Beyond the four corners of the world

the long version

In this compelling account of a remarkable woman and her struggle to find her place in the world, we follow Ella Bedonie from her childhood tending sheep in the high desert canyons of the Navajo Indian reservation and sleeping on hogan floors to the long, frightening bus ride to boarding school, and on into the white world and a college degree. We meet her grandparents and her parents, who plant corn and worship their gods much as their own grandparents did. We meet her husband and her children, whose lives straddle two worlds - ancient and modern, sacred and profane. As their stories unfold, we come to appreciate the Navajo society into which Ella was born - still in the 1950s an almost nineteenth-century world of visions and spirits, a world ordered by the unambiguous demands of religious tradition and ritual. We see that now, because of the genius of the Navajo culture for incorporating change, it is a world in which the established has made room for the new while at the same time maintaining its unique bond with the past.