Book Review: Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico by Bill Weinberg

Homage to Chiapas:

The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico

by Bill Weinberg

On New Year’s Eve 1994, a ragged army of soldiers seized San Cristobal de las Casas, a small city in Mexico’s poorest state Chiapas. Wearing ski masks and homemade army uniforms, the rebels carried rifles and pistols, though many of them were actually carrying wooden sticks made to look like guns. The rebel army was the EZLN, also known as the Zapatistas, and they were primarily made up of Mayan Indians. Some people took them to be a low-level threat and some tourists weren’t happy about the uprising disrupting their travel plans. Some might have even said the EZLN were quaint. But the Zapatista uprising shook Mexican society to its core, sparked a few other insurrections, and brought attention to the problems faced by the poorest people in the country. Although incomplete in ts scope, Bill Weinberg’s Homage to Chiapas puts the rebellion into context and looks at its short term consequences.

The book starts off with a whirlwind tour through Mexican history going back to pre-colonial times, detailing the relations between the indigenous Mayans and the Uto-Aztecan empire that conquered and assimilated them. By Weinberg’s account, rebellion has been a part of Mayan heritage from the beginning. After the Spanish Conquistadors and the Catholic church arrived to do the dirty deeds of the Castilian empire, the tradition of Mayan uprisings continued. Some elements in the church had humanitarian sympathies and defended the Mayans against the excessive cruelties of the colonialists and this alliance between Catholic activists and the indigenous people of Mexico continues to this day. Weinberg’s history of Mexico is brief and serves the purpose of setting a historical context for Mayan and Indian political resistance in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. He strongly emphasizes the history of the Mayan people. If you’re familiar with Mexican history, this part of the book might feel incomplete. If you’re not, it might feel a little muddled and confusing. But this book isn’t about the grand scope of Mexican history and the opening chapters do serve their purpose of drawing a connecting line from the Mayan past to the present.

The same can be said for the chapters on modern Mexico. The Mexican Revolution gets explained, especially the cause of land reform heralded by Emiliano Zapata, the guerilla fighter that inspired the EZLN in the 1990s. A lot of attention is also drawn to the domination of Mexico by the American government and multinational corporations during the industrialization and modernization process. Weinberg goes into great detail about how outside interference in Mexico’s culture and economy led to the widespread environmental damage, economic displacement, and loss of ancestral lands for Indians and campesinos. He brings us up into the 1990s when the corruption of Mexico’s dominant PRI political party and American free trade agreements under Reagan and Bush, like GATT and NAFTA, were ratified and exacerbated the unresolved problems the Mexican Revolution was meant to correct. These chapters are heavily detailed and the reader may feel lost in the weeds, especially in sections detailing environmental sciences and economics. Weinberg overdoes his explanations in a way that could alienate his audience.

Then we come up to New Year’s Day of 1994, the day that the NAFTA treaty went into effect, giving oil companies and other multinational corporations sweeping rights over Mexican natural resources, manufacturing in the maquiladoras along the border, and industrialized agriculture that killed off varieties of traditionally grown produce and further disinherited Mexicans from privately and publicly held land all for the sake of making money for American businessmen.

A decade previous, in the mountains of Chiapas and the Lacandon jungle along the border of Guatemala, a mysterious figure arose and began preparing armies of Mayan people to fight the Mexican government. His name was Subcomandante Marcos and no one knew who he was at first since he hid his identity behind a black ski mask. The New Year’s uprising of 1994 led to some small skirmishes with a small amount of casualties, mostly EZLN fighters. The Zapatistas realized they could not fight Mexico with arms so instead they captured the media’s attention and Marcos reached a global audience by posting dispatches on the internet that gained worldwide sympathy. The Mexican middle classes took sides with Marcos and the Zapatistas and their message caught on in all continents and regions of the world. Their message was simple: they wanted land, they wanted self-governance, and they wanted all the material benefits of modernity. They wanted political participation in the Mexican government and desired to be like a semi-autonomous nation within the nation. They eventually built a parallel government in rural Chiapas and refused to recognize the official governments run in the urban municipalities of the state. The conflict between the EZLN and the government was unresolved at the time this book was published. Weinberg is successful in defining the goals of the EZLN, but falls short on writing about their history. A lot of his account is bogged down with descriptions of his travels into Zapatista territories, hidden in the mountains and jungles, and his attempt at getting an interview with Subcomandante Marcos himself, which eventually happens but doesn’t lead to any great insights.

The next section of the book looks at other indigenous uprisings that happened parallel to or after the EZLN uprising of Subcomandante Marcos. The most interesting chapter gives an account of indigenous people rebelling against oil companies in the state of Tabasco who wrecked the environment and contaminated their drinking water making farming almost impossible and causing a wave of health problems. The author again bogs the reader down with excessive details. You might need to be an expert in chemistry or biology to fully understand everything he writes. He could easily make the point abut environmental destruction and its impact on the agricultural economy without going into such fine, technical details. But it is a good section because it documents some attempts at revolutionary activism that probably will otherwise be forgotten due to lack of attention from other writers.

The rest of the book moves sideways into accounts of the intersection between the Mexican government, landowners, the military, law enforcement, and the drug cartels in the North, especially in Sonora. The Tarahumara or Raramuri Indians get caught up in this mess due to poverty and lack of political power. These chapters get to be frustrating because the author introduces a lot of government officials, law enforcement officers, military generals, and hacendados who made the mistake of involving themselves in drug trafficking. Most of these people get assassinated soon after they enter the narrative and a lot of this just reads like lists of people you know close to nothing about getting murdered. It barely has any connection to the EZLN, indigenous people, or the state of Chiapas. It should probably have been left out of the book altogether.

Bill Weinberg gives us an interesting glimpse into the world of indigenous political activism in Mexico. As mentioned before, the main issues of the narratives get somewhat obscured by too much extraneous information. A lot of the information gathered by Weinberg is incomplete which isn’t entirely his fault. The historical roots of these indigenous uprisings, especially those of the Zapatistas, was not well known at the time of writing. Furthermore, he also wrote this too close to the time of the events themselves. There isn’t enough historical distance on his part to give these uprisings the clarity they deserve. But still it’s good to read about how indigenous people can organize and challenge the injustices of the Mexican political and economic system.

Despite all its many flaws, including sloppy writing and a thick jungle of arcane details that is hard to see through, Homage to Chiapas is worth reading once just because it draws attention to struggles that are not well-documented elsewhere. On a final note, the title should probably be changed as very little of what takes place in these pages happens in Chiapas. Besides, it is more of an homage to Mayan people and the EZLN than it is to Mexico’s poorest, but also one of the most fascinating, states. The dense jungle, the highlands, its ancient temples, its history, and the culture of its peoples make it a place worth visiting and learning about all on its own. 

 

Book Review: People Of the Peyote edited by Stacy B. Schaefer & Peter T. Furst

People Of the Peyote:

Huichol Indian History, Religion, & Survival

edited by Stacy B. Schaefer & Peter T. Furst

      If you’ve ever been to Mexico, you might have seen some brightly colored yarn paintings on black backgrounds or other crafts in similar styles using pointilist technique or depicting animals or other objects in ways that might be considered mind altering or psychedelic. You would see these in markets or tourist trinket shops. Sometimes they are on display in art galleries. Chances are you were seeing the creations of Huichol Indians whose vibrant artwork is known for its depiction of mystical and shamanic themes. Their cultural and religious traits are largely intertwined with the use of the hallucinogenic peyote buttons found in the desert. People Of the Peyote, edited by Stacy B. Schaefer and Peter T. Furst, is a collection of essays about the Huichols, mostly centered around their shamanic traditions and religious practices and how they influence their community.

This book starts off with the definition and history of the Huichols who are a sub-branch of the Azteco branch of North American Indians. They live in the Sierra Madre Occidental region in the states of Nayarit, Jalisco, Zacatecas, and Durango. Culturally and geographically they are close to the Cora people and linguistically they are connected to the Pimas of southern Arizona. These early chapters give brief information about pre- and post-Conquest interactions with the Spanish and mestizo population of Mexico. Their social, political, and economic organizations are introduced as well. One chapter is written by a German traveler from the 19^th century named Konrad Preuss. Despite not being proficient in anthropological fieldwork techniques, his writings are highly valued because they provide some of the only accounts of Huichol religion and ritual from that time. Unfortunately, his writing isn’t very good. Another chapter lists the botanical and pharmacological properties and applications of peyote and other plants in Huichol medicinal culture. Also a theory is asserted that the Huichol’s use of peyote, while still being considered traditional, is actually of recent historical origins in their shamanic practices. These early chapters are sometimes difficult to read due to both poor writing, a serious problem for authors of history, as well as an abundance of technical terminologies and analyses that alienate a layperson. Fortunately, the book gets more accessible and interesting as it goes along.

As the more interesting parts of the book begin to pick up, we get some good chapters on the shaman’s role in society. The Huichol word for shaman is “ma’akame” and, as difficult as it may be fore an English speaker to pronounce, it is used throughout the entirety of the book. The mara’akame’s purpose is to organize and lead ritual practices. It gets more complicated than that though since the Huichol rituals are tightly intertwined with social structures and hierarchies, familial roles, seasonal calendars, and agricultural practices. A missing or altered piece of these interrelations can throw a whole village out of balance so the position of mara’akame is one of great responsibility. He also holds the place where the human and spirit worlds interact so of course that is a position of great power and influence. Aside from community rituals, the mara’akame also leads people on ritual peyote gathering expeditions and pilgrimages to the sacred mountain where it is believed that peyote originated. The psychotropic effects of peyote ingestion are also examined from neurophysiological and spiritual perspectives. The authors make it clear that peyote use is taken seriously by the Huichols for creative cultural purposes and that recreational indulgences in the drug is strictly forbidden.

Huichol mythology gets an interesting examination. They have a complex web of deities, elemental spirits including a pantheon of malevolent wind spirits, and animals. They have two deities superficially corresponding to Santa Maria and Jesus Christ although they don’t appear to play a major role in religious practices. Deer occupy a central place in the theoretical aspects of the mara’alame and they believe in a unified trinitarian spirit made up of deer, peyote, and corn which they are different manifestations of the same element. One way to think of it is the way water can hold the three forms of mist, ice, and liquid. This might be hard to grasp for people outside the Huichol culture, but to them it is obvious. This is the challenge of encountering a culture other than your own and that is where anthropologists come in for the sake of explaining this insider knowledge to outsiders. Otherwise, the ritual deer hunt is a sacred practice and a mara’akame who takes peyote can speak with living deer or deer in the spirit world. Huichol religious rituals are re-enactments of mythological stories so the mythology can be seen as an instructional guide to religious practices.

One standout chapter describes the practice of a rare subset of Huichol mara’akame, one that practices shamanic lycanthropy. Through ritual and peyote use, these shamans interact with wolves in the spirit world, eventually learning how to turn into wolves, and communicate with them for guidance on living in the human world. In the older days of anthropology, especially during the colonial era, anthropologists could be guilty of exoticizing the people they studied, especially by over-emphasizing the parts of other cultures that appear bizarre due to being the most different from the culture of the anthropologist. That accusation could apply here to this chapter, but it is probably unjust since the author makes it clear that this is not an ordinary practice among Huichol mara’akame. She didn’t write this essay to dazzle or entertain her audience either; it is a serious attempt at explaining a practice that may baffle anybody outside Huichol society.

By the end, the essays address the issue of how Huichols interact with the modern world, the market economy, and the problems these cause while they try to preserve their traditional culture. More and more, they are forced to interact with mestizos, some of which respect them and some of which don’t. Being at the margins of the economy makes them subject to exploitation for cheap labor. The importation of alcohol and guns are also causing disruptions. An even bigger problem is how they should deal with outsiders coming into their villages. Once the Huichols lived in remote mountain farming communities; now the building of new roads has resulted in busloads of clueless tourists gawking at them like exotic animals and burned out hippies showing up and demanding a shamanic spiritual experience that sometimes results in them running around naked and screaming at the sky until they pass out. Patronizing new age types are showing up hoping to find the crap that Carlos Castaneda wrote about in his fake anthropological books with the fictional character Don Juan. Such intruders are a nuisance and the hospitable Huichols have difficulty knowing what to do with these louts. They have reacted to all this by retreating deeper into the privacy of their own traditions and minimizing their contact with outsiders.

Aside from the previously mentioned difficulties of reading the opening chapters, my only real complaint about this book is that it says very little about day to day life in a Huichol community. Almost every essay is about the religion, mythology, or shamanism of the mara’akame and how they relate to the community as a whole, but it doesn’t give any real sense of what it would feel like to be born into this culture or to live in it for a lifetime. While the things written about in this book are fascinating and written about with sincere interest, sometimes it is worth hearing about the mundane parts of a society too since those also play a major part in holding a society together. My guess is that those mundane details are left out for commercial purposes. The essays were written and collected in good faith by professional anthropologists whose intentions are clearly enthusiastic so I’m assuming they questioned this as they pieced the book together. But very few people read books, an even smaller amount read anthropology books, and of those that do, most of them are probably casual readers who want to read about mysticism and drug experiences without much concern for the people being studied. Book publishing is a business and sometimes authors need to make compromises in order to send something to press. But otherwise these are excellent essays, written with care and clarity so for what it is, it is a great book.

People Of the Peyote leaves me with one last thing to consider. Given that I, and many others, can’t accept the beliefs and practices of the Huichol people as objectively true or as scientific facts, does that mean that I have to reject those beliefs in totality? The anthropologists demonstrate how important their rituals are in maintaining and regulating their society and also how any disruption in these rituals can cause lasting damage to the Huichols who practice them. Should it be considered that scientific objectivity should always be supported as the primary goal of human knowledge? What if believing in something that isn’t real is necessary to maintain social order? But it’s difficult to believe in something once you’ve admitted that it isn’t factually true. As of now, I can’t answer these questions. But what I can say is a big thank you to the anthropologist friend I had in Albuquerque who recommended this book to me after I returned from a trip to Mexico 30 years ago. Good luck Dr. S.T. wherever you happen to be these days.

 

Book Review: Corn Is Our Blood by Alan R. Sandstrom

Corn Is Our Blood:

Culture and Ethnic Identity In a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village

by Alan R. Sandstrom

      “That’s a weird name for a book,” said the bookstore cashier where I purchased Corn Is Out Blood by Alan R. Sandstrom. Of course, things that are unfamiliar are thought of as weird by default. And there is nothing more unfamiliar than a culture you know nothing about. Besides, the title is an idiom and, linguistically speaking, an idiom is a metaphorical phrases that makes no sense when translated into another language. Only those fluent in the language and culture will understand what it means. That is the value of the social sciences and, in this case specifically, anthropology. The author of this book did fieldwork in Mexico for the purpose of being able to explain a foreign culture to those from outside that culture. His intention is to prove that, contrary to what outsiders say, the people he studied are making effective rational choices in the maintenance of their ethnic identity given the living conditions they are faced with.

Sandstrom spent several years off and on over two decades with Nahua Indians in Mexico located in the Amatlan region of Veracruz state. The Nahuas are contemporary descendants of the pre-colonial Aztecs and speak Nahuatl as their language. Very few of them are fluent in Spanish. They mostly survive by subsistence farming, largely maize and beans, although they sometimes take surplus produce to market. Through language, religion, and clothing, they maintain a fiercely independent ethnic identity that is remote from the dominant mestizo identity of most Mexican citizens. Loyalty to their traditions and identity has caused many mestizos to call them irrational, especially because they live so precariously, being marginalized socially and economically, when they could join modern society and live more comfortably with greater wealth. Sandstrom therefore desires to prove that their supposedly irratoinal clinging to tradition is actually a strategy for survival in a host culture that is hostile to them.

The book starts out with a brief history of the Indian people in Mexico beginning with the pre-Conquest Aztec empire up to contemporary post-Mexican Revolution times. The Nahuas have suffered persecution and marginalization all along the way from the conquistadors, the Catholic church, and the modern mestizo state. They are therefore relegated to remote ejidos, or communally owned farmlands, and have little contact with the outside world. But they aren’t hostile people at all. Sandstrom describes them as gentle, quiet, good natured, and avoidant of conflict. The opening chapters are useful, interesting, and informative. The biggest problem is that some of the personal testimonies are dry and a little difficult to follow. However, they do illustrate the types of problems the Indians have with government officials and law enforcement that is corrupt, violent, and exploitative.

The book progresses into chapters on daily life for the Nahua people. Since they are subsistence farmers, agriculture plays a central role in their lives. Their milpas, or farming territories, are arranged according to ownership and, after a chapter describing those ancestral categorizations of geneologies and familial structures that anthropologists love so much, we learn that the Nahuas are patrilocal with groupings of brothers being the central building block of social organization in their society. The distribution of milpas is based on this form of social organization. They also use slash and burn techniques of agriculture and crop rotations that are loosely related to their sometimes unpredictable rainy seasons. All of these horticultural realities have a direct influence over the Nahua’s world view and religious practices. When they say that “corn is our blood” they literally mean that without corn they would die. As a source of food, health, income, and meaning it is the most important thing to them. In America we might think of money in a similar way since, like it or not, we can’t live without it within the context of our culture.

At one point, Sandstrom argues his case that Nahua people are highly rational even though mestizos insist they aren’t and just blindly follow traditions even though it would make more sense to modernize and join the market economy. One claim they make against the Nahuas is that they inist on making maize their staple crop even though beans fetch higher prices at the market. Sandstrom points out that maize is more cost effective, less labor intensive, and easier to grow in high quantities on a regular schedule. Beans on the other hand require higher monetary investments, grow irregularly, and are more likely to get eaten or contaminated by vermin. Beans are also more difficult to harvest and transport to the market. Maize is simply more efficient and more reliable. The mestizos could always ask the Nahuas why they prefer it, but they are human and that means it is better to live in the certainty of their own illusions than to find out the truth.

After describing the material culture of the Nahuas, Sandstrom goes on to examine their religious practices, most of which revolve around their horticultural cycle. They believe in a type of animism or pantheism that is similar to what Hindus and Buddhists believe. There is one unifying spirit permeating the entire world and we only see it in fragments because of our own natural limitations. Like other Aztec derived cultures, they believe in wind spirits that cause illness, accidents, and death. During ceremonies, they attract and then banish them through the use of figures made out of colored paper. Their religious rituals are performed to maintain a balance in the interaction between the material and the spiritual world. Shamans are the religious authorities of the Nahuas and aside from performing rituals, they also act as doctors, fortune tellers, and politicians in the ejido.

By the time Sandstrom returns to Amatlan in the 1980s, the Nahuas have begun to change. The government has built roads into Amatlan along with sturdy houses. They are in the process of bringing in electric power. More Nahuas are learning Spanish and going into the cities to work. American missionaries have also discovered them and done some damage too. A rift in the community happens as Protestant converts refuse to interact with the other Nahuas and the missionaries insist that vaccines are evil so a portion of the converts die from an outbreak of measles that could easily have been prevented.

The end of the book is a thorough examination of how the Nahuas benefit from having a strong ethnic identity that sets them apart from the mestizos in the surrounding areas of Veracruz.

Alan Sandstrom has written a fascinating book about the Nahua people. He advocates for them by making and defending the claim that Nahuas are rational despite what others think. There is one point where he drops the ball in his argument. He addresses the reason why Nahuas keep farm animals even though they don’t eat meat, don’t use them for farm labor, and don’t see them as status symbols. They are economically inefficient because they cost a lot to feed, but he claims the Nahuas keep them so they have something to use their unusable milpas for. But if those milpas are unusable, why have them in the first place? Despite this one weak point, the other arguments he gives are sufficiently strong enough to support his claim. Even without the theoretical argument he makes, this book would still be interesting as it gives such a clear impression of what it is like to live in this culture. And it seems like the ultimate work on anthropology since it is so accessible to lay people without losing its value for professional anthropologists. It isn’t bogged down or made confusing with abstract theories and endless references to other scholars in the field the way a lot of anthropology books tend to be. Better still, the author doesn’t glorify the Nahua people by making them look quaint or by turning them into noble savages of the 20^th century. He makes them out to be ordinary people living ordinary lives in a way that is outside the ordinary for most of us.

I’m no expert in the social sciences, but if anybody ever asked me to recommend books from that field Corn Is Our Blood would be one of the first suggestions I would make. Humanizing people in other cultures isn’t a task that should have to be done, but unfortunately it is and this book does a good job of it. It also adds another dimension to whatever it is you know about Mexican society and culture. Like anybody else, I love Mexican food, but there is so much more to this fascinating country and its richly layered culture that should be learned about. You might as well start by letting Alan Sandstrom point you in the right direction.

 

Book Review

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

by Peter Matthiessen

     I’ve always thought Peter Matthiessen was a terrible writer. I’ll be up front about that right from the start. The fact that he was a CIA agent doesn’t do much to lend him credibility either. But the story of Leonard Peltier and the American Indian Movement (AIM) is important enough for me to overlook the shortcomings of the author and take In the Spirit of Crazy Horse into serious consideration.

This copiously researched and overwrought work on recent Native American Indian history begins with an account of Crazy Horse, Geronimo, General Custer, and the massacre at Wounded Knee in South Darkota. After some commentary on stolen land and treaties that were never upheld by the U.S. government, the story is brought into more recent times by briefly telling the story of AIM and how leaders like Russel Means, Dennis Banks, John Trudell and other lesser known men formed the militant activist group at the end of the 1960s. The group was loosely organized and made up of urban Indians, mostly from the West coast. They came into prominence in the early ‘70s when they occupied the Oglala reservation of Pine Ridge, South Dakota. This led to a brief standoff with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the FBI that brought AIM into the spotlight of national politics and won them support among Native peoples all across the country. Matthiessen follows this section up with an account of the trials that came after.

Up to this point, the story is straight forward and easy to follow since it goes along an ordinary linear path. Matthiessen’s style is not known for being direct, precise, or clear, but in these opening chapters he manages to keep a tight rein on his language so the audience doesn’t get lost so soon. The opening chapter on Wounded Knee feels arbitrary and unnecessary, especially for anybody who knows about American history. It could have been left out or shortened, but it doesn’t do any real damage to the book. The problems come later. At least these sections do a good job of setting the tone and context for what comes next.

What does come next is the whole heart of the story. In June of 1975, two FBI agents drove onto the Pine Ridge reservation with a huge entourage of FBI and BIA agents, SWAT teams, a gang of thugs, and a right wing militia group, while a spotter airplane flew overhead. A group of AIM members were camping on the reservation with a cache of weapons. Nobody knows how it started, but a firefight began. The two FBI agents were shot point blank and one AIM activist named Leonard Peltier was later charges and convicted of murder.

This whole chapter is confusing. I have to say, that is not Peter Matthiessen’s fault. He tells the story several times from the points of view provided by several different witnesses. Since most of them were either firing guns or hiding to avoid being shot, you can’t expect any of them to provide a clear explanation of what happened. As muddled and difficult as this part of the book can be, Matthiessen still holds your attention enough to keep you reading and guessing what will happen.

The inevitable next section of the story is the arrest of Peltier and some others and their two trials for murder. The prosecution does a terrible job in both trials, resulting in a finding of not guilty in the first and guilty in the second, the one in which Leonard Peltier got sentenced to life imprisonment. Matthiessen demonstrates how insufficient the prosecution’s case was in both and how they broke the law in their conduct by intimidating witnesses, tampering with evidence, and withholding necessary documents from the defense. If Matthiessen’s account of these trials is accurate, then there is more than sufficient reason for Peltier to be allowed a retrial. If Matthiessen’s account isn’t accurate, then it is because he is guilty of massively cherry picking his information. Given what I know about Leonard Peltier, I think the former is more believable than the latter and I would prefer to just go along with the author. But what comes later in the book, or more accurately what doesn’t come later, gives me reason to pause and question how trustworthy the author is.

From a simple standpoint of excitement, the beginning of the last section is the most interesting. The imprisoned Leonard Peltier learns of a supposed plot to assassinate him, so he escapes from the penitentiary, only to be caught soon after. If you want any more action to keep the narrative going, you will find it here. This incident leads the author to assert that there is some sort of conspiracy by the FBI to bring down the American Indian Movement. Matthiessen’s theory is that they are working with some corporations to access uranium mines in the Black Hills on the Pine Ride Reservation. Is it a real conspiracy or just a conspiracy theory? We know that the FBI tried to take out other Civil Rights organizations along with other activist groups of the New Left in the 1960s, so it isn’t a far fetched idea. As to why they chose to go after Peltier even though they probably knew he wasn’t guilty, is a bit more complex. It appears they needed to pin the murders on someone, even if it wasn’t the actual murderer and they found it easier to build a case against Peltier than anyone else. As for the assassination plot, I just don’t know. The FBI had Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers assassinated so it can’t be ruled out even if there is testimony from only one man regarding this.

The rest of this last section involves Matthiessen rambling around, talking to various people about various elements related to the case. Except for the two people who claim to have murdered the FBI agents, there isn’t anything here that actually strengthens the author’s argument. It is a disorganized mess of random stuff that is barely, if ever, interesting. It seems that Matthiessen felt he had to include all the information he had gathered even if it didn’t contribute anything of value to the book overall.

The biggest problem with this last section is not its bad writing, but the way in which it makes its one-sidedness so obvious. I have to say that I mostly agree with the author’s stance on the issues addressed, but the absence of opposing points of view make it look suspicious. There is one passage where the author has a phone conversation with FBI agent David Price, but Price does little more than talk in circles without ever saying much of anything. He obfuscates the FBI’s case rather than clarifies it. It doesn’t stand firmly as an attempt at providing a counter-argument. Matthiessen should have cut down on all the testimony from AIM members and sympathizers, who sound like nothing more than yes-men and yes-women, and included more from the government’s point of view. It would have made the story more complete and I don’t think it would have hurt his thesis. It probably would have strengthened it.

Is In the Spirit of Crazy Horse worth reading? For now, I have to say yes. The history is interesting enough on its own to survive the bad writing. And as far as I know, this is the most well-researched and comprehensive account of the Leonard Peltier affair that is available. Still the question remains, did Leonard Peltier kill those two FBI agents? I really don’t think so, but I also don’t think Peter Matthiessen did a good job of proving his innocence. What he does succeed in is showing how the trial was a sham, a persecution motivated by extreme prejudice and not by a desire for justice.