Son of Old Man Hat is the autobiography of a Navaho Indian from childhood to maturity. With a simplicity as disarming as it is frank, it tells of his birth in the spring "when the cottonwood leaves were about the size of my thumbnail," of how he first shared family tasks by guarding the sheep near the hogan, of his sexual awakening. As he grows older, into the story come accounts of life in the open, of nomadic cattle-raising, farming, trading, communal...