Bighorse the Warrior

Rating:
Summary: Bighorse Warrior Comes Alive
Review: I've met the author - Tiana Bighorse Butler. Her pride shines through as she tells the stories of her father. Written in Navajo english, the reader is taken into the traditional navajo way of life. Wonderful stories give an honest perspective and a clear understanding of warriors in that point of time. Buy this book!! Compelling reading that you'll never forget!!

Rating:
Summary: Easy read
Review: The topic which this book covers, the oppression of the Apache Indians by the American Government, particularly the Long Walk, is an amazing story of struggle and brutal oppression. However, this story, an account of the events from a family memeber of Big Horse the Warrior, leaves the reader feeling a little slighted. Very little detail of the horrific events is given and worse yet, the events end up sounding watered down, as if they really weren't that bad.

Overall, I feel the historical event of tragic proportion deserves a much better account which brings the readers into the emotional aura surrounding the events.

Rating:
Summary: My family's story
Review: Tiana Bighorse is my grandmother's aunt and the Bighorse of the title is my great-great grandfather. I love this book. It was such a find for me to finally read it. I do not speak Navajo being half Navajo and half Nakota Sioux, so this story was never told to me. And anyway, during short visits to my grandparents no one ever had time to talk this away about our family history. I love it that Noel strove to retain Tiana's voice. My grandmother, her niece, cannot actually speak English as does her aunt, so it was neat to see what she might sound like if she actually did speak the language I do! All in all a real treasure. True, it does not go into great detail about the horrors of the Long Walk, but I loved some of the nuggets of wisdom she passes down from my long-gone grandfather. One is how he urged, like a modern psychologist that survivors of the Long Walk (he did not walk it himself, but fought as a guerilla fighter against the Americans) talk about their pain and losses. So many kept it inside them and it killed them. I also love her message to the young Navajo people about how this Navajo homeland was not "given" to us but it was fought for and people died and suffered for. My family now lives in Cameron on the Western side of the reservation, but when I drove across the vast Dinetah, which is the size of Ireland or W. Virginia, it gave me a great feeling of pride to know my family had lived all over that land. From Mt. Taylor, where Bighorse is originally raised, to Navajo Mountain where he lived as a guerilla warrior and finally in the Tuba City area, where my mom's family live now. The best quote from the book and I am paraphrasing is what Big Horse told her about being a warrior, a warrior is the one who is still walking around, tending to the sick when everyone else is down. This is such a Navajo sentiment. My aunts and uncles are always urging me to stand up, keep moving, wake up early. And implicit in that urging is the belief that we all have the ability to access our inner strengths for the benefit of those we hold dearest to us.