"The Man who Killed the Deer" by Frank Waters

I recommend this book to anybody interested at all in First Nations issues in North America even if you do not want to get into the politics of it. It just deals with the daily life of a simple person.

It takes place among the Pueblo Indians and was written in 1942. Normally I would be reluctant to even go close to a novel about First Nations written that long ago but I promise you it is safe to go there. You will not have to cringe or grind your teeth.

I own two copies of it. One copy is water stained because it was the cheapest copy I could originally find. The second copy I picked up for a quarter even though it has what I think is a terrible cover. Honestly had it been the original cover I had seen I may not have bought the book. Goes to show the saying is true, "you cannot judge a book by its cover".

Here is an extract from the back of one of them: "Frank Waters' The Man who Killed the Deer stands with Black Elk Speaks as one of the finest books ever written about American Indian. A novel of a Pueblo Indian caught between the ritual ways of his tribe and the alien 20th-century world of the white man, The Man Who Killed the Deer is a story of a man who lives as a stranger in both."

First it is beautifully written and it is a beautiful story; second, from my point of view, it is a great book about somebody caught between their original culture and another world regardless of how they got there.