Deep Valley

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The American Indian has been ill-served by a succession of popular images: he passes from the lyric nonsense of nineteenth century Hiawatha to the cinematic nonsense of early Hollywood. It is only recently that he has been thought of as the ruined survivor of the white man's lust for land. Relieved of his tomahawk and feathered headress, the Indian is regarded today as an embarrassing ethnographic footnote to American history. What was the aborigine really like before the advent of the white man? Deep Valley provides an answer for one tribe: the Pomo of Northern California. The result of 25 years of research by two noted anthropologists, Deep Valley is a re-creation of Pomo life in the early 19th century. The tribe lived by sets of rigid rules, carefully inculcated from one generation to another. The family protected, and governed, every individual in this pervasively insecure culture. One needed his family's constant vigilance, for instance, against the possibility of being poisoned by some other member of the tribe. Yet despite their taboos (and sometimes reasonable fears), the Pomo were in many ways not only sensible but remarkably advanced - in their ideas of marriage, child-rearing (and birth control), group living, career training, and even the treatment of emotional problems. Deep Valley is not, of course, a story that can be cut off short; it is one for which the authors provide a line of continuity that reached to the present.