In Geronimo's Footsteps
A Journey Beyond Legend
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
The name "Geronimo" came to Corine Sombrun insistently in a trance during her apprenticeship to a Mongolian shaman. That message and the need to understand its meaning brought her to the home of the legendary Apache leader's great-grandson, Harlyn Geronimo, himself a medicine man on the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico. Together, the two of them—the French seeker and the Native American healer—would make a pilgrimage that retraced Geronimo's life while following the course of the Gila River to the place of his birth, at its source.
Told in the alternating voices of its authors, In Geronimo's Footsteps is the record of that journey. At its core is an account of Geronimo's life, from his earliest days in a Chiricahua Apache family and his path as a warrior and chief to his surrender and the years spent in exile until his death, at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Recounted by his great-grandson, his story is steeped in family history and Apache lore to create a portrait of a leader intent on defending his people and their land and traditions—a mission that Harlyn continues, even as he campaigns to recover his ancestor's bones from the U.S. government. Completing Corine's circle, the book also explores the links, genetic and possibly cultural, between the Apache and the people of Mongolia.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French shaman Sombrun traveled to New Mexico after experiencing a vision that encouraged her to write about Geronimo. In this alternating narrative, she relates the story of her meeting with Harlyn Geronimo, a medicine man and great-grandson of the legendary Apache chief, as he shares the life story of his famous ancestor. Sombrun offers fascinating background on her role as a Mongolian shaman and the tribe with which she apprenticed, though her narrative is overfilled with minutiae of everyday life, down to mentions of cell phones and candy wrappers. Her stream-of-consciousness recollection of that single day in Mongolia lacks in-depth thoughts and details on her shamanic experience but the book is rescued by the wealth of information on Apache culture and the earnestness of Harlyn's desire to repatriate his great-grandfather's bones from Fort Sill to Apache land near the Gila River in New Mexico. The dual narrative can be jarring, but the difficulties the Apache people and nation have endured are clearly laid out. The chapters are interspersed with short segments of Apache legend, written in the Apache language with translations. Patient readers with an interest in shamanic or Native American traditions will find much of interest here.
