DIVNearly 100 tales offer an unparalleled glimpse into beliefs, culture of Pueblo Indians: "The Kachina Suitors and Coyote," "The Envious Hunter," "The Jealous Girls," "Echo Boy," many more. /div

The '60s--the music, the clothes, the political and sexual idealism, the experimentation with drugs, the hunger for peace, creativity, and sharing--were a watershed in the way America sees itself. Hippie culture was at the very zenith of that watershed, and Taos was its beating heart, a Mecca that beckoned young pilgrims from all over the country. Iris Keltz was one of those pilgrims who came to Taos in the '60s. She stayed to become a folk historian of the tribe.

The underground world of con men, winos, prostitutes, laborers, and artists has been an abundant source of material for great writers from Dickens to Bukowski. The underground world of Taos, New Mexico, is no different. In the late 1950s this mountain town was higher, brighter, poorer, and farther removed than London, Paris, or Los Angeles, but it was every bit as rich for the explorations of a young writer. Max Evans, the beloved New Mexican writer of such enduring classics of Western fiction as The Rounders and The Hi-Lo Country, returns to form with The King of Taos. Set in the late 1950s, the novel tells the stories of sharp-witted Zacharias Chacon, aspiring artist Shaw Spencer, and a circle of characters who drink, fight, love, argue, and—mostly—talk. Readers will enjoy this witty and moving evocation of unforgettable characters as they look for work, love, comfort, dignity, and bottomless oblivion.

In this extraordinary collection, Tony Hillerman presents the Southwest as only he can, choosing remarkable true tales from his personal archives of local lore. As you read these stories, you will be amazed, astounded, and oftentimes confounded by the power of ingenuity, serendipity, and the strange, comical coincidence of life and how it proves, once again, that truth is ultimately stranger than fiction. From the amusing title story of the holdup that didn't happen, to the riveting account of scientists tracking Black Death through the arroyos, to the ironic account of how a black cowboy's commonsense intelligence destroyed the dogma of the Smithsonian Institution, master storyteller Tony Hillerman reveals the present and timeless past of one of America's most beautiful and haunting regions.

Kopecky's journals take us back to the beginnings of New Buffalo, one of the most successful of the communes that dotted the country in the 1960s and 1970s, where he and his comrades encountered magic, wisdom, a mix of people, the Peyote Church, planting, and hard winters.

Ladies of the Canyons is the true story of remarkable women who left the security and comforts of genteel Victorian society and journeyed to the American Southwest in search of a wider view of themselves and their world. Educated, restless, and inquisitive, Natalie Curtis, Carol Stanley, Alice Klauber, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright were plucky, intrepid women whose lives were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century by the people and the landscape of the American Southwest. Part of an influential circle of women that included Louisa Wade Wetherill, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather, these ladies imagined and created a new home territory, a new society, and a new identity for themselves and for the women who would follow them. Their adventures were shared with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Henri, Edgar Hewett and Charles Lummis, Chief Tawakwaptiwa of the Hopi, and Hostiin Klah of the Navajo. Their journeys took them to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, into Canyon de Chelly, and across the high mesas of the Hopi, down through the Grand Canyon, and over the red desert of the Four Corners, to the pueblos along the Rio Grande and the villages in the mountains between Santa Fe and Taos. Although their stories converge in the outback of the American Southwest, the saga of Ladies of the Canyons is also the tale of Boston’s Brahmins, the Greenwich Village avant-garde, the birth of American modern art, and Santa Fe’s art and literary colony. Ladies of the Canyons is the story of New Women stepping boldly into the New World of inconspicuous success, ambitious failure, and the personal challenges experienced by women and men during the emergence of the Modern Age.

In this comprehensive history, David J. Weber draws on Spanish, Mexican, and American sources to describe the development of the Taos trade and the early penetration of the area by French and American trappers. Within this borderlands region, colorful characters such as Ewing Young, Kit Carson, Peg-leg Smith, and the Robidoux brothers pioneered new trails to the Colorado Basin, the Gila River, and the Pacific and contributed to the wealth that flowed east along the Santa Fe Trail.

Gringo Lessons: Twenty Years of Terror in Taos is a tale of modern adventure about a young man, who experienced the local culture from 1966 to 1987. There he met the community: skiers, La Gente, los vato locos, Chicano activists and their Spanish contemporaries, the artists, drug dealers, fellow soldiers, tempting sirens, the occasional movie star, and a host of con artists. Finally the fool abandoned Taos and returned to university only to return and publish Horse Fly, a monthly journal about politics and art for another decade, which he promises to chronicle in a sequel: Taos Redux: The Horse Fly Years.

The Tewa are a Pueblo Indian group from New Mexico, some of whom migrated around 1700, in the aftermath of the second Pueblo Revolt, to their present location on First Mesa of the Hopi Reservation in northern Arizona. This collection of more than one hundred tales from both New Mexico and Arizona Tewa, first published in 1926, bears witness to their rich cultural history. In addition to emergence and animal stories, these tales also provide an account of many social customs such as wedding ceremonials and relay racing--that show marked differences between the two tribal groups. A comparison of tales from the two divisions of the tribe reveals something of what has happened to both emigrant and home-staying Tewa over two centuries of separation. Yet, while only half of the Arizona tales are distinctly parallel to the New Mexican, additional similarities may be found in such narrative features as the helpfulness of Spider old woman and her possession of medicine, creating life magically under a blanket, or Coyote beguiling girls into marriage. Elsie Clews Parsons was a pioneering anthropologist in the Southwest whose works included the encyclopedic Pueblo Indian Religion. The Tewa tales she gathered for this volume are thus notable not only as fascinating stories that will delight curious readers, but also as authentic reflections of a people less known to scholars.

In her first book, Blonde Indian, Ernestine Hayes powerfully recounted the story of returning to Juneau and to her Tlingit home after many years of wandering. The Tao of Raven takes up the next and, in some ways, less explored question: once the exile returns, then what? Using the story of Raven and the Box of Daylight (and relating it to Sun Tzu’s equally timeless Art of War) to deepen her narration and reflection, Hayes expresses an ongoing frustration and anger at the obstacles and prejudices still facing Alaska Natives in their own land, but also recounts her own story of attending and completing college in her fifties and becoming a professor and a writer. Hayes lyrically weaves together strands of memoir, contemplation, and fiction to articulate an Indigenous worldview in which all things are connected, in which intergenerational trauma creates many hardships but transformation is still possible. Now a grandmother and thinking very much of the generations who will come after her, Hayes speaks for herself but also has powerful things to say about the resilience and complications of her Native community.