When people get together around southern Arizona, there's a good chance that somebody will say, "That reminds me of the time I flew with Ike Russell. . . . " A backcountry pilot famous for his jaunts into the wildest, most remote regions of the borderlands, Alexander "Ike" Russell has become something of a legend since his death in 1980, and the stories surrounding his flights never fail to amaze.

This book combines biography and oral history by offering a wide range of anecdotes and remembrances about Ike by friends and family. Many describe the great adventures and gut-wrenching close calls that have become enshrined in local folklore as classic "Ike Russell stories," in all their hair-raising and hilarious splendor.

Russell was an easterner who moved to Arizona for his health and got his pilot's license in 1948—despite suffering from a respiratory disorder that would have kept other men firmly anchored to the ground. Over the years he flew scientists and other scholars to remote field locations in Mexico's Gulf of California and Sierra Madre Occidental that otherwise might not have been investigated. He often landed on short and dangerous airstrips and never seemed to mind running out of gas, getting caught without provisions, or attempting night landings in unlighted terrain. He took along a teapot wherever he went—and wherever he stopped, his first priority was to brew a quick cup.

Backcountry Pilot is the story of a larger-than-life adventurer, with those who knew Ike sharing tales tall and true about his famous exploits, brushes with fate, and sometimes narrow escapes from the jaws of disaster. It includes reminiscences by such scientists and friends as botanist Richard Felger, whom Ike frequently flew down to Seriland; ethnohistorian Bernard Fontana, whom Ike took to Tarahumara country; and paleoecologist Paul Martin, who talked Ike into a nine-month trip through Africa over totally unfamiliar terrain. A concluding chapter by Thomas Bowen offers a brief biographical sketch of Russell.

Ike Russell was a central figure for a generation of people who studied the southwestern desert and who helped others see it as a biological treasure rather than a wasteland. More than a highly skilled bush pilot, he was an extraordinary human being who touched the lives of everyone he met. For those who never got the chance, Backcountry Pilot secures Ike Russell's legacy in the desert skies.

Exquisite blankets, sarapes and ponchos handwoven by southwestern peoples are admired throughout the world. Despite many popularized accounts, serious gaps have existed in our understanding of these textiles—gaps that one man devoted years of scholarly attention to address.

During much of his career, anthropologist Joe Ben Wheat (1916-1997) earned a reputation as a preeminent authority on southwestern and plains prehistory. Beginning in 1972, he turned his scientific methods and considerable talents to historical questions as well. He visited dozens of museums to study thousands of nineteenth-century textiles, oversaw chemical tests of dyes from hundreds of yarns, and sought out obscure archives to research the material and documentary basis for textile development. His goal was to establish a key for southwestern textile identification based on the traits that distinguish the Pueblo, Navajo, and Spanish American blanket weaving traditions—and thereby provide a better way of identifying and dating pieces of unknown origin.

Wheat's years of research resulted in a masterful classification scheme for southwestern textiles—and a book that establishes an essential baseline for understanding craft production. Nearly completed before Wheat's death, Blanket Weaving in the Southwest describes the evolution of southwestern textiles from the early historic period to the late nineteenth century, establishes a revised chronology for its development, and traces significant changes in materials, techniques, and designs.

Wheat first relates what Spanish observers learned about the state of native weaving in the region—a historical review that reveals the impact of new technologies and economies on a traditional craft. Subsequent chapters deal with fibers, yarns, dyes, and fabric structures—including an unprecedented examination of the nature, variety, and origins of bayeta yarns—and with tools, weaves, and finishing techniques.

A final chapter, constructed by editor Ann Hedlund from Wheat's notes, provides clues to his evolving ideas about the development of textile design. Hedlund—herself a respected textile scholar and a protégée of Wheat's—is uniquely qualified to interpret the many notes he left behind and brings her own understanding of weaving to every facet of the text. She has ensured that Wheat's research is applicable to the needs of scholars, collectors, and general readers alike. Throughout the text, Wheat discusses and evaluates the distinct traits of the three textile traditions. More than 200 photos demonstrate these features, including 191 color plates depicting a vast array of chief blankets, shoulder blankets, ponchos, sarapes, diyugi, mantas, and dresses from museum collections nationwide. In addition, dozens of line drawings demonstrate the fine points of technique concerning weaves, edge finishes, and corner tassels. Through his groundbreaking and painstaking research, Wheat created a new view of southwestern textile history that goes beyond any other book on the subject. Blanket Weaving in the Southwest addresses a host of unresolved issues in textile research and provides critical tools for resolving them. It is an essential resource for anyone who appreciates the intricacy of these outstanding creations.

Adulthood in the Navajo world is marked by the onset of menstruation in females and by the deepening of the voice in males. Accordingly, young adults must accept responsibility over the powers manifest in blood and voice: for women, the forces that control reproduction and growth; for men, the powers of protection and restoration of order that come through maintaining Navajo oral tradition.

The maintenance of the latter tradition has long been held to be the function of the Navajo singer, a role usually viewed as male. But despite this longstanding assumption, women can and do fill this role. Drawing on interviews with seventeen Navajo women practitioners and five apprentices, Maureen Trudelle Schwarz explicates women's role as ceremonial practitioners and shows that it is more complex than has previously been thought. She examines gender differences dictated by the Navajo origin story, details how women came to be practitioners, and reveals their experiences and the strategies they use to negotiate being both woman and singer.

Women who choose careers as singers face complex challenges, since some rules prohibit menstruating women from conducting ceremonies and others regarding sexual continence can strain marital relationships. Additionally, oral history places men in charge of all ceremonial matters. Schwarz focuses on how the reproductive life courses of Navajo women influence their apprenticeships and practices to demonstrate how they navigate these issues to preserve time-honored traditions. Through the words of actual practitioners, she shows how each woman brings her own unique life experience to the role. While differing among individuals, these experiences represent a commitment to shared cultural symbols and result in a consensus that sustains social cohesion.

By showing the differences and similarities between the apprenticeship, initiation, and practice of men and women singers, Blood and Voice offers a better understanding of the role of Navajo women in a profession usually viewed as a male activity—and of the symbolic construction of the self in Navajo culture. It also addresses classic questions concerning the sexual division of labor, menstrual taboos, gender stereotypes, and the tension between tradition and change that will enlighten students of other cultures.

Published in 1986, Blue Desert was Charles Bowden’s third book-length work and takes place almost entirely in Arizona, revealing Bowden’s growing and intense preoccupation with the state and what it represented as a symbol of America’s “New West.”

Bowden presents a view of the Southwest that measures how rapid growth takes its toll on the land. Writing with a reporter’s objectivity and a desert rat’s passion, Bowden offers us his trademarked craft and wit to take us into the streets as well as the desert to depict not a fragile environment but the unavoidable reality of abuse, exploitation, and human cruelty. Blue Desert shows us the darker side of development—where “the land always makes promises of aching beauty and the people always fail the land”—and defies us to ignore it.

In a thoughtful new foreword, Francisco Cantú writes, “In Blue Desert, we follow Bowden in the processes of becoming. We see the version of Bowden that he would likely most want us to remember—someone who did their best to be an honest witness, someone who was haunted by modernity and his place in it, someone who grappled with his demons by gazing deeply into the desert.” Blue Desert is a critical piece in the oeuvre of Charles Bowden, and it continues to remind readers of the cruelty and beauty of the world around us.

The U.S.-Mexico border region is home to anthropologist Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez. Into these pages he pours nearly half a century of searching and finding answers to the Mexican experience in the southwestern United States. He describes and analyzes the process, as generation upon generation of Mexicans moved north and attempted to create an identity or sense of cultural space and place. In today’s border fences he also sees barriers to how Mexicans understand themselves and how they are fundamentally understood. From prehistory to the present, Vélez-Ibáñez traces the intense bumping among Native Americans, Spaniards, and Mexicans, as Mesoamerican populations and ideas moved northward. He demonstrates how cultural glue is constantly replenished by strengthening family ties that reach across both sides of the border. The author describes ways in which Mexicans have resisted and accommodated the dominant culture by creating communities and by forming labor unions, voluntary associations, and cultural movements. He analyzes the distribution of sadness, or overrepresentation of Mexicans in poverty, crime, illness, and war, and shows how that sadness is balanced by creative expressions of literature and art, especially mural art, in the ongoing search for space and place. Here is a book for the nineties and beyond, a book that relates to NAFTA, to complex questions of immigration, and to the expanding population of Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico border region and other parts of the country. An important new volume for social science, humanities, and Latin American scholars, Border Visions will also attract general readers for its robust narrative and autobiographical edge. For all readers, the book points to new ways of seeing borders, whether they are visible walls of brick and stone or less visible, infinitely more powerful barriers of the mind.

Byron Cummings, known to students and colleagues as “The Dean,” had a profound influence on the archaeology of Arizona and Utah during its early development. An explorer, archaeologist, anthropologist, teacher, museum director, university administrator, and state parks commissioner, Cummings was involved in many important discoveries in the American Southwest over the first half of the twentieth century and was a pioneer in the education of generations of archaeologists and anthropologists.

This book presents the first comprehensive examination of Cummings’ life, offering readers a greater understanding of his trailblazing work. Todd Bostwick elucidates Cummings’ many intellectual and cultural contributions, investigates the controversies in which he was embroiled, and describes his battles to wrest control of Arizona archaeology from eastern institutions that had long dominated Southwest archaeology.

Cummings saw the Southwest as an American wilderness where the story of cultural development revealed by the archaeologist and anthropologist was as important as it was in Europe. Bostwick’s meticulous account of his life reflects his great reverence for the region and pays tribute to a man whose dedication, mentoring, and friendship have forever sealed his place as The Dean.