When the Earth Was New

Memory, Materiality, and Numic Ritual

Alex K. Ruuska

• Publisher: University of Utah Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9781647692360
  9781647692346
• eBook ISBN:
  9781647692353
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Explores the value of oral traditions and challenges entrenched beliefs about ethnogenesis in the Great Basin

In When the Earth Was New, Alex K. Ruuska explores riveting multigenerational memories of Numic-speaking communities that extend back, potentially, to the late Pleistocene. These diverse oral traditions describe geological, climatic, and ecological events that occurred over thousands of years and were passed down across many generations. Through the examination of place-based memories and the architecture of Numic knowledge, Ruuska demonstrates convergences of oral traditions, ethnography, ethnohistory, archaeology, and geology.

When the Earth Was New critically compares and considers multiple forms of knowledge that contribute to overlapping as well as disparate understandings of both recent and distant pasts in the regions of California, the Great Basin, and the Colorado Plateau. It works at balancing key themes in these regions' histories within a more holistic framework, exploring ancient and modern strands of knowledge with the assistance of twenty-four Tribes and Consolidated Organizations.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Statement on Use of Sensitive Materials
• 1. Babies and Bathwater
• 2. We Have Always Been Here
• 3. Grandma Said
• 4. No Ritual? No Way!
• Beginnings: Ice and Water
• 5. Raven Cracks the Ice
• 6. Old Woman of the Sea and the Giant Fish
• 7. Giants and Waterbabies
• 8. Earth Birth
• 9. Vagina Dentatum and Serpent Stories
• 10. Wake ’Em Up, Wake ’Em Up!
• 11. We Are Still Here
• Bibliography
• Index