21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The only guide for processing acorn!, September 21, 2001
This review is from: It Will Live Forever: Traditional Yosemite Indian Acorn Preparation (Paperback)
As a friend of Julia Parker, I know her gentle spirit to be true to the Old Ways. She grew up in the last days of the government-sponsered "Indian Schools" which basically stripped native children of their heritage and turned them into little white kids. So on the surface this book is a guide to processing acorn in the ancient ways of the native California Indians, but it's also testimony to Julia's spirit and the rediscovery of the life skills and spirituality of her people.
Acorn is central to The People -- it is the primary staple food of the Indians of California and sustained them through the winter. A bad crop of acorn meant possible starvation, so the food is treated with respect and tradition throughout the process of turning it from a bitter nut to a sweet flour for making soup or bread.
The book is beautifully photographed and gives detailed instructions for how to make acorn both the traditional way with a granite mortar and sand pit and the modern way with a blender and kitchen sink. I have watched the Indians of Yosemite Valley make acorn many times and have made acorn myself, so I can assure you that the instructions will help even beginners make acorn for themselves.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Food for bodies and spirits in Native woman's account, June 3, 1997
By A Customer
This review is from: It Will Live Forever: Traditional Yosemite Indian Acorn Preparation (Paperback)
California Native Americans used acorn as a staple food, and still reverence it. "One must create a relationship with the tree, one must understand the ground which cherishes the fruit so lovingly." But that understanding is not mere words, it is a vast array of knowledge -- and a special technology of place. Julia Parker, Kashia Pomo, who married into the Yosemite Mono/Paiute family headed by elder Lucy Telles, spent many years learning the lifeways that Lucy taught by example.
Julia tells anthropologist, writer, and friend Beverly Ortiz the story. of acorn preparation through a seasonal round. It is Julia's story, but it is also the story of California Native women over thousands of years. Many photos (by Raye Santos, of Julia preparing acorns; family activities and people from the Telles and Parker family albums; and from 19th and 20th century Yosemite National Park Service collections) make clear the intricate technology these women developed. The process, followed step by step from the story and photos, is shown as part of a life-and-seasonal cycle. The acorns, gathered from the ground, should be dried for a year before being shelled and pounded into meal and flour. The meal is then leached of bitter tannin in shallow sand basins, then separated and cooked with hot rocks in water-tight woven baskets.
The careful explanation of each step in the long process of food preparation is enlivened by Julia's personal recollections of traditional family life, and the cultural/spiritual/social meanings of all the activities. This is a fascinating way to understand Native lifeways, full of life and meaning. Readers will understand, from this woman's inside view, why the book's title -- It will live forever -- is true. This is not an academic account of a dead past; it is a lifeway still alive. At Native events in California today, women still take the time and trouble to prepare this traditional food and experience their closeness to the earth, and their cultural survival as a people.
There is enormous contrast between this lively account of Native women, maintaining life, and the distancing, dead accounts by male anthropologists and historians, which mount Native cultures and lifeways with a freezing academic objectivity, as if they were bagged specimens dead and long gone. This book is highly recommended for young people, as an alternative to the deadly, boring, and incorrect accounts prepared for young people that purport to present archaic Native societies. Those awful books form a minor industry among textbook publishers. This book is a delicious antidote to such multicultural poisons. -- Reviewed by Paula Giese, editor, Native American Books (http://www.fdl.cc.mn.us/~isk/books/bookmenu.html)
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The absolute best guide to acorn processing, September 27, 1998
This review is from: It Will Live Forever: Traditional Yosemite Indian Acorn Preparation (Paperback)
I spent years learning how to properly process acorns, so that they were yummy to eat. I tried all the recipes in the wild edible books, and my own experiments. Reading this book gave me the simple but crucial details I was missing to turn out good acorn every time. Its not hard, you just got to do it right. This book is the only one I know of that will show you all you need to know. Otherwise its a fairly bland book, with a little too much heroine worship by the author.
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