EfraÃn of the Sonoran Desert: A Lizard's Life Among the Seri Indians

"The very first thing that you see when you reach the beach and leave your boat behind in the shallows of the Sea of Cortez is a lizard running away from the water. It curls its tail high so the waves won't get it wet." That's what Gary Nabhan remembers about his first visit to the Seri village in Kino Bay. There he met storyteller Amalia Astorga. She tells him the bittersweet history of Efrain, a sun-blotched lizard. In so doing, she helps him to understand how the Seris have protected a species that everywhere else is endangered. Together Amalia and Gary give young readers an insight into the life and culture of the Seris, an endangered people themselves, but a people who know how to love their land and its inhabitants.Amalia Astorga is a Seri Elder. She lives with her tribe in Desemboque, Sonora in Mexico. She is preserving the herbal knowledge of the Seri hunting-gathering community, as well as songs and stories about native animals.Since 1975, Gary Paul Nabhan has roamed the ancient cactus forests, mesquite grasslands and hidden oases of the Sonoran Desert. His original scholarship integrates conservation biology, agroecology, ethnonutrititon and applied anthropology in unique and unforeseen ways. A co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, he is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Pew Scholarship on Conservation and the Environment, the Premio Gaia, and the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing. He lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.Marketing Plans:o Author tour in the Southwest to include Tucson, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Santa Fe and El Paso.o PostcardsJanet K. Miller, a self-taught artist, makes her home in Tucson, Arizona. She lived and worked in West Africa during most of the 1980s, and started painting in 1993. She does reverse glass painting, painting inside out and backwards on the wrong side of clear glass. The original paintings for Efraín are all done using this technique.