Acorn is central to The People -- it is the primary staple food of the Indians of California and sustained them through the winter. A bad crop of acorn meant possible starvation, so the food is treated with respect and tradition throughout the process of turning it from a bitter nut to a sweet flour for making soup or bread.

The book is beautifully photographed and gives detailed instructions for how to make acorn both the traditional way with a granite mortar and sand pit and the modern way with a blender and kitchen sink. I have watched the Indians of Yosemite Valley make acorn many times and have made acorn myself, so I can assure you that the instructions will help even beginners make acorn for themselves.

California Native Americans used acorn as a staple food, and still reverence it. "One must create a relationship with the tree, one must understand the ground which cherishes the fruit so lovingly." But that understanding is not mere words, it is a vast array of knowledge -- and a special technology of place. Julia Parker, Kashia Pomo, who married into the Yosemite Mono/Paiute family headed by elder Lucy Telles, spent many years learning the lifeways that Lucy taught by example.

Julia tells anthropologist, writer, and friend Beverly Ortiz the story. of acorn preparation through a seasonal round. It is Julia's story, but it is also the story of California Native women over thousands of years. Many photos (by Raye Santos, of Julia preparing acorns; family activities and people from the Telles and Parker family albums; and from 19th and 20th century Yosemite National Park Service collections) make clear the intricate technology these women developed. The process, followed step by step from the story and photos, is shown as part of a life-and-seasonal cycle. The acorns, gathered from the ground, should be dried for a year before being shelled and pounded into meal and flour. The meal is then leached of bitter tannin in shallow sand basins, then separated and cooked with hot rocks in water-tight woven baskets.

The careful explanation of each step in the long process of food preparation is enlivened by Julia's personal recollections of traditional family life, and the cultural/spiritual/social meanings of all the activities. This is a fascinating way to understand Native lifeways, full of life and meaning. Readers will understand, from this woman's inside view, why the book's title -- It will live forever -- is true. This is not an academic account of a dead past; it is a lifeway still alive. At Native events in California today, women still take the time and trouble to prepare this traditional food and experience their closeness to the earth, and their cultural survival as a people.

There is enormous contrast between this lively account of Native women, maintaining life, and the distancing, dead accounts by male anthropologists and historians, which mount Native cultures and lifeways with a freezing academic objectivity, as if they were bagged specimens dead and long gone. This book is highly recommended for young people, as an alternative to the deadly, boring, and incorrect accounts prepared for young people that purport to present archaic Native societies. Those awful books form a minor industry among textbook publishers. This book is a delicious antidote to such multicultural poisons. -- Reviewed by Paula Giese, editor, Native American Books (http://www.fdl.cc.mn.us/~isk/books/bookmenu.html)

I've been studying anthropology students as my thesis and I must say they are a dry and humorless lot. This book does have a lot of admirable ideas for field projects though and tips on how to observe anthropology students in their natural habitat with out disturbing their foraging or mating rituals (what there are of them). Though why any one would want to study these mind numbingly monotonous creatures is beyond me. I'm thinking of changing my major to botany anyway.