Yaqui Women

"'Why are you bothering with talking to those women?' The Yaqui men asked Jane Holden Kelley during the years in which she laboriously and painstakingly gathered detailed life histories from over a dozen Yaqui women. 'My uncle has been in many battles. He has a history.' Yet perhaps more can be learned of a people from the lives of women, four of which are presented in detail in this book, than from the more public presentation of self that is the male lot...All the women presented led a 'typical' Yaqui life. All suffered poverty, extended forced migration - caused either by poverty or the Mexican government - and actual physical abuse...Yet they also present much variation, including personalities from 'happy' to 'sad,' women who assumed both traditional and modern dress and ways, women who limited their activities solely to their house and those active in the social and religious lives of their community, and women who lived in the Yaqui Valley, Hermosillo, and Tucson, Arizona." (South Eastern Latin Americanist). "Kelley's interpretations are realistic, hard-nosed, and at times disturbing. But she has adamantly avoided the condescending pathos that mars much of the popularized treatment of Native Americans. Accurately and skillfully, Kelley has narrated the biographies of four quietly strong, unassuming Yaqui women." (Arizona and the West). "This is an excellent book." (Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology). Jane Holden Kelley, a professor of archaeology at the University of Calgary, is also the author, with Rosalio Moises and William Curry Holden, of A Yaqui Life: The Personal Chronicle of a Yaqui Indian, available as a Bison Book.