DISCOVERIES

NORTH, South, East, West. Despite the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, sacred Native American places have been destroyed to make room for everything from roads to ski resorts. Peter Nabokov, who teaches at UCLA, wrote this book “to establish the pre-Christian origins of religion in North America.” He is not one to romanticize Native American ties to the land. For one thing, each tribe has different values regarding sacred sites; for another, these ties have changed over the centuries. And finally, he warns, not all sacred sites are pretty. With these caveats, he takes us on a tour of buttes, rocks, mesas, places of pilgrimage, burial mounds and sacred animal meeting places -- including a few in our own backyard, what scholar Brian Swann calls the “shadow geography” under urban areas. At Tellico Dam, in the center of the Overhill Cherokee Nation in Tennessee; in the Black Hills of South Dakota and Bear Butte State Park, where Cheyenne and Lakota had to buy permits to fast and pray; at Playa Vista in Marina del Rey, where Indian remains and artifacts were uncovered but, not belonging to one of the 562 federally recognized tribes, weren’t protected by the 1978 act, Nabokov watches, listens, takes note of the loss. “I also know this much,” wrote one of his students, a member of the Tongva-Gabrielino tribe, “that you know and understand what hallowed ground is because you say, ‘Where the Twin Towers once stood is hallowed ground ... it must be respected.’ ”

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The Big Why

A Novel

Michael Winter

Bloomsbury: 376 pp., $24.95

“NOTHING useful can come of looking at what you’re doing as anything other than a necessity for survival,” a Newfoundland sea captain tells painter Rockwell Kent, the protagonist of Michael Winter’s “The Big Why.” “As soon as you look at your work as something outside of you, then it’s gone from you. You’re not part of it.” Kent fled the art scene in New York in 1914. He was 30, married, with two children. His first attempt to remove his family from New York had been hobbled by his uncontrollable philandering (he met an old girlfriend en route and got her pregnant, making it impossible for his wife and children to follow). This time, Kent swears he’ll be good. He travels to Brigus, Newfoundland, finds a house and begins fixing it up for his family, becoming part of the small community of mostly seal hunters. Soon he’s trying to unionize them against profiteering captains. “The Big Why” is a historical novel, driven by Winter’s “will to know a truth” (he’s a native Newfoundlander). It’s full of beautiful descriptions of the pristine landscape, written in an abrupt syntax that mirrors the harsh environment: “The walk was long enough that the darkness had begun to sink into me. Black sky and a dark blue acre of snow slanting down to the water....I could hear the rut of the shore. The cold, fresh air on my face.” How to hold a sextant and which wood makes the best dory are an added bonus.

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The Woman Who Waited

A Novel

Andrei Makine

Arcade: 182 pp., $24

IN “a village among forests stretching all the way to the White Sea,” a woman waits for her lover, a soldier, to return. She has been waiting for 30 years. In 1945, when she was just 16, he left for the front and was soon reported missing in action. A young man, an artist, disillusioned by the dissident life in Leningrad, moves to the northern village of Mirnoe, where the woman, Vera, waits. He finds a false note in all human emotion, merriment, derision, but not in Vera’s simple waiting. He falls in love -- with Vera, but also with the smoke and birch bark, the indigo forests, the frozen berries, the icons and the tea. He falls in love with the waiting. Eventually, her soldier materializes -- he’s a party committee secretary in Moscow, a war hero who never returned to Mirnoe. Which life was wasted and which was well spent?