Word: washoe
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Dates: during 1973-1973
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This is a young man's novel-theme and scheme far too massive but stubbornly hefted anyway. The author follows the disintegration of a small Indian tribe, the Washo, who lived by hunting rabbits near Lake Tahoe. His central vision has brutal force: that the very first sight any Washo had of white men was in midwinter, high in the Donner Pass, at the moment when surviving members of a party of settlers began to eat their own dead...
...warrior who sees the cannibalism is shaken so profoundly that he loses all sense of the Tightness of things, and sinks into melancholy. He takes no further part in tribal life, understanding in some half-mystical way that the time of the Washo is finished...
...corruption and decay of the Washo require four generations, and in each generation Author Sanchez tells the unrelievedly gloomy story of one doomed Indian. The mood of the novel, as might be expected, is that of an incantation for the dead...
Although knowledge and talent have been spent on this ambitious book, two serious objections must be made. One is that to give his earliest Washo non-English speech and thought patterns, Sanchez invents a portentous lingo that just does not work ("Gayabuc, what say you? The Sun is heavy in the Sky, soon it will drop. We have walked the day ... What...
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