Customer Reviews

Sunflower's Promise (Native American Lore & Legends (Rourke))

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This a very corrupted version of one of our folktales. The second half of the book covers a little bit of our history, the people, food, Zuni today. Some of the information is not accurate. For example on page 35, second paragraph, it states that the Zuni people still live on top of a mesa we fled to in the 1680s during an attack by the Spanish. I can assure you that we do not live on top of a mesa. Also, how can we live near the Rio Grande River close to the border of Arizona? Our reservation is 12 miles from the Arizona border and the Rio Grande River is about 150 miles to the east. There are several misspellings on page 36, first paragraph, the word we use for ourselves is "A:shiwi", not "Siwi." And we do not have a third gender different from men and women. There are also a couple of pictures that are not of Zuni. The caption for a picture on page 39 reads, "A Zuni woman baking bread traditionally in a horno in the San Ildefonso Pueblo in 1935." This picture is definitely not of Zuni. A lot of the information is written in past tense whereas we're continuing our way of life and the practice of our religion and culture. I would not recommend this book as a reliable source for information on Zuni, and most definitely not if a teacher were considering it for a source of information for the classroom.