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Reservation Restless
In the powerful and haunting lands of the Southwest, rainbows grow unexpectedly from the sky, mountain lions roam the desert, and summer storms roll over the Colorado River. As a park ranger, Kristofic explores the Ganado valley, traces the paths of the Anasazi, and finds mythic experiences on sacred mountains that explain the pain and loss promised for every person who decides to love. After reconnecting with his Navajo sister and brother, Kristofic must confront his own nightmares of the Anglo society and the future it has created. When the possible deaths of his mentor and of the American future loom before him, Kristofic must find some new way to live in the world and strike some restless path that will lead back to hózhó - a beautiful harmony.
Acclaim
“Once in a great while, a miracle of a book comes along, a gift that both touches the heart and engages the mind. Reservation Restless is such a book. Kristofic’s entertaining, jaw-droppingly honest recollections of adventures and explorations on and off the Navajo Nation come with a poet’s respect for the perfect word in the perfect place." (Anne Hillerman, New York Times best-selling author of Rock with Wings and The Tale Teller)
"Reservation Restless is a book about growing up, loss, and arrival, all of it told in stories populated by walks, books, Navajos, mentors, river guides, canyons, and coyotes. Oh yes, and rainbows you get to touch." (Dan Flores, New York Times best-selling author of Coyote A Natural and Supernatural History)
"Beautiful, evocative, Kristofic has written a book that conveys that sense of mythic reality that pervades every corner of the Colorado Plateau. He reveals portals into indigenous mind rarely understood by non-Native peoples.... It makes you pull the nails out of your frame of reference in order that you may perceive with greater clarity." (Jack Loeffler, author of Adventures with A Portrait of Abbey)
About the author
Jim Kristofic grew up on the Navajo Reservation in Northeastern Arizona. He has written for the Navajo Times, Arizona Highways, Native Peoples Magazine, and High Country News. He is the author of Medicine The Story of the First Native American Nursing School and Navajos Wear A Reservation Life. He lives in Taos, New Mexico.
Acclaim
“Once in a great while, a miracle of a book comes along, a gift that both touches the heart and engages the mind. Reservation Restless is such a book. Kristofic’s entertaining, jaw-droppingly honest recollections of adventures and explorations on and off the Navajo Nation come with a poet’s respect for the perfect word in the perfect place." (Anne Hillerman, New York Times best-selling author of Rock with Wings and The Tale Teller)
"Reservation Restless is a book about growing up, loss, and arrival, all of it told in stories populated by walks, books, Navajos, mentors, river guides, canyons, and coyotes. Oh yes, and rainbows you get to touch." (Dan Flores, New York Times best-selling author of Coyote A Natural and Supernatural History)
"Beautiful, evocative, Kristofic has written a book that conveys that sense of mythic reality that pervades every corner of the Colorado Plateau. He reveals portals into indigenous mind rarely understood by non-Native peoples.... It makes you pull the nails out of your frame of reference in order that you may perceive with greater clarity." (Jack Loeffler, author of Adventures with A Portrait of Abbey)
About the author
Jim Kristofic grew up on the Navajo Reservation in Northeastern Arizona. He has written for the Navajo Times, Arizona Highways, Native Peoples Magazine, and High Country News. He is the author of Medicine The Story of the First Native American Nursing School and Navajos Wear A Reservation Life. He lives in Taos, New Mexico.
- GenresIndigenous
Audible Audio
Published March 1, 2020
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48 people want to read
About the author
Jim Kristofic
12 books50 followersJim Kristofic grew up on the Navajo Reservation in northeastern Arizona. He has written for the Navajo Times, Arizona Highways, Native Peoples Magazine, and High Country News. He is the author of The Hero Twins: A Navajo-English Story of the Monster Slayers, Navajos Wear Nikes: A Reservation Life, Medicine Women: The Story of the First Native American Nursing School, Reservation Restless, and Send a Runner: A Navajo Honors the Long Walk (all published by UNM Press). He lives in Taos, New Mexico.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 1, 2021
Some excellent stories (Jim Danger, Running Red River, The Song of the Cells, the earthship sections, and all the stories about Lyle) but as a whole it was a bit uneven and rambly at times in between these great stories, making it a bit hard to follow. I absolutely loved his first memoir, Navajos Wear Nikes--this one is good but not nearly as good. Seemed to not really have a core thread to it, as the first did. Still a good read--he's a great writer!
June 15, 2021
An absolutely lovely book. Took me to an area of the country I love. Kristofic writes vividly. I could see and hear him. I appreciated the times he was in two places.
January 18, 2021
I REALLY wanted to like this book as I am intrigued by the Dine people and their culture. The author has the most fascinating stories about life on and near the Navajo reservation, BUT he rambles on switching subjects and interrupting tales to go off on tangents. It simply doesn't flow. It reminds me of a 5 year old trying to describe what they did at school...very choppy.
I would thoroughly enjoy reading about Kristofic's experiences written by the hand of a more experienced writer.
Sorry...I truly wanted to like this book.
I would thoroughly enjoy reading about Kristofic's experiences written by the hand of a more experienced writer.
Sorry...I truly wanted to like this book.
December 8, 2023
I recommend this book because it provides a glimpse of another world, and another perspective. Despite the shift, the reader also identifies with the author (narrator), and recognizes that alien world as his own.
November 15, 2023
Enter another world
Unique, poetic, challenging and beautiful. Profound and Spiritual. The interdependent web of existence woven by a man with a singing mind.
Unique, poetic, challenging and beautiful. Profound and Spiritual. The interdependent web of existence woven by a man with a singing mind.
May 29, 2024
This audiobook - I listened to about half. Plot is weak and hard to follow although the locations are familiar. Not my kinda book. Not gonna do this author again. DNF
January 26, 2025
This book felt like a lovely ramble through the Southwest. It was a mini vacation.
December 31, 2020
If you're ever lost in the wilderness in Navajo country and in need of a rescue or a guide, author Jim Kristofic might be the man to call. In his new memoir, "Reservation Restless," a follow-up to "Navajos Wear Nikes," Kristofic as narrator is a wilderness superhero, cultural anachronism, snake charmer, life saver, cowboy, MacGyver and sage. He is also a young man lost in the wilderness of his own restlessness and trying to find his place in the world.
If his name sounds familiar, it might be because he teaches your student at Taos High School, but let's not jump ahead.
The story begins in the narrator's senior year of high school when his mother moves him and his family from Ganado to Page, Arizona. This move causes him to ask a fundamental question, "I once asked why we decide to call a place our home. Now I would ask why we decide to leave that home, to choose restlessness (or let it choose us), to range into strange experience, and to emerge forever changed."
Relocating to the reservation when he was a child, Kristofic had learned to adapt. He mostly finds respite in the mountains and canyons of the Four Corners region, chasing rainbows and stalking mountain lions. Diné words are interspersed throughout the book, particularly when discussing spirituality, and the reader never loses sight of the author's strong roots. In his new high school, he meets Lyle Parsons, his English teacher who ends up being his most important confidant and mentor.
After high school, he attends college in the East, where his family is from, and during the summers takes a job in Arizona as a rafting guide in Glen Canyon. "There was something intimate in what remained of Glen Canyon. In those hours and river miles, I guided my passengers over water that flowed smooth and quiet, green and glassy, below six-hundred-foot walls of wind-polished Navajo sandstone." Kristofic's beautiful nature writing is rich in precise detail paired with poetic musings.
It's on one float trip when the author's colleague falls into the freezing river and Kristofic, already nicknamed Jim Danger for inconsequential dives into freezing depths, jumps in after him and saves his life. He writes, "I never told this story to anyone. But I told it to Lyle Parsons about two weeks later. ... I had no one else to tell. He was the clearest voice in my life."
In one of the most evocative chapters of the memoir, "Yellow Evening Twilight," the reader learns that Lyle's wife is a cancer survivor and Kristofic's best friend Leo is also a cancer survivor. Kristofic writes about Lyle, "He is thin and his hair is long as that of a prophet wandered down from the mountaintop and his eyes are grayer and bluer than I remember them because he looks at his wife with a new kind of love, for she has been out wandering in the wilderness and that wilderness is called Cancer."
Wandering lost in the wilderness takes on new meaning as the author recognizes that this is one backcountry he doesn't have a map for. Later, we learn that Lyle is also diagnosed with cancer.
Kristofic struggles out east where he lands a teaching job after graduation and becomes a published author. He is distraught by the American modern culture -- its sprawling suburbs, wasted energy and lack of harmony. Restless and confused, he tries to make his way back west as he is haunted by reoccurring nightmares.
It's not difficult to imagine that Kristofic is a teacher as he often takes opportunities to educate other characters and the readers on the subjects as varied as history, geology and anthropology.
If his name sounds familiar, it might be because he teaches your student at Taos High School, but let's not jump ahead.
The story begins in the narrator's senior year of high school when his mother moves him and his family from Ganado to Page, Arizona. This move causes him to ask a fundamental question, "I once asked why we decide to call a place our home. Now I would ask why we decide to leave that home, to choose restlessness (or let it choose us), to range into strange experience, and to emerge forever changed."
Relocating to the reservation when he was a child, Kristofic had learned to adapt. He mostly finds respite in the mountains and canyons of the Four Corners region, chasing rainbows and stalking mountain lions. Diné words are interspersed throughout the book, particularly when discussing spirituality, and the reader never loses sight of the author's strong roots. In his new high school, he meets Lyle Parsons, his English teacher who ends up being his most important confidant and mentor.
After high school, he attends college in the East, where his family is from, and during the summers takes a job in Arizona as a rafting guide in Glen Canyon. "There was something intimate in what remained of Glen Canyon. In those hours and river miles, I guided my passengers over water that flowed smooth and quiet, green and glassy, below six-hundred-foot walls of wind-polished Navajo sandstone." Kristofic's beautiful nature writing is rich in precise detail paired with poetic musings.
It's on one float trip when the author's colleague falls into the freezing river and Kristofic, already nicknamed Jim Danger for inconsequential dives into freezing depths, jumps in after him and saves his life. He writes, "I never told this story to anyone. But I told it to Lyle Parsons about two weeks later. ... I had no one else to tell. He was the clearest voice in my life."
In one of the most evocative chapters of the memoir, "Yellow Evening Twilight," the reader learns that Lyle's wife is a cancer survivor and Kristofic's best friend Leo is also a cancer survivor. Kristofic writes about Lyle, "He is thin and his hair is long as that of a prophet wandered down from the mountaintop and his eyes are grayer and bluer than I remember them because he looks at his wife with a new kind of love, for she has been out wandering in the wilderness and that wilderness is called Cancer."
Wandering lost in the wilderness takes on new meaning as the author recognizes that this is one backcountry he doesn't have a map for. Later, we learn that Lyle is also diagnosed with cancer.
Kristofic struggles out east where he lands a teaching job after graduation and becomes a published author. He is distraught by the American modern culture -- its sprawling suburbs, wasted energy and lack of harmony. Restless and confused, he tries to make his way back west as he is haunted by reoccurring nightmares.
It's not difficult to imagine that Kristofic is a teacher as he often takes opportunities to educate other characters and the readers on the subjects as varied as history, geology and anthropology.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews