A Yaqui Life: The Personal Chronicle of a Yaqui Indian

"The reminiscences of a Yaqui Indian born in 1896 in northwestern Mexico whose story begins during the Yaqui revolutionary period, continues through the last uprising in 1926, and ends with [his] recollections of his life on a Texas farm from 1952 to 1969. The introduction by Professor Kelley adds scholarly analysis to the poignant autobiographical narrative."-Booklist

"A powerful chronicle. . . . It deserves an important place in the annals of American Indian oral history and literature."-Bernard L. Fontana, New Mexico Historical Review

"A valuable document . . . about the effects of the Diáz Indian policy in Sonora on the human beings who were its object. [It] tells the story of the social limbo created by the shattering of families and corruption of personal relations under the relentless pressures of the Yaqui deportation program."-Edward H. Spicer, Arizona and the West

"The nightmare world of witchcraft and dream-dependence is one of the major fascinations of this strange and moving book. . . . [Its understatement] acquires a kind of fascinating power, as does the laconic stoicism of the Yaqui himself."-Southern California Quarterly

Jane Holden Kelley, a professor of archaeology at the University of Calgary, is the author of Yaqui Women: Contemporary Life Histories (1978), also a Bison Book. Her father, William Curry Holden, a trained historian and anthropologist, met the Yaqui narrator of this chronicle, Rosalio Moisés, in 1934. They remained close friends until Moisés's death in 1969.