Mountain People

David Cohen lived among the Ramapo Mountain People for a year, conducting genealogical research into church records, deeds, wills, and inventories in county courthouses and libraries. He established that their ancestors included free black landowners in New York City and mulattoes with some Dutch ancestry who were among the first pioneers to settle in the Hackensack River Valley of New Jersey.

This book presents the rich panorama of Ute history, from the archaeological features of prehistoric Ute cultures to elements of present-day Ute culture.

Gives a brief history of the folk culture and crafts in the Appalachian region and discusses their present-day revival by introducing contemporary craftsmen and their work.

In the early 1940s, $10 bought a bus ticket from Appalachia to a better job and promise of prosperity in the flatlands of northeast Ohio. A mountaineer with a strong back and will to work could find a job within twenty-four hours of arrival. But the cost of a bus ticket was more than a week's wages in a lumber camp, and the mountaineer paid dearly in loss of kin, culture, homeplace, and freedom. Numerous scholarly works have addressed this migration that brought more than one million mountaineers to Ohio alone. But Mountain People in a Flat Land is the first popular history of Appalachian migration to one community -- Ashtabula County, an industrial center in the fabled "best location in the nation." These migrants share their stories of life in Appalachia before coming north. There are tales of making moonshine, colorful family members, home remedies harvested from the wild, and life in coal company towns and lumber camps. The mountaineers explain why, despite the beauty of the mountains and the deep kinship roots, they had to leave Appalachia. Stories of their hardships, cultural clashes, assimilation, and ultimate successes in the flatland provide a moving look at an often stereotyped people.

In The Mountain People, Colin M. Turnbull describes the dehumanization of the Ik, African tribesmen who in less than three generations have deteriorated from being once-prosperous hunters to scattered bands of hostile, starving people whose only goal is individual survival. Sad, disturbing, and eloquently written, The Mountain People is a moving meditation on human nature, our capacity for goodness, and the fragility of human society.

The Mafulu: Mountain People of British New Guinea by Robert Wood Williamson is about Williamson's experience of the native tribes living in New Guinea. Contents: "CHAPTER I Introductory CHAPTER II Physique and Character CHAPTER III Dress and Ornament CHAPTER IV Daily Life and Matters Connected with It CHAPTER V Community, Clan, and Village Systems and Chieftainship CHAPTER VI Villages, Emone, Houses and Modes of Inter-Village Communication CHAPTER VII Government, Property and Inheritance CHAPTER VIII The Big Feast."

The driving force that compelled me to write this book, I would say is my love for my late grandmother, Kezbah Yazzie. I had promised her that I would keep her story alive, and since I could not memorize thirteen chapters by rote like she did; the only other way to preserve it was to write it into a book. Writing this book has positively broadened my mind. It took effort and determination. I learned that how smart you are is not a factor for self-esteem. I encourage anyone who has a dream to pursue it. Use the negative experiences in your life to help others. It will definitely charge up a positive life for you.

This volume draws its material from the same wealth of mountain culture as the first, with stories and photographs of the mountains of today and yesterday creating a vivid picture of a vital way of life.