The Way of the Human Being - Softcover

Martin, Calvin Luther

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300085524 ISBN 13: 9780300085525

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2000

Synopsis

From Native Americans, Europeans learned about corn and beans, toboggans and canoes, and finding their way around an unfamiliar landscape. Yet the Europeans learned what they wished to learn―not necessarily what the natives actually meant by their stories and their lives―says Calvin Luther Martin in this unique and powerfully insightful book. By focusing on their own questions, Martin observes, those arriving in the New World have failed to grasp the deepest meaning of Native America.

Drawing on his own experiences with native people and on their stories, Martin brings us to a new conceptual landscape―the mythworld that seems unfamiliar and strange to those accustomed to western ways of thinking. He shows how native people understand the world and how human beings can and should conduct themselves within it. Taking up the profound philosophical challenge of the Native American “way of the human being,”

Martin leads us to rethink our entire sense of what is real and how we know the real.

About this title

About the Author:

Calvin Luther Martin lives and writes in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. His book Keepers of the Game: Indian Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade received the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award. His new book, The Way of the Human Being, is due out in 1999.

From Publishers Weekly:

Having spent a summer on a Navajo reservation and having lived among Yup'ik Eskimos in Alaska for two years, Martin has written a searching exploration of Native American ways of being and seeing. The Navajo, reports this former Rutgers history professor, "see man and woman intertwined, yin and yang, between them accomplishing the purposes of the earth, housing the powerful events of the landscape and firmament surrounding them." Traditional Eskimos don't talk about "nature," "conservation" or "environment," he surmises, "because they are nature; they are coterminous with the mind, the spirit, the being of it all. This is being a real person." Yet Native cultures, in his assessment, have been grievously fragmented. The Eskimos, for example, a people who once synthesized the cosmos through their music and dance, their clothing, homes and tools, even their names, have been psychologically devastated by the impact of Western civilization, with its "severed intellect" detached from nature. From Winnebago Trickster tales, Martin teases out lessons on the need for equilibrium and modesty. Blending insights from N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko and Loren Eiseley, and quoting liberally from early European explorers' journals, he plumbs the perceptual divide that he has found between natives and non-natives. He intriguingly speculates that the outlook of quantum physics, while starkly different from our controlled, materialist reality, is in some ways congruent with the Native American relativistic and sentient cosmos. These deeply personal essays represent an engaging departure from Martin's more academic books on Native America.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0300085524
• ISBN 13: 9780300085525
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256