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posted: February 2, 2025
tl;dr: Definitely not a history, but rather a collection of stories about early Native American tribes and migrations...
I met author Donald L. Ensenbach at the Superstition Mountain Museum in Apache Junction, Arizona. He was just outside the entrance to the gift shop, manning a table with his books on it. After speaking with him and seeing his obvious passion for native American culture and the desert Southwest, I chose one of his books to purchase. It was When the Spirits Move: A Native American Creation Story.
To set the proper expectations for this book: it is not a scholarly history. Writing a definitive history of early Native Americans is the job of archeologists, based on the physical evidence of what these people left behind that survives to this day. There is some archeological evidence presented in When the Spirits Move, but the focus is on stories. Since there is no original written source for these stories passed down orally among generations, it is impossible to say to what degree they actually happened. Ensenbach admits in the book that he made up some of them. Ensenbach also is not a direct descendent of Native Americans, so these stories were not inculcated into his mind from birth.
When the Spirits Move recounts one version of a Native American creation story or myth, in which we are currently inhabiting the fourth world after three prior creations and destructions. There are more than a few parallels to the genesis stories in the Bible. After the fourth creation, the tribes were instructed to travel to the four corners (north, east, south, and west) of the world, which is effectively the Americas, North and South. Most of the book concerns stories about these migrations and some of the places the migratory tribes visited.
The stories in When the Spirits Move do make a good point that tribes had to follow the food chain. If the hunting, gathering, or agriculture in a given area started to yield less food, it was time to move on. It is less certain to what degree the migration was due to some command to explore the world.
Ensenbach is a passable writer, but this is not a work of literature nor is it intended to be. It is a good enough book to be sold in museum book stores in the desert Southwest. It would have benefited from the scrutiny of an editor, who could have eliminated some of the repetitive phrasing and awkward sentences. Those who are interested in the subject matter may enjoy it, and may also find themselves hoping for more.
In the second half of the book, Ensenbach names more of the present-day places in the stories he’s telling. For future reference for myself, I am recording some of them here: