Walter L. Williams

Set in the Civil War era of the 1860s, this novel tells the story of an innocent young Virginian who comes West by railroad to escape his domineering preacher-father and find adventure and a new life. He is duped into accepting the feckless job of Indian Agent at Fort Sumner in the New Mexico desert. There the Navajo were being imprisoned in an "experiment in Indian management" known as the Bosque Redondo Reservation. But the young hero is hardly the pawn his commanders intended him to be after he finds himself captivated by a crossdressing Two-Spirit male shaman, highly respected as spiritual leader and healer among the Din , as The People call themselves. Together the pair expose the real motives behind this "experiment" and help the Din escape imprisonment and return to their sacred homelands in the mountains. Anthropologist Walter L. Williams has teamed up with award-winning novelist and spiritual writer Toby Johnson to produce a work of historical fiction that presents the Native American philosophies, spiritualities, and gender wisdom which Williams documented in his groundbreaking The Spirit and The Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture. It was that book in 1986 that helped introduce the Two-Spirit tradition to modern readers. Williams' and Johnson's novel Two Spirits was winner of a prize for Historical Fiction from the Arch & Bruce Brown Foundation. This is a story, based on the real history of the Bosque Redondo, of tragedy, oppression, and discrimination, but it is also an enlightening tale of love, personal discovery, and natural beauty. Full of suspense, plot twists, and endearing romance, Two Spirits will captivate readers with its positive approach to life and love and its wonderful happy and satisfying ending. The novel is, at once, educational, entertaining, sexy, romantic, mystical, enlightened. Walter L Williams is author of the award-winning The Spirit and the Flesh and more than a dozen other books and novels. He has been professor of anthropology, history and gender studies at the University of Southern California, where he taught gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender studies, and also American Indian Studies. He is past president of ONE Institute International Gay and Lesbian Archives.Toby Johnson is author of four non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of Joseph Campbell, his teacher and personal "wise old man," to modern-day social and religious problems, three gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual issues at the heart of gay consciousness, and two books on gay men's spiritualities, gay spirit, and the mystical experience of homosexuality.

Williams examines the efforts of public agencies to better incorporate citizen participation in the administrative process. He focuses on the effort of the Department of Energy to use citizen advisory boards composed of stakeholders—persons who stand to gain or lose from policy implementation—in its economic transition, waste management, and environmental restoration programs.The Department's efforts to deal with hazardous and toxic wastes stemming from uranium fuel for the U.S. nuclear weapons program are examined in detail. The case study shows that the stakeholder model was effective: the advisory board was expeditiously organized, reached consensus on critical issues, and accomplished its primary mission. The board's performance was such that the Clinton administration considered it a major example of how federal agencies could be reinvented to produce a government that works better and costs less. Of particular interest to policy makers and researchers involved with US environmental issues and public policy.

Java is the most populous island of Indonesia, the fifth largest nation in the world. Yet despite its importance, outsiders know little about the country or its people. With the help of Indonesian students and scholars, Walter L. Williams has collected and translated the life histories of twenty-seven Javanese women and men. The people interviewed tell how they have coped with rapid social and economic change, and the transformation of their traditions. Williams has carefully selected the individuals he includes to represent a wide diversity of Java's people. We hear from fascinating men and women of various religions, from the rich and the poor, and from different ethnic backgrounds. Diversity is a constant theme, as evidenced by a poor pedicab driver who can barely scrape along, by a rich businesswoman who explains how she balances her professional and domestic roles, by an educated and respected homosexual school principal, and by an illiterate mother of fourteen children. All of them present in their lives a unique Javanese approach to living. These oral histories were derived from elderly people, who have a larger perspective on the changes they have seen in their lifetimes. The focus of the first section of the book is the way people have adapted in their daily lives to massive social and economic changes. In the middle section, we hear from the Javanese who represent traditional values in the midst of change. Finally, we hear from educators and parents who tell us of their concerns for Indonesian youth and the future of Indonesia.