, sorcery, heroism, all phases of the life of a people who are stark realists, still the possessors of a unique native culture in spite of white contact, are seen through a boy's eyes. He encounters one of the relics of the frontier--a white man gone Indian. Then death, and the weird ceremony of cremation. He saves his friend and is saved by his friend in the storm that brings an end to the crazy weather and leaves him an Indian boy no longer, but a white man."-- |
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| Physical Description: | 195 pages ; 21 cm |