more on rabbit boss
"The Indian experience of the last 120 years of a size and scope that is awesome. Sanchez is a man of tremendous vision."
-Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times
"Like ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, RABBIT BOSS will haunt the conscience of history forever."
- Le Figaro, Paris France
RABBIT BOSS has been hailed as a landmark work
of twentieth-century American literature, a novel in which the tragic
experience of the American Indian is made real and profoundly moving
through the lives of four generations of a family of Washo in the
California Sierra Mountains.
RABBIT BOSS is about the doomed hunter Gayabuc, whose first sight
of the white man is his witness to the great disaster of the Donner
Party in 1846, burning into the consciousness of the Washo the powerful
notion that the white man is a cannibal. The time of Gayabuc's son,
Captain Rex, is set against the gold and silver filled mountains of
the Sierra, being plundered and stripped of their natural treasures.
Hallelujah Bob, the surviving son of Captain Rex, tries to live the
sacred life on the shores of Lake Tahoe, but he is isolated from his
past and doomed to an alien future. For Hallelujah Bob, the Road
coming is the Road going; he preaches the white man's Jesus and embraces
Wovoka, the Indian Messiah, while leading the Washo to the vision of
peyote. It is against a landscape of despair that Joe Birdsong
inherits the once honored position of Rabbit Boss, which has been
reduced to keeping the vast ranches free of rabbits. Birdsong's
existence becomes a trespass against nature, the final violation
of the Indian's eternal ethic, beginning his astounding flight back
through time.
RABBIT BOSS is panoramic and powerful-- a first novel that introduces
an extraordinary young writer in an epic story about dreams dying,
the loss of power, the death of flesh, the poetic triumph of a proud
peoples' spirit.
