Don’t Let the Sun Step Over You:
A White Mountain Apache Family Life, 1860-1975
by Eva Tulene Watt with Keith H. Basso
University of Arizona Press
2004
pp. 340
Paperback
ISBN 978-0-8165-2391-7
$24.95
Synopsis
Born in 1913, Eva Tulene Watt shares the story of her family from the time of the Apache wars to the modern era. Her interpretation of her people’s past is a diverse assemblage of recounted events, biographical sketches, and cultural descriptions that bring to life a vanished time and the men and women who lived it to the fullest. Her book affords a view of the past that few have seen before--a wholly Apache view, unsettling yet uplifting, which weighs upon the mind and educates the heart.
Read an excerpt
- From Don’t Let the Sun Step Over You: A White Mountain Apache Family Life, 1860-1975 by Eva Tulene Watt with Keith H. Basso. © 2004 The Arizona Board of Regents. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press. This material is protected from unauthorized downloading and distribution.
Read reviews
“Her voice is a pleasure to listen to—kind, observant, with a this-too-shall-pass quality.” -- Los Angeles Times
“Readers will find her unaffected honesty as enlightening as it is refreshing” -- San Diego Union-Tribune
“Her voice rings so clearly in the stories about three generations of her family that reading her words is almost as good as sitting at her kitchen table.” -- Western Historical Quarterly
About the author
A renowned moccasin maker and storyteller, Eva Tulene Watt is cultural advisor to the Nohwike Bagowa, the White Mountain Apache tribe’s cultural center, was a charter member of the tribe’s cultural advisory board, and also served as a key advisor to the Western Apache Place Names Survey. A recipient of the Arizona Indian Living Treasure Award, she lives with her son’s family near Hon-Dah on the Fort Apache Reservation in Arizona.
Keith Basso, whom Eva Watt invited to record her narrative, is University Regents Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico and a leading expert on Apache culture, language, and history. Among his books are Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache, winner of the Western States Book Award, the Victor Turner Prize, and the J. I. Staley Prize; Portraits of ‘the Whiteman’: Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols among the Western Apache; and Western Apache Language and Culture.
Visit your local library to borrow a copy of Don’t Let the Sun Step Over You. Or purchase it from University of Arizona Press.