Beautifully written, evocative, and utterly original, A Red Woman Was Crying takes the reader into the rich and complex internal lives of South Pacific rainforest cultivators - young and old, male and female, gentle and fierce - as they grapple with predatory miners, indifferent colonial masters, introduced religion, their own changing culture, their sometimes violent past, and the “other” who has come to live with them.

Don Mitchell’s newly revised and expanded collection of short stories, all but one set among tribal people on Bougainville Island in the late 1960s, demystifies ethnography by turning it on its head.

The narrators are Nagovisi,  and it’s through their eyes that the reader knows the young American anthropologist, himself struggling with his identity as a Vietnam-era American, who’s come to study their culture in a time of change.

Don has a new book.