Waterless Mountain by Laura Adams Armer

First published: 1931; illustrated

Subjects: Coming-of-age, nature, and race and ethnicity

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Moral tale and social realism

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Recommended Ages: 13-18

Locale: Arizona

Principal Characters:

• Younger Brother, eight years old at the beginning of the story, a Navajo boy in Arizona
• Elder Brother, his brother, who marries and starts his own family
• Uncle, a famous medicine man who gives Younger Brother his secret name (Little Singer) and trains him in the ancient ways
• Hasteen Tso (the Big Man), a white trader
• Cut Finger, a horse thief

Form and Content

A slow-moving, lyrical story, Waterless Mountain follows a single character, Younger Brother, as he matures from a sensitive eight-year-old into a successful young farmer attending his first social dance. The book’s thirty-four chapters, most of which can stand alone, center on traditional ceremonies (“The Basket Ceremony,” “The Dance of the Maidens,” a healing ceremony, an initiation) and markers of the seasons, such as the “month of Short Corn.” Into these chapters Laura Adams Armer has woven many folktales of the “Navaho” (the spelling used throughout, rather than the spelling “Navajo” preferred by later scholars). These tales are retold by, and sometimes to, Younger Brother as he gradually learns more about his culture and becomes increasingly sensitive to the natural world around him.

From the opening chapters, Younger Brother is shown to be closely in tune with nature. Watching his sheep as they graze, he thinks about the grass “and how it grew after the rain,” picturing its underground roots: “He thought of seeds underground, waiting in the darkness for the rain to moisten them and swell them so they could burst into leaves and roots.” He communicates mystically with Pack Rat, Yellow Beak (the eagle), and Soft-footed Chief (the cougar). After seeing the dance of the Deer People, Younger Brother begins composing songs. This ability to see what others do not see, and to transform it into song, causes his uncle, a medicine man, to dub him Little Singer and begin training him in his craft, including a knowledge of the culture’s legends and of sand painting. During this period, Younger Brother also expands his knowledge by going up in a small plane with a white trader known as the Big Man and a water developer.

Younger Brother’s quest to become worthy to be a medicine man takes a literal form in the central section of the book, when at the age of twelve, feeling restless, he sets out for an unknown western destination on his pinto pony. Along the way, he rescues and travels with a white boy, loses his horse to thieves and reclaims it, visits a relative who tragically loses her young husband, and rejoins his family in time to travel to the coast by train. He has proved his independence and resourcefulness and has become a young man. His first view of the ocean and his experience of a big city (where his parents are exhibiting at a museum) are both mixed. The visit ends shortly after a trip to see a motion picture in which Younger Brother recognizes one of the actors as his relative’s young husband, now dead. His distress is so profound that the Big Man acknowledges, “We must go back. We do not belong here.”

The book closes with the return to Waterless Mountain and its timeless ways. The last immediate threat to peace in the community, Cut Finger, is arrested and removed after setting fire to a trading post. Younger Brother helps to find the tribe’s missing deerskin masks, hidden long ago in a cave. The all-night Dance of the Yays is the climax of a nine-day ceremony attended by more than a thousand Navajos. For the first time, Younger Brother participates as an assistant to his uncle. In parallel fashion, soon after the ceremony he attends a “girl dance” at the trading post, and it is clear that he will be settling down before long, in a ceremony like his brother’s wedding at the beginning of the book. The cycle of the seasons, as well as of the day, is again complete as Younger Brother greets the dawn “with a consciousness of new power rising within him.”

Armer and her husband created more than a dozen full-page aquatint illustrations for the book, a reminder that the author’s first creative works were paintings and that she had made an extensive study of sand paintings, copying many for the Rockefeller Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Critical Context

When Laura Adams Armer wrote Waterless Mountain, she clearly intended it to portray its subject in a positive light to a reading public that knew nothing about it. In 1931, the novel was progressive in most respects. Its subject matter, fidelity to its material, and luminous prose brought excellent reviews and two awards: the Longman’s Juvenile Fiction Prize and the Newbery Medal. As a Newbery-winning book, Waterless Mountain has remained available and is mentioned in most accounts of the development of juvenile literature in the United States; however, it has never been a favorite of young readers, and both Armer and her book have lapsed into relative obscurity. Following the success of Waterless Mountain, Armer portrayed another Navajo adolescent, Na Nai, in Dark Circle of Branches (1933). Several other books by the author about the Southwest were designed for young readers, such as The Trader’s Children (1937) and Farthest West (1939). Her picture book about a Mexican boy, The Forest Pool, received a Caldecott Honor Book designation; otherwise, Armer’s later works attracted little attention. In the year before her death, Armer described her time among the Navajos in the autobiographical book In Navaho Land (1963).

The relationship between Navajos and white people in Waterless Mountain is problematical. Unlike many authors dealing with this subject matter, Armer does not dwell on the clashes between white people and American Indians but rather portrays them as coexisting in relative harmony. Despite the fact that the book’s focus on day-to-day Navajo life puts the non-Navajo characters at the periphery, it is evident that the white characters—with their cars, planes, and money—represent a threat to the very way of life being described. The benevolent paternalism of the Big Man, in particular, seems less attractive with the passage of the years. Younger Brother “could feel power shining through the blue eyes” when he first meets the Big Man who—literally—pats him on the head. The pat on the head is only the first indication of the Big Man’s attitude; after giving a dollar to a young man, he “drove on, smiling at the ways of these brown people, whom he loved.” Clearly, the Big Man is intended as a sympathetic character; clearly, he no longer seems quite so sympathetic. Other white characters echo this paternalism (although, like the Big Man, they seem to feel real affection).

Beginning in the 1980’s, many critics have believed it important that a culture be portrayed from the inside: African American stories by African Americans, American Indian ones by American Indians, and so on. Waterless Mountain has, like many other books, fallen into this controversy because it is obviously written from the outside—by a white author, writing for young white readers. Feminist readers may feel concern about the extremely traditional gender roles shown in the book. Even though the book may have its detractors on such political grounds, Waterless Mountain is still admired for its sensitive and accurate portrayal of Navajo life in the early years of the twentieth century.