Journeys Home: Revealing a Zuni-Appalachia Collaboration

Description

Sixteen hundred miles separate Zuni’s Corn Mountain, in western New Mexico, and Appalachia’s Pine Mountain, in eastern Kentucky. But both these rural communities are so off the beaten track that they are places where people still tell stories directly to one another. This remarkable book tells the story of how Kentucky’s Roadside Theatre inspired and then collaborated with Zuni Pueblo’s Idiwanan An Chawe (Children of the Middle Place), the first Zuni language theatre. Together, the two theatre companies created a bilingual play, ‘Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain: Following the Seasons’, which toured nationally. Included in this book, the play uses traditional and original stories, oral histories, humour, music, and dance to celebrate and comment upon two agricultural ways of life that once provided physical and spiritual sustenance for people in Zuni and Appalachia. The Zuni language was exclusively oral until a written form of the language was developed in the 1970s. The Zuni writing in ‘Journeys Home’ is the most inclusive example of written Zuni extant, and the book, with the accompanying CD, will become a primary text for teaching written Zuni.