DR. YOLANDA BROYLES-GONZÃLEZ BOOK RELEASE & SIGNING
The University of Arizona’s Native American Red Ink Magazine is proud to host the launch event of Professor Yolanda Broyles-González’s new book Earth Wisdom: A California Chumash Woman, written in collaboration with Chumash native elder Pilulaw Khus. The event will take place 7:00 p.m., Friday, February 3, 2012 at Antigone Book Store located at 311 N. 4th Avenue in Tucson, Arizona.
Broyles-González gathered the oral history of Pilulaw Khus for over ten years. This book provides a new vision of California history and an important vision for the survival of our planet. This is a groundbreaking Indigenous women’s history volume.
In Earth Wisdom: A California Chumash Woman, Khus narrates the history of California and of the state’s Indigenous peoples’ from a native woman’s perspective. She includes her personal story of over four decades of activism in tribal, environmental, and human rights issues. That powerful history is both deeply spiritual and political; it constitutes an important segment of the Civil Rights Movement.
Yolanda Broyles-González provides an extensive introduction, carefully providing context to Khus’s narrative, as well as to the periods before, during, and after European colonization of California. She challenges many of the widely held assumptions put forward by anthropologists and historians, as she unfolds an Indigenous understanding of gender, of history, of the universe. The book is the first to document 20th Century Chumash re-emergence struggles, such as the yearlong Point Conception Occupation (1978).
Reviewers of Earth Wisdom sing its praises:
     “This is one of the most extraordinary collaborations between a scholar and Indigenous activist     that I have read.†–Prof. Greg Cajete, Director of Native American Studies at the University of       New Mexico
“Yolanda Broyles-González’s book on the Chumash of Santa Barbara is superb.†–Rudy Acuña,   author of Occupied America and professor at California State University Northridge
“Exemplary meeting of activism and scholarship brings the reader a wealth of accessible    information that penetrates well beyond surface gleam (. . .) Partake in the earth wisdom of a      people who revolted and revolutionize still.†–Allison Hedge Coke, author of Blood Run
Dr. Yolanda Broyles-González is an elder of the Yaqui Barrio Libre ceremonial community in Tucson, Arizona and Professor of Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona. Pilulaw Khus is a Chumash ceremonial elder and clan mother of the northern Chumash Bear Clan.Eart