A major contribution to O'odham studies and Southwest history, Martinez offers a new perspective on the life and knowledge of Komal Hok, an important Akimel O'odham storyteller also known as "Thin Leather." The Maze of History refers to the man-in-the-maze symbol that has adorned O'odham baskets for generations. According to O'odham oral tradition, the maze is the home to I'itoi, "our elder brother," the sacred being that taught ancestral O'odham their way of doing things, their himdag. Moreover, I'itoi's home is in the mountains everywhere that O'odham dwell, be it South Mountain, Baboquivari, or Sierra Pinacate. Komal Hok (born ca. 1827), also known as Thin Leather, was an Akimel O'odham elder and storyteller from Sacaton Village who shared his people's origin narrative with anthropologist Frank Russell, archaeologist Jesse Walter Fewkes, and writer J. William Lloyd. With the help of translators Jose Lewis Brennan and Edward H. Wood (both O'odham), Komal Hok created an epic legacy that continues to inform the direction of O'odham studies to this day. However, his uniqueness in modern O'odham history has never been fully appreciated and honored until now. The culmination of David Martinez's twenty-five years of studying, writing, and teaching about O'odham culture and history, The Maze of History at last captures the significance of Komal Hok's work as an O'odham intellectual. Komal Hok's recounting of O'odham origins forms the basis of an O'odham sense of history, which is based on their relationship with their jeved-the earth, soil, land-that was given them at the time of creation. Here is where I'itoi, along with Jeved mahkai (Earth medicine maker), Ban (Coyote), and Nuwi (Buzzard), shaped the first people into O'odham.
David Martinez (Akimel O'odham / Hia-Ced O'odham / Mexican) is enrolled in the Gila River Indian Community and is a professor of American Indian and transborder studies at Arizona State University. He is also the director of the Institute for Transborder Indigenous Nations. Martinez's previous works include Life of the Indigenous Mind: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Birth of the Red Power Movement and My Heart Is Bound Up with Them: How Carlos Montezuma Became the Voice of a Generation.
"David Martinez succeeds brilliantly in framing O'odham oral tradition as history and Indigenous intellectual history from the perspective of a renowned O'odham intellectual who is deeply grounded within a genealogy of O'odham intellectuals." - Seth Schermerhorn, author of Walking to Magdalena: Personhood and Place in Tohono O'odham Songs, Sticks, and Stories. "Martinez has wrangled an enormous O'odham archive of resistance to present a uniquely O'odham philosophy of history. Thanks to this pathbreaking book, we may (and may we) never again hear about the 'peaceful warriors' Americans encountered along the Gila River or the 'mysterious' architects of Casa Grande who faded away into history. This is O'odham jeved (land) and O'odham history." - Fantasia Painter, assistant professor of global and international studies, University of California Irvine
