I was skeptical of Waterless Mountain, the 1932 Newbery Award Winner by Laura Adams Armer. It's the story of a young Navaho (sic) boy written by a white woman. The publishers must have known there would be skeptics like me because there was a foreword written by some guy who saw the author interact with the Navaho people and testified that he'd never seen any white person so accepted into their culture.
Being a white person myself, I certainly can't tell you how accurate her portrayal of the people and the young boy (whose connection to the world around him and to his culture leads him to become a medicine man) is. But I did like that most of the book was simply written from the Navaho boy's point of view. There were only a few times when a white person appeared on the scene and we were shown how the different races reacted to each other.
Most of the book followed Younger Brother (the Navaho mothers did not speak the names they gave to their children because they believed a person's name had a lot of power and it would be diminished by speaking it too often)--his connection to the landscape, to his family, to his ancestors, and to the stories of his people.
I enjoyed the stories and didn't mind the book as a whole. I can say that I definitely would not have enjoyed or appreciated this book as a youth though. Some of its target audience might still like it today, but I wasn't into nature-centric books back then.
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