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Southern Piaute

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Southern Paiute
William Logan Hebner
and Michael Plyler
8.5 x 11, 208 pages

Published: 2010

ISBN 978-0-87421-754-4
cloth $34.95

ISBN 978-0-87421-755-1
e-book $28.00

Signed copies are available.
Contact us at:
(435) 797-1362 or
d.miller@usu.edu

WILLIAM LOGAN HEBNER (above left) moved to southwest Utah in 1981, opening an award-winning restaurant and working as a river guide. He met his wife Angie on a peace walk from Leningrad to Moscow in 1987, and together they founded International Legislative Exchange, working with new parliaments emerging from ex-Soviet republics. With their sons, Jordan and Sean, they live on a mesa overlooking Zion Canyon. Hebner has published in High Country News, Best of Writers at Work and Northern Lights.

MICHAEL L. PLYLER (above right) has been photographing for over thirty years. In 1993 he was awarded a Visual Artist Fellowship from the Utah Arts Council. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, has won awards, and is held in numerous collections. Plyler was the photographer for the books Pioneer Voices of Zion Canyon and Zion Canyon: A Storied Land. He presently is director of the Zion Canyon Field Institute.

Southern Paiute

A Portrait

William Logan Hebner
photographs by Michael Plyler

Open full view of book sample

"In this carefully-wrought book, thirty unforgettable Southern Paiute people speak to us. Logan Hebner is our guide, our Studs Terkel—unfailingly generous and warm. Hebner asks: 'Why, in all this time, has nobody simply asked the Southern Paiute for their stories?” Hebner did just that, and in doing so, he was able to record stories that exist nowhere else in print, interviewing elders who remember tales told to them by their grandparents—taking us right back to the 19th century. We listen to the full sweep of tragedy and restoration in the life of this often-neglected Southwestern tribe as they 'tell their own histories.'

Hebner’s persistence over twenty years pays off splendidly. He is a fine, humorous, and observant writer, sharing intimate scenes from his fieldwork and taking care to provide trustworthy and wide-ranging historical and anthropological context. Michael Plyler’s quiet portraits reflect the same honorable approach. In moving and eloquent words, the Southern Paiute share with us the forgotten 'clues to who they were, who they remain, how they’ve survived, and what will carry them into the future.'"

—Stephen Trimble, author of The People: Indians of the Southwest

Book Review Utah Historical Quarterly (Volume 79, Number 3, 2011) pg. 288 / Reviewed by Eileen Hallet Stone

Book Review High Country News April 18, 2011
by Teresa Jordan

Southern Paiute territory once extended from the Mojave to the San Juan River and from the Sevier to the Colorado River. Paiute still live in small communities across this vast expanse, having survived as a people widespread enslavement, virulent diseases, unjustified blame for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, invasion and displacement, unfounded termination of government services, and more. Listening to them, Logan Hebner, “was able to record stories that exist nowhere else in print, interviewing elders who remember tales told to them by their grandparents—taking us right back to the nineteenth century. We listen to the full sweep of tragedy and restoration in the life of this often-neglected Southwestern tribe" (Stephen Trimble).