Book Review: Pure Land: A true story of three lives, three cultures and the search for Heaven on Earth by Annette McGivney

Annette McGivney’s new book “Pure Land” started with a story she wrote for Backpacker magazine in June 2007 about the murder of Tomomi Hanamure on her 18th birthday, May 8, 2006, by Randy Wescogame, a Hasvasupai tribal member.

In “Pure Land: A True Story of Three Lives, Three Cultures and the Search for Heaven on Earth,” McGivney does not shy away from the stark facts of the most brutal murder in Grand Canyon history.

But to tell of Hanamure’s life and death, McGivney also tells Wescogame’s story — one of domestic violence, which, in the course of researching and writing the story, McGivney discovered was her own story, too. 

She also tells a story about Native American genocide and historical trauma and its effects on not just the Supai people but Native American tribes across the nation.

It is those details that elevate Pure Land from its origins when McGivney first wrote about it for Backpacker magazine and make the book worth reading, not only for those who have traveled to Havasupai to see the waterfalls, but also for people who wonder why the Supai are largely confined to the bottom of the canyon — when the Grand Canyon had been their home for hundreds of years.

It would have been easy to write about Wescogame as a foreign person who was hard to understand. He did murder Hanamure by stabbing her 29 times, not something everyone can relate to. 

There was no reason to write about him as a complete, complicated person with a history that while not an excuse for the eventual murder, is an explanation for how Wescogame could have been brought to the point where he met Hanamure on the trail and decided the course of his life and the end of hers.

That the reader can come away from the book feeling empathy for Wescogame is entirely because of McGivney’s unflinching ability to look at her own past and describe her own experience with domestic violence at the same time that she tells of the abuse in Wescogame’s past.

“I’m not wanting to minimize in any way what Randy did,” McGivney said. “But it is not as simple as just saying he was mentally ill or a sociopath.”

McGivney said that one of the main things she wanted to get across in Pure Land is that everyone is connected despite living in a world where people are divided by culture or religion and child abuse can happen anywhere and its effect is far reaching.

“I guess I wanted to break down those barriers and show that it’s not that simple,” McGivney said.

The original Backpacker story garnered many comments with people sharing their experiences hiking down into Supai and recording what they saw there — with typical responses of how beautiful the area was while also commenting on the conditions they saw around them, but with no real thought to the Supai people and their history.

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Original review on: www.nhonews.com