Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places

By Peter Nabokov

Book Overview

From the author of Native American Testimonycomes a revelatory new look at the hallowed, diverse, and threatened landscapes of the American Indian For thousands of years Native Americans have told stories about the powers of revered landscapes and sought spiritual direction at mysterious locations in their homelands. In Where the Lightning Strikes, Peter Nabokov offers sixteen biographies of place? that dramatize the rich diversity of Indian cultures and their religious systems across North America. From the mountains of Maine to Tennessee?s Tellico Valley, from the Black Hills of South Dakota to Rainbow Canyon in Arizona to the high country of northwestern California, each chapter explores a host of relationships between Indian cultures and their environments and describes the myths, legends, practices, and rituals that sustained them.Based on years of research and personal experience, Where the Lightning Strikesreveals a range of holy lands containing beneficial as well as malevolent forces and reminds us of the stubborn persistence of Indian beliefs in the sacredness of the American earth.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670034320
• ISBN13: 9780670034321
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 350 Pages
• Weight: 1.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Court battles for Native sacred places

Peter Nabokov's WHERE THE LIGHTNING STRIKES: THE LIVES OF AMERICAN INDIAN SACRED PLACES surveys Native American culture and the myths and legends which have kept their close connections with the environment. Chapters are arranged by the four cardinal directions and use four major court cases in which Indians fought against destruction of key sacred places to bring together both past belief and modern controversies surrounding these places. There's a tendency to view Indians as 'ecological saints': WHERE THE LIGHTNING STRIKES takes a different approach, analyzing Indian environmental habits, spirituality and social issues as entwined facets of the whole.