Your search for: incidents AND in AND the AND life AND of AND a AND slave

Duong Van Mai Elliott's The Sacred Willow, an extraordinary narrative woven from the lives of four generations of her family, illuminates fascinating--and until now unexplored--strands of Vietnamese history. Beginning with her great-grandfather, who rose from rural poverty to become an influential ...

Duong Van Mai Elliott's The Sacred Willow, an extraordinary narrative woven from the lives of four generations of her family, illuminates fascinating--and until now unexplored--strands of Vietnamese history. Beginning with her great-grandfather, who rose from rural poverty to become an influential mandarin, and continuing to the present, Mai Elliott traces her family's journey through an era of tumultuous change. She tells us of childhood hours in her grandmother's silk shop--and of hiding while French troops torched her village, watching blossoms torn by fire from the trees flutter "like hundreds of butterflies" overhead. She reveals the agonizing choices that split Vietnamese families: her eldest sister left her staunchly anti-communist home to join the Viet Minh, and spent months sleeping with her infant son in jungle camps, fearing air raids by day and tigers by night. And she follows several family members through the last, desperate hours of the fall of Saigon--including one nephew who tried to escape by grabbing the skid of a departing American helicopter. Based on family papers, dozens of interviews, and a wealth of other research, this is not only a memorable family saga, but a record of how the Vietnamese themselves have experienced their times. At times haunting, at times heartbreaking--it is always mesmerizing--The Sacred Willow will forever change how we view the history of Vietnam and our own role in it.

This is the compelling yet disturbing story of Corbett Mack (1892-1974), an opiate addict who was a member of the Nuumuu (Numa), or Northern Paiute. The Northern Paiute are best known as the people who produced Wovoka, the Ghost Dance prophet whose revitalistic teachings swept the Indian world in ...

This is the compelling yet disturbing story of Corbett Mack (1892-1974), an opiate addict who was a member of the Nuumuu (Numa), or Northern Paiute. The Northern Paiute are best known as the people who produced Wovoka, the Ghost Dance prophet whose revitalistic teachings swept the Indian world in the 1890s. Mack is from the generation following the collapse of the Ghost Dance religion, a generation of Nomogweta or "half breeds" (also called "stolen children") - Paiute of mixed ancestry who were raised in an increasingly bicultural world and who fell into virtual peonage to white (often Italian) potato farmers. Around the turn of the century, the use of opium became widespread among the Paiute, adopted from equally victimized Chinese laborers with whom they worked closely in the fields. The story of Corbett Mack is an uncompromising account of a harsh and sometimes traumatic life that was typical of an entire generation of Paiute. It was a life born out of the turmoil and humiliation of an Indian boarding school, troubled by opiate addiction, bound to constant labor in the fields, yet nonetheless made meaningful through the perseverance of Paiute cultural traditions.