The Longest Trail: Writings on American Indian History, Culture, and Politics, by Alvin M. Josephy Jr.
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The Longest Trail: Writings on American Indian History, Culture, and Politics, by Alvin M. Josephy Jr.
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Alvin Josephy Jr.’s groundbreaking, popular books and essays advocated for a fair and true historical assessment of Native Americans, and set the course for modern Native American studies. This collection, which includes magazine articles, speeches, a white paper, and introductions and chapters of books, gives a generous and reasoned view of five hundred years of Indian history in North America from first settlements in the East to the long trek of the Nez Perce Indians in the Northwest. The essays deal with the origins of still unresolved troubles with treaties and territories to fishing and land rights, and who should own archeological finds, as well as the ideologies that underpin our Indian policy. Taken together the pieces give a revelatory introduction to American Indian history, a history that continues both to fascinate and inform.
The Longest Trail: Writings on American Indian History, Culture, and Politics, by Alvin M. Josephy Jr.- Amazon Sales Rank: #412643 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-27
- Released on: 2015-10-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.80" h x .90" w x 5.20" l, .88 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 544 pages
Review Praise for The Longest Trail“This work reprints his most influential writings, many of which were either previously unavailable or difficult to locate. Through this work, one can trace the evolution of Native American activisim from the 1950s to the early 21st century. Essential for anyone interested in contemporary Native American history and culture.” —Library Journal (starred review)Praise for Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.“Alvin Josephy, Jr., is a hero to those of us who live in the American West.”—Terry Tempest Williams, author of Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert“I marvel at the mark Josephy has made as the nation’s premier Indian historian.” —Stewart Udall, former Secretary of the Interior “[Josephy’s] informed, accurate, and human account of some of the major issues in Indian affairs today goes far in clarifying the basic thrust of the modern Indian movement.”—Vine Deloria, Jr., author of Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto“Only occasionally does one find such a felicitous pairing of author and subject. . . . Mr. Josephy again serves justice with his clear-eyed, even-handed scholarship.” —The New York Times Book Review“Alvin was a man of his word. He was a man of honor who wielded influence with humility. He cared deeply about the future of Indian people. In his lifetime, he contributed much to help shape that future, seeking no acclaim for the work.” —from the foreword by Roberta Conner, director of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute
About the Author Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. was born in 1915 in New York. He went to school at Horace Mann and Harvard, worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, a print and radio journalist in New York, and as a World War II Marine Corps combat correspondent in the Pacific; his recording of the amphibious landing at Guam was broadcast nationwide. After the war he became an editor at Time magazine and then American Heritage. On assignment with Time in Idaho in the early 1950s, he discovered the Nez Perce. That meeting changed his life—and that of many others. Fifty years of books and articles on Indian and western history followed. He was also a technical advisor on the film Little Big Man, a noted book and magazine editor, and an advocate for Indians. Josephy worked with Stewart Udall in the Kennedy administration, wrote an influential Indian "white paper" for the Nixon administration, and served as chair of the founding board of the National Museum of the American Indian. Many of his books remain in print. Alvin and his wife, Betty, bought a small ranch in the heart of Nez Perce Country in eastern Oregon in 1963, where the family spent summers for more than forty years. Alvin died in 2005, a year after Betty’s passing.
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IntroductionWhy an anthology of Josephy writings on American Indians now, a decade after his death and three, four, and five decades after most of the material was written? The answer is wrapped in his multiple writing personae and in his early conversion to Indian advocacy. In his 2001 memoir, A Walk Toward Oregon, he says that by 1959, well into research on the Nez Perce but before his first book on Indians was published, he and his wife, Betty, had become advocates for American Indians.It all began with a chance assignment from Henry Luce himself to Alvin, then a Time staff writer, to do a story on Idaho. The assignment—ironically from a man widely known for his antipathy to Indians—brought this New York–bred easterner together with a number of Indians who “influenced and changed” the rest of his life. It inspired a twelve-year investigation of the Nez Perce tribe and the historical context of the Nez Perce War, a subject of little interest to historians at the time. The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, published in 1965, quickly established itself as a seminal work and the cornerstone of Josephy’s accomplishments as a historian of the American West and of the American Indian.From his initial focus on the Nez Perce, interaction with Indians of other tribes in the Northwest and then throughout the hemisphere led to a flurry of research and writing. Books and articles about Indians past and present began to flow, beginning with The Patriot Chiefs in 1961 (he had interrupted work on the Nez Perce history to write this book), continuing with the classic Indian Heritage of America, a National Book Award finalist, and ending with the elaborately illustrated 500 Nations: A History of North American Indians. Articles appeared in Life, American Heritage, Audubon, and many other publications, both academic and those meant for the general public.'Alvin Josephy was a friend and mentor to the editors of this volume for over thirty years. And in that time we learned much about the intensity and commitment that lay behind an exterior of quiet reserve. In 2001, in Olympia, Washington, while on a tour with Alvin in connection with the publication of his memoir, we learned that he had discovered the extraordinary Gustavus Sohon drawings of Northwest Indians, stuffed away in state archives, as he researched his book on the Nez Perce tribe. These are some of the only images of important tribal leaders of the mid-nineteenth century, and are now widely published. In Lewiston, Idaho, Nez Perce Indians—friends and the sons and daughters of friends—came to say hello and thank him for his work and friendship.Also on that book tour across Oregon, Idaho, and Washington veterans of World War II in the Pacific came to say that they too had been at Guadalcanal, Guam, or Iwo Jima. Some had read his first book, The Long and the Short and the Tall: The Story of a Marine Combat Unit in the Pacific, published in 1946, shortly after war’s end. Others had already picked up the new memoir and read the chapter that was the signal event in their own lives. Almost sixty years on, they quietly mouthed the names of beaches and battles, which sometimes brought them to tears. Alvin listened and responded, nodding and trading a few words, and signed their books—perhaps with a “Semper Fi,” the Marine Corps motto. (Once, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in dark Indian days, a Marine Corps emblem on a humble shack led to conversation and friendship—Alvin, like many of his Indian friends, was forever a Marine.)It is important to an understanding of Josephy’s writing career that he came to Indian affairs less than a decade after his time in the Pacific. He had covered the war from foxholes, and wrote hundreds of stories about the troops in the front lines. He trusted the interview method and the stories that followed. When a young Nez Perce Indian told him some raw truths about his heritage, Josephy saw a “great American epic” that had been largely omitted from the narrative of “American” history. When he found first-person accounts of Indian life recorded by an eccentric Washington rancher named Lucullus McWhorter, published by a small press in Idaho, he decided that he would tell the Nez Perce story as part of the broader history of the Pacific Northwest.Alvin had told us on publication of his first book on Indians, The Patriot Chiefs, that he found it most often under “Natural History” on bookstore shelves, and that he had determined then to begin his personal campaign to move Indians into American history on bookshelves and in American minds. He knew that the full, authentic story of Indian Country must be told from the Indian point of view, as well as from documents and narratives from a white world. On the tour for his memoir he still found some of his books misplaced under “Insects and Dinosaurs,” thus The Longest Trail is one more effort for Alvin to help “get it right.”Other ideas that inform this book are here as well. The title The Patriot Chiefs was, Indians told Josephy over the years, the first time anyone had called their ancestors, who had fought for their lands, families, and cultures, “patriots.” Indians did not “vanish,” as has been often predicted—and sometimes proclaimed as government policy—but are part of America still, living on reservations and in towns and cities across the country. The fact of their survival as Indians and members of named Indian tribes is a kind of miracle. And their participation in American life today, in accordance with treaties signed by their ancestors and white governments thirsty for settlement land and “peace” with tribes, is a matter of fact and consequence to all of us, especially as Indian lands and treaties involve the nation’s waters, forests, and fish—our natural resources.Who really was Alvin Josephy? When asked how Alvin identified himself, a family member said simply, “He identified himself as a writer.” And a writer he certainly was—screenwriter, novelist, newspaper, radio, and magazine journalist, historian. Josephy first put pencil, pen, and typewriter to paper as a professional in his teenage years. Then, after an economy-forced departure from Harvard College during the Depression, it was on to Hollywood, to the New York Herald Tribune (among other journalistic venues), to the Marine Corps as a combat correspondent, to Time, Inc., to American Heritage as an editor of books and magazines—these last at a time when he was writing respected history about Indians and the West (though without benefit of PhD or collegiate lectern). As he moved into the publishing world as a principal editor at American Heritage Publishing Company, there came a different challenge for his devotion to words—and pictures as well. The task called for little writing but entailed commissioning of other writers to put words on paper, suggesting ideas for articles and books, worrying about deadlines and an array of administrative details, and driving for higher book sales and magazine circulation. Alvin clearly was good at his job. He was responsible for the highly successful series of American Heritage book publications, and by the 1970s had become editor-in-chief of American Heritage, as well as supervising all the company’s magazines.Josephy had become a respected writer and editor on Indian and Western issues, but unlike most other historians and journalists, his activities led to strong personal relationships with the people he wrote about, and then to full-throated activism on behalf of American Indian rights and Indian social, political, and economic progress. His first appearance on the national stage was the preparation of a report on Indian affairs at the request of the Nixon administration. That report (which appears in this volume in abbreviated form) has been credited as a key influence in Nixon’s proposal to change the entire direction of federal policy toward the Indians, from Eisenhower’s “termination” of Indian reservations and treaties in the 1950s to the concept of self-determination for Indian peoples. The Nixon presidential legacy is shadowed by scandal and resignation, but under his administration, urged on by Alvin Josephy, Indians began a slow but steady progress never thought possible before that time.For Josephy, activism was a way of life, and he operated at many levels. At the request of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Josephy joined others in righting a sinking ship at the Heye Museum of the American Indian in New York City, and eventually helped steer its consolidation with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Josephy was the founding board chair of the National Museum of the American Indian, which has sites both in New York and on the National Mall in Washington. On a more local and personal level, he often acted as an informal travel guide, for example, writing a four-page letter charting the most historically important views along the route from Boise, Idaho, to Wallowa Lake, Oregon (as well as the best place to stop for pancakes). It was written for the benefit of three New York City visitors to the opening session of a literary event called the Fishtrap Gathering, in 1988. The event and the organization, Fishtrap, which he helped form, continue to this day.While Josephy’s activism on behalf of American Indians never flagged, from the 1960s to the end of his life, yet another persona developed on a more or less parallel track. In his autobiography Josephy writes that during his work on a Heritage book about Yellowstone Park, “I became aware of a strange, redemptive change that had come over me.” The impact of the writings of men like Wallace Stegner, Peter Matthiessen, Justice William O. Douglas, and the poet Paul Engle, and the images of the photographers Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, merged with his empathy for the Indian identification with the natural world, as well as his own love for the “unspoiled parts of the West.” Josephy turned his back on the “unrestrained exploitation of the earth,” which he had so strenuously promoted as a Time, Inc. journalist. Over time he became a “conservationist,” or what is called in early twenty-first-century terminology an “environmentalist.” This new commitment was reflected not only in his writing (three examples of which appear in this volume), but also in practical political involvement as a close advisor to President Kennedy’s Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall. In later years, Josephy was known not only to have clashed with forces such as power and coal companies, but also to have been in close relationships with writers such as Edward Abbey (of Monkey Wrench Gang fame); William Kittredge, dean of environmental writers in the West; and the well-known southwestern writer and environmentalist J. R. Loeffler.There we have him. Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.—writer, editor, historian, activist, environmentalist. But one still may ask—how did the son of a cultured, upper-middle-class German-Jewish New York family become a devoted citizen and distinguished historian of the American West and defender of a tiny population of threatened Native Americans? The answer may come from two directions. First, the character of the man. He had a powerful intelligence, wide-ranging curiosity, relentless (some would say insufferable) perseverance, and a surfeit of what a famous sociologist, Pitirim Sorokin, called an “instinct for combinations.” (This last being the ability and desire to bring things together, people of varying types and dispositions or ideas of disparate nature, all toward a positive result.) Second, Alvin Josephy’s innate motivation, perhaps a hundred generations in the making, was to help the world to a better place.As editors, we learned much about Alvin Josephy and about American Indians in the preparation of this book. In the end, we hope it helps others learn what Indians have thought and done over five hundred years of American history. We all must continue to learn even more about how and why it is important for Indian voices to be heard, for Indians to be involved in national conversations—about resources, religion, and politics—today, and for generations to come.Marc JaffeWilliamstown, MassachusettsRich WandschneiderJoseph, OregonNovember 2014
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. A must have for fans of American Indian history and culture. By Alexander Lucard The Longest Trail is a fantastic compilation of essays, research and exerts from other books Alvin Josephy wrote before his death in 2005. These pieces on Native America culture have been collected and reprinted for the first time, so if you are a fan of Josephy's writing, this is a great way to get a large cross-section of his writing for a fraction of the price it would take to track down all of these pieces in their original publications. That said, the pieces contained in "The Longest Trail" are his shorter pieces, so do not expect to find full books like "Now That the Buffalo's Gone" or "500 Nations" in this collection. Josephy was as prolific as he was good, so while "The Longest Trail" is not by any means an exhaustive compilation of his work, it is probably the best place to start if you are interested in the man's work or non-fiction on Native American culture.In "The Longest Trail" you will find fourteen different pieces by Alvin Josephy. Each piece is forwarded by a bit of history on it (remember, each piece is several decades old) along with where it was originally published. You will also find an introduction, foreword and a very long commentary from different authors about the importance of Josephy's writing and his legacy. If you are new to the author, you will walk away with a great deal of respect for the man's work and how he spent his life. Of course, you're primarily picking up this book for Josephy's writing, not pieces that praise him and you'll find a lot to love here. Even pieces that are nearly half a century old are fun to read and contain a lot of information about the American Indian that you more than likely were unaware of before picking up this book. Each piece is stand alone so you can read a "chapter" and put the book down, feeling that you have read the full "tale." Again, this is a compilation rather than a full book on a single subject.You'll also notice that I used works like chapter and tale in the previous paragraph to describe this book. This is because unlike a lot of non-fiction, which is written in a more dry, textbook style, Josephy's writing is done in narrative style. This means the writing contained in this book will be appealing to those that generally eschew non-fiction books because they prefer the narrative style of fiction. Non-fiction fans will still enjoy this because everything in this collection is true, non-exaggerated and factual. It just means that this anthology doesn't read like a textbook or remind you of Ben Stein in "Ferris Buller.""The Longest Trail" is a great collection by a great man and is more than worth the book's cover price. I can't recommend it highly enough.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Nicely done compilation. By Tanstaafl The first that I remember reading by the author were his American Heritage books and that was several decades ago. They were always professionally done while being easily read. In fact, I have a few of those on my shelves along with his very enjoyable book "The Civil War in the American West". The 500 Nations book, perhaps his most well known, was very well done as well. My copy disappeared in a move a few years ago.Thus, I was really looking forward to reading this collection from his work. It is divided into three sections: Putting Indians into American History; Indians and the Natural World; and The Miracle of Indian Survival. Each section is divided into chapters with brief information about the source of what follows. Those lend context without taking from the material.Josephy collected history as "stories" told to him by those he interviewed. He deliberately wrote himself out of those stories and let them tell themselves. What writing he did do to tie them together and provide framework was written in a way that keeps the pages turning. Always looking for the information behind what was written in the history books, he searched for that elusive "what really happened".To me, a book like this is to be savored rather than being quickly read from cover to cover as I would a novel. It is to be enjoyed over time and supplemented with material from other sources. This will be especially enjoyed by those who have read Josephy but have missed some of what he contributed to American history writing, especially about Native Americans. Or, if you have an interest in the subject but do not have the time to try to find appropriate and trustworthy information, then spend your time with this one. There are about five hundred pages of text and will be a friendly companion on winter evenings.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Breathtaking in Scope and Insight By Hrafnkell Haraldsson This is a great book, very easy to read, and very informative on a wide variety of topics and historical periods going all the way back to before Europeans trod North American soil.The Longest Trail is a collection of Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.'s writings, each article introduced with a brief commentary by the editors, putting the piece in context. They come to this collection from various sources: A Continent Awakes comes from the book "500 Nations" (1994) while Tecumseh: The Greatest Indian was published in 1961 as part of Josephy's book, "The Patriot Chiefs" and Cowplanter, Can You Swim? is taken from his 1982 book "Now That the Buffalo's Gone."I came of age on books like "Red, White and Black" (1974) by Gary B. Nash and "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" (1970) by Dee Brown, books which really introduced me to Native Americans as something other than movie antagonists. If you haven't yet discovered that Native Americans belong in American history, you should pick up a copy of The Longest Trail and find out why it is so important that they become part of our historical landscape. If you are already aware, read The Longest Trail anyway, as it is full of rich detail and insights that will only deepen your understanding.All of the included essays are excellent and display the breadth of Josephy's interests. You can read them in order, as I did, or skip around to the subjects that interest you most. There is something for everybody interested in Native American culture, history, and politics. It is a book that belongs on every historian's (professional or amateur) shelf. Highly recommended and easily 5 stars alone for the obvious love and compassion Josephy shows for his subject matter.
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