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A book review of Fadwa El Guindi's recent book SUCKLING.

A Review of "Understanding Collapse: Ancient History and Modern Myths" by Guy D. Middleton (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources. M. Kat Anderson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xxix + 526 pp. $39.95.

Survival Skills of Native California Paul D. Campbell. Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 1999. XV -I- 448 pp., hundreds of photographs and text figures, maps, bibliography.

California: Five Centuries of Cultural Contrasts. Julian Nava and Bob Barger. Beverly Hills: Glencoe Press, 1976. 428 pp., many illustrations and maps, index. No price listed.

Edible and Useful Plants of California.Charlotte Bringle Clarke. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977. 280 pp., 8 color pls., 77 figs. $5.95 (paper).

Fig Tree John. An Indian in Fact and Fiction.Peter G. Beidler. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 1977. 152 pp., Illus. $4.95 (paper), $10.50 (hardbound).

December's Child: A Book of Chumash Oral Narratives.Thomas C. Blackburn, ed. and analysis. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975. $12.95.

The Eye of the Flute: Chumash Traditional History and Ritual as Told by Fernando Librado Kitsepawit to John P. Harrington. Travis Hudson, Thomas Blackburn, Rosario Curletti, and Janice Timbrook, eds. lllustrated by Campbell Grant. Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, Santa Barbara Bicentennial Historical Series iv. 1977. 130 pp., map, 19 illus., 4 appendices, indexed, clothbound. No price given.

I am very grateful to Professor Aschmann for correcting my more speculative flights. It is, of course, true that the Jesuit and Dominican missions killed off the native populations as fast as the Franciscans did, and that the Jesuits were out of the field by 1769. My impression is still that overall Jesuit policy was relatively mild--cf. the well-known experiment with Utopian planning among the Indians in Paraguay, for instance--and that this relatively mild policy was one of the reasons for their downfall in the New World. Their record in Baja California was certainly a sad one, however. As to the Dominicans, my memory seems to have simply played me false. It appears that things were even worse than I thought for the unfortunate missionized Indians of the Californias!