LAIRDCAROBETH

Interview with Carobeth Laird

 

 

 

 

The tape opens with discussion of a Limbo, a book written by Mrs. Laird after an attack of acute gallbladder disease experienced while living on an Indian reservation. As she tells the story, she was evacuated to a hospital where she was mistreated by Indian nurses from tribes inimical to her husband's tribe. Dependent on social security payments, she wound up in a nursing home in Phoenix, where she was neglected. Laird was a writer who didn't publish her first book until she was ''discovered'' by student researchers when she was 80 years old. Her best-selling book, ''Encounter With an Angry God: Recollections of My Life With John Peabody Harrington,'' detailed her life among the American Indians with the anthropologist.

In the book, which she wrote in 14 weeks, she told of her youth in Texas and how she moved to San Diego and studied under Mr. Harrington, becoming his lover and later his wife, running his errands and helping him compile notes from 1915 to 1921. Eventually, she left him for George Laird, a Chemehuevi Indian, and they had six children, including one who died. Mr. Laird died in 1940. Mrs. Laird died in 1983.

Carobeth Tucker Laird; Interviews; Oral histories; Mary Mitchell; Limbo (book); George Laird; Gallbladder disease

 

 

© San Diego State University. All rights reserved.

 

 

English

 

Audiotape

00:52:16

No

 

 

 

Audio

MP3

56.06 MB