Travels in a Stone Canoe: The Return to the Wisdomkeepers - Hardcover

Arden, Harvey; Wall, Steve

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684800942 ISBN 13: 9780684800943

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1998

Synopsis

Two journalists who came back from an assignment in Indian Country with a powerful message for humankind share the intensely personal story surrounding their time with the Wisdomkeepers, and continue to extoll the Native American approach to humanity and life. 25,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

From the Author:

HARVEY ARDEN RESPONDS TO KIRKUS REVIEWS
Your reviewer faults us for not "excluding" ourselves from the narrative of TRAVELS IN A STONE CANOE, as we did in our earlier book WISDOMKEEPERS--which focuses entirely on those we went out to see, the spiritual Elders themselves. Certainly, focusing entirely on the Elders is a lovely and admirable idea--as WISDOMKEEPERS proved, selling some 300,000 copies in five languages, including Japanese. Our subsequent books, Steve Wall's WISDOM'S DAUGHTERS and my own NOBLE RED MAN, likewise focused entirely on the Elders. We ourselves are virtually transparent in those books. We then found that readers asked us, "But what happened to YOU when you, two white guys, went out to the Wisdomkeepers all those years? How were you yourselves affected? How did those experiences change you personally?" TRAVELS IN A STONE CANOE answers those questions while taking readers with us in our "Stone Canoe" on a spirit-journey back into the world of the Wisdomkeepers. The book gives readers the story behind--and beyond--our decades-long search. Your reviewer criticizes us for being "self-conscious"--but I prefer the term "self-reflective." On this journey we deliberately view the world of the Wisdomkeepers through the lens of our own imperfect selves, and hence those imperfections become magnified. Things change, sometime radically, when you step back and include yourself in the picture. It's a bit like looking through a viewfinder and seeing your own eye staring back at you. That can be disconcerting, but it's also the beginning of self-awareness. This book is very much about self-awareness. I think it's precisely this at-times uncomfortable and unflattering self-awareness that bothers your reviewer. But that's what this book is ABOUT--our own intensely personal reactions as two very ordinary and unknowing white journalists entering the Native American otherworld, crossing a mystic line into a different way of thinking and, more importantly, of doing. Your review records but a single quotation from the Wisdomkeepers themselves, though TRAVELS IN A STONE CANOE contains hundreds--including a display-type compendium of their wonderful words at the end of the book, which you don't mention. The whole point of the book is to show how those words, that wisdom, did more than simply inform us--they transformed us! Taken collectively, those words sketch the outlines of a potentially transformative philosophy--a new, yet ancient, way of being human. Your reviewer's complaint that we give "less weight to the telling of the Native American point of view than to the telling of [our] own as whites" is flatly contradicted by American Indian Movement co-founder DENNIS BANKS, who states that TRAVELS IN A STONE CANOE seems not like a book written by whites about Indians but rather a book written by Indians about whites. Another Indian warrior who knows and cares about these things--LEONARD PELTIER--calls TRAVELS IN A STONE CANOE "a gift to future generations." Maybe your reviewer overlooked something. There's an urgent message from the Wisdomkeepers in TRAVELS IN A STONE CANOE--a potentially life-changing message about ourselves as human beings. I know there are at least some people out there who will understand that message and heed it.

Respectfully,

Harvey Arden Co-author, TRAVELS IN A STONE CANOE

About the Author:

Harvey Arden, coauthor with Steve Wall of Wisdomkeepers, has also written Dreamkeepers and Noble Red Man. He lives with his wife, Lorraine, in Washington, D.C.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0684800942
• ISBN 13: 9780684800943
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304