Papago Woman: An Intimate Portrait of American Indian Culture
"Dr. Ruth Underhill, during three years of ethnological work among the Papago, has not been content to make only the formal report of the culture of these desert people of the American Southwest. From the lips of an old woman, her friend and confidante, she has taken down the story of her life. Hardly at any point was this life touched by our white standards of existence. From the beginning to end it has run a different current, filled with achievements, with joys and sorrows that arose out of the substance of life among her people. Her story—whether she is telling of being given to a husband she has never seen, or of her father's adopting his enemy's scalp into the house¬hold, or of the village ceremonials—sacrifices nothing of the accuracy of an ethnologist's formal account; but it has also what the latter can hardly attain—the breath of life." --Ruth Benedict