Yaqui Deer Songs/Maso Bwikam: A Native American Poetry

Winner of the Chicago Folklore Prize
In both form and content, Yaqui Deer songs is one of the most beautiful anthropological books of recent years. It stands as part of the great tradition of collaborative work flowing from Boas and Teit, in which oral literature is presented, preserved, and sensitively translated.

Journal of Anthropological Research
A model for others interested in studying across languages and culture …Readers who wish a more realistic view of the Yaqui people than that provided by Carlos Castaneda will find this book of stories, songs, and photographs a credible account of Yaqui history and ritual.

Choice
The interweaving of ethnological material, personal anecdote and visual imagery gives a reader the sense of witnessing, even participating in, both a ceremony and the life it sanctifies.

San Francisco Chronicle
This is an important and beautifully produced book, a labor of love as well as of scholarship.

Western Folklore
A book for scholars, aficionados of Yaqui culture, and people who just want a good read.

Journal of the Southwest
As a study of a Native American poetic genre, it is outstanding. The collaboration of Evers, a non-Yaqui specialist in American Indian traditional literature, with Molina, a young Yaqui who speaks his people’s language and performs as a deer singer in his own right, makes this a very model of what such studies can and should be.

William Bright in SAIL