Chapter 2, Stalking with Stories Summary and Analysis

Basso advises paying close attention to the claims people make about themselves, as it helps to understand who the people of study are. This chapter focuses on sets of spoken texts that the Cibecue people say express themselves, their language and their places. They see the land as making people moral, looking after them. These claims are hard for Anglo-Americans to understand because one cannot understand their symbology and sense of themselves. For instance, the Western Apache see a deep connection between the land and the enforcement of morality. This enforcement of norms also occurs through language. An apparent simplicity of relationships to language and land will give way to deep concepts.

Chapter two illustrates its major themes through Nick Thompson, a man who claims to have been born in 1918. Basso has known him for...