Page 10 RAIN Aug.-Sept. 1982 and Bontoc tribes in the Philippines find their way of life threatened by dam projects. Both Australian aborigines and native Americans face loss of land and loss of health from uranium mining. While a growing network of native and nonnative people is fighting to protect indigenous cultures, organizations too frequently operate in isolation from one another, unaware of the potential for cooperative efforts. ITie People of the Earth project, sponsored by Friends of the Earth Foundation, is compiling a comprehensive international directory of non-violent, service-oriented groups active in the struggle to strengthen the sovereignty and land rights of native peoples. The project's go^ is to help organizations and individuals with a concern in this area to find each other, strengthen bonds of cooperation, and build a global movement with a much greater impact. To learn more about the project, or to offer information or other assistance, contact Randy Hayes at the address above. —John Ferrell ThatAwesome Space, edited by E. Richard Hart, 1981,147 pp., $8.95 from: Westwater Press P.O.Box 6394 Salt Lake City, UT 84106 The American West... the phrase evokes images of John Wayne in the saddle, of desert mesas and jagged mountain ranges, of a heroic history, of a present that is power plants, strip mines and big cities. The West and its myth are deep in the collective psyche of Americans, but what, really, is the West? The Institute of the American West at Sun Valley, Idaho took 10 weeks in 1980 to make an intensive examination of that question. This book is a product of that effort, a series of 26 cogent, well-written essays whose topics range from the history of fire to Mormon views of the MX missile to the impact of the Western landscape on art and science. For anyone interested in exploring the regional identity of the West, That Awesome Space is an invaluable tool packed with insightful perspectives guaranteed to provoke thought. The "awesome space," a description that accurately captures the Western vastness, is defined as the region between the Continental Divide on the Rockies to the crest of the West Coast Ranges, the Cascades and Sierras. If one thing comes clear from this book, it is that this space has accommodated many "Wests"; regional identity is a fluid and evolving thing. Was the essential West lost with the closing of the frontier? In "Western Time and Western History," Stephen J. Pyne says no: "The West was not completely assimilated; it has retained its separate regional identity. Western time did not cease, but merged into a brave new imiverse of atoms and quasars . . . that awesome space in time did not vanish with the passing of the frontier; it is only being recycled." the West is undergoing vast changes, this book makes clear, shifting from an agrarian culture to one based on technology and industry. Says Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. in his essay, "Colonialism in Today's West," "The West is still a colony. Decisions affecting most parts of the area .. . are stiU being made in board rooms... all over the world by people who have never been out here and don't know what the West is aU about ... In short, we must recognize that history is still beng made in the West." For aU the development, there is stiU power in the land that brings forth "the truth of inmost being, that surging and resurgent current of life in us to which the world around us is tributary, pouring forth its influences tike water out of a living rock, so long as we keep the source and the stream from defilement and depletion," writes Brewster Ghiselin in his essay, "The Altered Landscape." The book gives no final answer to the question, "What is the West?" and suggests there is no final answer. We each create our own West. In the creation of that understanding, in the development of an individual vision of that awesome space, this book is a tool, a guide and downright enjoyable reading. — Patrick Mazza The Nine Nations ofNorth America, by Joel Garreau, 1981,427 pp., $14.95 from: Houghton Mifflin 2 Park St. Boston, Mass. 02107 This book is based on a fascinating concept, that North America is reaUy nine nations, each with its own identity. Their existence endlessly confuses the affairs of "fictional"nations like the U.S.A., Canada and Mexico. Garreau has an entertaining, anecdotal style and a good eye for images and vignettes, but he displays real failures of vision. I read Garreau this way: yoimgish, liberal, Washington, D.C. journalist who has bought into many of the misguided notions of dominance, power and exploitation that pervade the U.S. capital. For instance, he defines three of the nine "nations" by their prevailing economies: mining and energy production in the unfortunately nam^ "Empty Quarter" (the Rockies and Arctic), grain growing in "The Breadbasket" (the Great Plains), heavy industry in "TTie Foundry" (the Eastern Seaboard and Great Lakes regions). In doing this, Garreau obscures real cultural distinctions such as those between the conservative Southern Plains and the more progressive Northern Plains, between high rolling Coloradans ancj the traditionalist Mormons of the Deseret Kingdom (the Mormons would have called Utah "Deseret" if the U.S. government had let them), and between the intensity of the Middle Atlantic regions and the more stolid approach of Great Lakes dwellers. A nation is more than a crop or industry. It is a shared set of values, perceptions and cultural patterns. Garreau does not appear to hiUy recognize this. Perhaps nine nations are easier to comprehend than the 20, 30, 50 or more that actually exist in North America. The author also fails to ask the hard questions about the exploitative relationships that imderlie many of his "nations." A glaring example of this is the scanty attention he gives to the desp>erate poverty of "The Islands" (South Florida plus islands of the Caribbean). Garreau is more interested in telling tales of gunrunners and drug smugglers. In a similar vein, he includes the native peoples of the Arctic in the "Empty Quarter," even though they have their own culture and languages and have asked for recognition as a separate nation known as Nunuvik. Garreau seems to display the standard American attitude toward traditional peoples — if they don't have a developed, modem economy and an impressive capital city, they are not a nation. The book is also somewhat weak on abuse of the land. The soil erosion and groundwater depletion that could make much of the Great Plains into a "Used- to-be-Breadbasket" in our lifetimes gets no ink. Yet despite these gaps Garreau shows himself to be a perceptive observer about some things. For example, in his report on Ecotopia, the West Coast nation, he accurately describes the region's cultural contradiction between ecological consciousness and the proliferation of high technology defense industries and bases. (We're working on that.) In the chapter on MexAmerica (northern Mexico plus parts of the American Southwest where Hispanics are a large portion of the population), the author makes a fascinating reference to a Hispanic belief that this land ■will one day be a place of peace and justice called Aztlan. May it soon come to pass. The Nine Nations of North America helps build an understanding of this continent as one of distinct regions, not a monoculture. But it is oversimplified and does not address many of the most important issues facng the continent. The Nine Nations is a good try at forming an important concept, but the book that really tells us how North America works is stiU to be written. — Patrick Mazza
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