Preface

It is an arguable assertion that books change lives, but I believe they do. Everything that we experience, reject, or digest has its effect on us, be it seen or unseen.

I have always viewed myself as a product of the land, of the American West where, from earliest memory, I was exploring vacant lots, ravines, foothills, mountain ridges, deserts and, later, jungles and seas. Nature for me, has been my greatest teacher, my enduring guide, and my constant companion. She is my severest critic and my abiding friend.

The earth is our mother whether we accept it or not. She nurtures us no matter how we repay or disrespect her. The indigenous peoples of the world—our earliest ancestors—have understood this and they, being closest to the earth, have in their cosmologies performed rites and ceremonies to ensure the continuity of all life forms.

A few luminous writers have spoken for the land and its closest inhabitants. These writings have had one constant purpose: to bring about an awareness of the need to balance our intellect with our feeling perceptions for the purpose of perpetuating the health of the planet and ourselves.

This compilation of letters between the writer, Frank Waters, and myself is intended to introduce the readers to the scope and breadth of Waters’s work, his themes and his great ability to synthesize disparate knowledge in service to them. He was a consummate scholar, a deep ecologist, and a man who listened to his innermost stirrings as well as to the rhythms of nature. From these, he fashioned a prose, not unlike Mother Earth herself, that nurtures and informs.

That he chose to write of the Indians of Mexico and the southwestern United States was no accident. In their complex ceremonies and creation myths he saw a deeply religious people, close to the land, whose church is Mother Earth. They humbly and respectfully say their prayers for the earth itself—for its healing and fecundity—and for all its children. In the pueblos of Hopi, Taos, and Santa Ana and, in fact, among all native peoples, they include prayers for their White Brothers. They see that we are all connected and Frank Waters wrote of this, carrying the message to the larger, so-called rational world.

Photo: Frank Waters Early 1970's – Photo by Author Alan Louis Kishbaugh

Frank was the perfect messenger. He was born and raised in the white world but his father was part Southern Cheyenne. In his boyhood in Colorado Springs, Frank had his earliest exposure to Plains Indians who still encamped in the nearby foothills. Later, as a writer who read extensively in Jungian psychology, Tibetan and Indian philosophy, and pre-Columbian anthropology, he came to travel among Indians in Mexico and the American Southwest. He settled just outside of Taos, New Mexico, near what was then a remote little village, and set up his writing table for the next fifty years in a house adjacent to Indian lands, tucked beneath two mountains, one of them sacred.

Photo: Taos Pueblo 2015 – Photo by Author Alan Louis Kishbaugh

In over twenty books, in works such as The Man Who Killed the Deer, People of the Valley, The Colorado, Masked Gods, Book of the Hopi, The Woman at Otowi Crossing, Pumpkin Seed Point, Pike’s Peak, Mexico Mystique, and Mountain Dialogues he has established a clear and eloquent voice for the earth and for native peoples.

His fans throughout the world are legion. He is read and reread and thousands of new readers discover him every year.

It has always been a source of amazement to me that there has not been more printed recognition of Frank Waters’s books, as there has been for the works of Hermann Hesse. I have always thought that despite widely disparate styles and cultural content, they were more or less covering the same thematic ground, i.e., inner exploration.

No matter, water, or in this case, Waters seeks its own level.

Frank’s following has never been greater than it is today. The literary critics, for the most part, could never see Frank or his work. They thought of him as a regional writer, as though that somehow precluded a cosmic voice. The words he borrowed from Victor Hugo for the epigram that introduces Book of the Hopi could be applied to the scope and depth of his work as well: “There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their number than the greatness of a man is determined by his height.”

It was a joy to call Frank Waters my friend and it is an honor to share our personal correspondence here. It is my hope that this exchange between us will stimulate the reader to discover and rediscover the body of his work and the many rewards it offers.

While Frank and I first met in the fall of 1967, our correspondence didn’t begin until the following year. I had sent him some books we were publishing at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and he acknowledged these in his initial letter to me in November of 1968.

Photo: Author Alan Louis Kishbaugh with Frank Waters in 1969 – Photo by Giovanna D’Onfrio

By 1969, we were steadily engaged in exchanging letters. In those first few years of corresponding with him from 1968 until July of 1971 I did not retain copies of my own letters. I was caught up in the spirit of our exchanges and was in no way thinking about the future, nor of chronicling our friendship.

Fortunately, in 1971 I began to save copies of my letters to Frank. This came about through the realization that I was now writing to him about themes and sensibilities that I had heretofore not expressed on paper and I thought it would be a good idea to save these for future writing projects.

In the fall of 2006, I visited the Center for Southwest Research in Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque to look at their collection of Frank Waters’s papers. Here, to my astonishment and joy, I found most of my original letters to Frank, the content of which was missing from my own files.

Throughout this compilation, by means of annotation, I have sought to provide the background, the mise-en-scène, if you will, of what was taking place in our various lives—the tangential things that are not always conveyed on the pages of our letters. In short, I have worked to put events in context, both as to time and place and to our respective inner states of mind.

Most of all, I have wanted to share with the reader the great scope of Frank Waters’s vision, his affection for this earth and its peoples, the vast ocean of his mind, and his down-to-earth friendship that blew across so many lives like a warm wind through the aspens.