{"id":34228,"date":"2015-10-28T06:40:00","date_gmt":"2015-10-28T13:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2015\/10\/tooting-a-horn-about-a-new-book\/"},"modified":"2015-10-28T06:40:00","modified_gmt":"2015-10-28T13:40:00","slug":"tooting-a-horn-about-a-new-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2015\/10\/tooting-a-horn-about-a-new-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Tooting a horn about a new book"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/div>\n

Well, it\u2019s kind of my horn, but mostly my friend and mentor, Alvin\u2019s horn. And mutual friend and co-editor Marc Jaffe\u2019s horn. And editor (Alvin\u2019s own long-time editor) Ann Close\u2019s horn. She steered us through the project, and then passed it on to Keith Goldsmith at Viking Penguin. So a chorus of horns\u2014maybe a band!<\/p>\n

The book is The Longest Trail: Writings on American Indian History, Culture, and Politics<\/i>, by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., edited by Jaffe and Wandschneider. It\u2019s in three sections, based on three concepts that Alvin drummed into us over years: First, that the standard narrative of American history has omitted Indians\u2014they have either been sideshows or impediments to the march of Euro-American civilization, not treated as actors in the American drama, the actions, decisions, and accidents that have all gone to make us the nation we are.<\/p>\n

Second, Indians have something to teach us still about living with the rest of creation. There were democrats and autocrats, farmers, warriors, slavers and medicine people among them, but the indigenous people of the Americas saw themselves as pieces of the universe, not its commanders.<\/p>\n

Finally, Alvin believed that Indian survival is a kind of miracle, and that it owes to resilience and a relationship to land that, until quite recently, Euro-Americans did not even try to understand\u2014our notion being that land is a kind of commodity, like labor and capital, that can be bought and sold quite independently of the people long rooted to it.<\/p>\n

So we scoured Alvin\u2019s books (many of them still in print after decades!) and we looked at pieces he had written for large publications and small, the New York Times<\/i> and Idaho Yesterdays<\/i>, and we nudged as many of them into the whole as we could make room for. And we got Bobbie Conner to write a foreword, and Cliff Trafzer, Jaime Pinkham, and Mark Trahant to write intros to sections\u2014and as of today it is out in the world! <\/p>\n

Library Journal liked it, and a bunch of \u201cvine\u201d readers at Amazon\u2014whoever they are\u2014gave it five stars, and Viking put it in their teachers\u2019  catalog and is sending copies to Indian Studies departments as we identify them. (\u201cBooks are now available at the Josephy Center or your local bookstore.\u201d)<\/p>\n

I tell people that I thought Alvin was leaving me a few books to deal with, and I am indeed learning to be a librarian. But I didn\u2019t realize at first that he left a mission too, an admonition to continue to learn and tell the Indian story. As Marc Jaffe says, after six or seven decades in the publishing business, \u201cputting Indians into American history\u201d is a pretty good project, one he\u2019s delighted to pick up on in the name of our old friend and his fellow Marine, Alvin M. Josephy Jr.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.penguinrandomhouse.com\/books\/229064\/the-longest-trail-by-alvin-m-josephy-jr\/<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, it\u2019s kind of my horn, but mostly my friend and mentor, Alvin\u2019s horn. And mutual friend and co-editor Marc Jaffe\u2019s horn. And editor (Alvin\u2019s own long-time editor) Ann Close\u2019s horn. She steered us through the project, and then passed it on to Keith Goldsmith at Viking Penguin. So a chorus of horns\u2014maybe a band! […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247,191,725,784,785,786,496,787],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34228"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}