Inside Dazzling Mountains: Southwest Native Verbal Arts

Inside Dazzling Mountains provides fresh new translations of Native oral literatures of the Southwest, a region of vital and varied cultures and languages. The collection features songs, stories, chants, and orations from the four major language groups of the Southwest: Yuman, Nad ne (Apachean), Uto-Aztecan, and Kiowa-Tanoan. It combines translations of recordings made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a rich array of newly recorded and produced materials, attesting to the continued vitality and creativity of contemporary Native languages in the Southwest.

For southwestern linguistic and cultural traditions to be more widely recognized and appreciated, retranslations of older works have been sorely needed. Original translations were often flawed and culturally biased and made use of literary conventions that were familiar to Anglo-Americans but foreign to the Native tribes themselves. Inside Dazzling Mountains corrects these flaws and celebrates the diversity of Native languages spoken in the Southwest today.

Skillfully edited and translated by David L. Kozak, who offers a wealth of editorial tools for interpreting songs, song sets, myths, stories, and chants of the Southwest, past and present, this volume contributes to the continued vitality and cultural complexity of the region.


Author: David L. Kozak
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 01/01/2013
Pages: 696
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 2.10lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 1.70d
ISBN: 9780803215757

Review Citation(s):
Choice 09/01/2013

About the Author
David L. Kozak is a professor of anthropology at Fort Lewis College. He is the author of Devil Sickness and Devil Songs: Tohono O'odham Poetics.