The Fourth World by W. Tussinger
***image1***Growing up my family traveled a lot. My father was shot and killed when I was around eight years old and after that we had to travel. My mother was half Indian and so we just naturally seemed to gravitate to reservation scenery. Although I’ve lived on several reservations my mother called Navajo Land hers.
It wasn’t hers by birth for she was Wyandotte out of Oklahoma, Turtle Clan. But to come to the Navajo reservation was like crossing a border into another country, with the big, open, landscapes and rugged, picturesque, mountains. There was space all around us as we drove to various teaching positions she would take. She would teach for a year, or a semester, and then we would travel again.
Often we were running away from something, violent men, unjust debtors charging extravagant fees for meager assistance or yes, sometimes, even the law. We were gypsies of a sort. My mother never had a driver’s license, yet she drove everywhere. She could produce identification cards in an assortment of names, depending on present needs.
***image2***But she taught me to stand for what is right, without ever succumbing to the temptation to dictate exactly what that represents. She left the specifics up to me. She taught me that the world will always try to impose itself on me, force its morals and strict code of black and white ethics on me. And it has, just as she warned.
More than once I’ve joined in the ranks of the imposer, persecuting and condemning those that didn’t readily conform. It’s been a journey, but I’ve slowly come back to myself, my heritage, my right road. Now I’ve taken up the pen and my first work is about a journey that I’ve only really taken in my imagination. It is on this journey that I invite you to join me.
Between myth and legend, in that brief instant between imagination and reality, there’s a remembrance in mankind of what once was-the origins of myth and fairy tale. Every culture has some leftover consciousness of what was before: before modern science, technology, and disbelief. Fourth World is a tale of three Navajo boys growing up on the largest reservation in the US during tumultuous times.
While struggling with the challenges of adolescence they inadvertently find a passageway that takes them back to a previous age. They find themselves in a world where legends and traditions meet them head on. It’s a world where many Native traditions start, where hierarchies don’t exist and man and animal meet as equals. Their task is to reinstate the preexisting balance that greed and the desire for power has disrupted. They’ve yet to learn it, but perhaps their struggle is one we all must eventually face.
***image3***I invite you to experience the world as seen from the eyes of a traditional Navajo boy on the largest Native American Reservation in the United States. The Fourth World is my first fiction novel and I believe the readers will greatly enjoy the special insights that I share about the Navajo people. The book is published by Publish America under ISBN # 1-4137-4547-4.