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Kindred
History

Kindred

March
March
March
History

March

  • This book is long and packed with LOTS of information, but it is so, so good. From the Author’s Note at the end: “Like reservations themselves, this book is a hybrid. It has elements of journalism, history, and memoir. As such it is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive. It is meant to capture some of the history and some of the truth of reservation life—which is not any one thing but many things depending on where you’re looking and to whom you’re talking.” // “This book… is about how reservations began, what they are now, and where they are going. You can tell a lot about a place by its exceptions, by turning over and inspecting the frayed corners of its quilt. You can tell a lot about the whole by looking at the part. You can tell a lot about America, about its sins and its ideals, by looking at and behind the signs that advertise our existence, the existence of a kind of American who was supposed to have died out a long time ago.” // “One of the most serious misconceptions about reservations is that they were a kind of moral payment: that the U.S. government, motivated by pity and guilt, ‘gave’ reservations to Indians along with treaty rights, which functioned as a kind of proto-welfare program. This is not the case. Reservations and treaty rights were concessions negotiated for the right to settle and develop new land.” // “For better or worse, this is my take on things, my take on our lives. I have no doubt that faced with the same task, all the people mentioned above and all the people I talked to would have come up with a different vision of reservation life. So it goes. I owe a debt of gratitude to the many writers, academics, historians, activists, and researchers whose work I admire and lean on. Keep it up.” // I learned a lot from this important book. #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth
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  • I asked my daughter, fellow white girl learning @ninataviano, to read and review this book for me, since I had so many to read this month. BUT after hearing so many people talk about how good it was, I had to read it myself. It absolutely lives up to any/all hype. The writing is brilliant, the history lessons are fascinating, the social issues are fire, and the plot is WOW. // “In a world nearly destroyed by global warming, the Indigenous people of North America are being hunted for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. Frenchie and his companions, struggling to survive, don’t yet know that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.” (back cover) // “Miigwans. I’d heard that name before. I could see my father’s mouth pronouncing it with reverence, like he did for everything that had a touch of the old about it, the words from our language; like a prayer.” (16) // “Miig explained it one night by the fire. ‘Dreams get caught in the webs woven in your bones. That’s where they live, in that marrow there… You are born with them. Your DNA weaves them into the marrow like spinners… That’s where they pluck them from.’” (18-19) // “After Chi-Boy there was me, sixteen. I was nicknamed as much for my name as for my people—the Metis. I came from a long line of hunters, trappers, and voyageurs. But now, with most of the rivers cut into pieces and lakes left as grey sludge puckers on the landscape, my own history seemed like a myth along the lines of dragons.” (21) // “‘How do you have language?’ My voice broke on the last syllable. My chest tightened. How could she have the language? She was the same age as me, and I deserved it more. I don’t know why, but I felt certain that I did. I yanked my braid out of the back of my shirt and let it fall over my shoulder. Some kind of proof, I suppose.” (38) // HIGHLY recommend this beautiful, important, brilliant, exciting book. #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth
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  • “Cassidy Rain Berghoff didn’t know that the very night she decided to get a life would be the night that Galen would lose his. It’s been six months since her best friend died, and up until now Rain has succeeded in shutting herself off from the world. But when controversy arises around her aunt Georgia’s Indian Camp in their mostly white midwestern community, Rain decides to face the outside world again—at least through the lens of her camera… In a voice that resonates with insight and humor, Cynthia Leitich Smith tells of heartbreak, recovery, and reclaiming one’s place in the world.” (inside book jacket) // “Part of the deal with being a mixed-blood is that every now and then I feel like I have to announce it. ‘What are you?’ people sometimes ask Fynn. It sounds like they want him to ID his entire species. Because my coloring is lighter, I usually get the next standard questions: ‘How much Indian are you?’ (About forty-five pounds’ worth.) And ‘Are you legally [or a card-carrying] Indian?’ (Yes, but only on my mother’s side.) / I don’t mind as much when it’s Native people asking, probably because they show respect for the tribal affiliation, for my family. They never follow up with something like, ‘You don’t seem Indian to me.’ / I’ve never asked about the phrase ‘seem Indian,’ but I figure it involves construction-paper feathers, a plastic paint pony, and Malibu Pocahontas.” (48-49) // This story is fiction, but has some autobiographical elements. The author spent part of her young life in northeastern Kansas and attended college in Douglas County, where Rain’s fictional town is located. She’s an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and has written many other books. This one is her second, written in 2001, and she’s still writing today. I look forward to reading more of her work. #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth
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  • I think I liked this book better than the first one (Trail of Lightning). Maybe because there was more plot, less violence. // “It’s been four weeks since the bloody showdown at Black Mesa, and Maggie Hoskie, Diné monster hunter, is trying to make the best of things. Only her latest bounty hunt has gone sideways, she’s lost her only friend, Kai Arviso, and she’s somehow found herself responsible for a girl with a strange clan power. Then the Goodacre twins show up at Maggie’s door with the news that Kai and the youngest Goodacre, Caleb, have fallen in with a mysterious cult, led by a figure out of Navajo legend called the White Locust... She vows to track down the White Locust, then rescue Kai and make things right between them. Her search leads her beyond the Walls of Dinétah and straight into the horrors of the Big Water world outside…” (back cover) // “She opens her mouth, and a high humming song flows from her lips. It surrounds me, and for a moment I feel that sun-soaked warmth of late summer again, something fragile and beautiful from an idyllic childhood. But it’s a childhood that was never mine. It’s fake, something pretty that has nothing to do with me. An approximation of a perfect childhood too foreign a seduction to lure me in.” (22) // “The truth is that Dinétah got off easy when the rest of the world went to shit. Outside that wall is the horror of what happened to everyone else. And it may sound truly selfish, but I’ve had enough horror in my life. I don’t want to know about other people’s horrors too.” (27) // Have you read Trail of Lightning and Storm of Locusts? What did you think? #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth
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  • I’ll be honest. I wasn’t looking forward to reading this. As I deconstruct a conservative evangelical faith in hopes of discovering the true God of love and mystery, I was afraid this would be a book Old Me would’ve eaten up but would make New Me cringe. To say I was pleasantly surprised is an understatement. I was blown away. This book changed my life. // “This book is a personal theology. It arises from my experience as both a Native American and a Christian. It is about my struggle to reconcile these two halves of who I am. I do not share this personal theology with any pretense that I am speaking for all Native people or for any other Christians.” // “These four basic components describe the classic Native American vision quest: preparation, community, challenge, and lament.” // “The quest is not an answer. It is a deeper question. I realize that my opinion about the nature and role of the vision quest is a little counter-intuitive for many people, including many Native Americans. After all, if the quest is not going to give us some answers, then what good is it? That’s a fair question. My reply is that the quest is not about transcendence, but transformation.” // “But I would like to offer a different path, one that begins in the ancient traditions of Native America and that takes us through the mystery of the vision quest to find the Christ we are seeking. If, in fact, the Jewish rabbi, Jesus of the first century, is truly the Christ of the twenty-first century, then he must be transcendent of time and culture. He must be as much a part of the Native story as he is of the story of any tribe or people. Consequently, we should be able to see his vision through the lenses of Native American tradition as clearly as through European thought.” // I would encourage 100% of Christians (and even people of other faiths) to read this powerful book. #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth
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  • Today’s review is brought to you by @ninataviano, my 13yo daughter and fellow bookstagrammer/white girl learning. I hadn’t planned to read this book myself (so many books, so little time!) but after reading her review, I had to. It was really good. Here’s Nina! // How I Became a Ghost is a Choctaw Trail of Tears story, written so powerfully honest, and I learned so much about the Trail of Tears that I never knew before. Isaac lives with his mom, dad, big brother Luke, and dog, Jumper. But one thing he has noticed recently, is that he can see ghosts. Mostly ghosts of people he knows. Mister and Missus Jonah, Old Man and Old Woman, all people he knows that live close to him. But the strange thing for him is that all those people are still alive. He sees flames dancing in the hair of the Jonahs that nobody else sees. And when Isaac’s father and Luke come back from hunting, saying that there is Treaty Talk in town, Isaac’s mom gets worried. One night, Isaac wakes up, and their house is on fire. His family rushes out of the house, to find all the houses in their area, burning. The large Choctaw community is trying to help each other put out the fires, when Isaac learns that Mister and Missus Jonah didn’t make it. And that’s when he knows that he can see how people die, a few days before it happens. As the story follows Isaac’s family on the Trail of Tears, life-and-death events happen that happened to so many non-fictional Choctaw in 1835. This book is so emotional, and its immersive Choctaw perspective shows the truth that so many white-washed history books refuse to share. #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth #IndigenousHeritageMonth
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  • Happy Sunday! Today’s #SundaySixStack is made up of nonfiction books by Indigenous authors. They’re all very different and all very good. From top to bottom: Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (#lesliemarmonsilko); Glory Happening (@kaitlincurtice); Seven Fallen Feathers (@tanyatalaga_author); Braiding Sweetgrass (#robinwallkimmerer); Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys (#richardtwiss); and Do All Indians Live in Tipis? Do you have a favorite #IndigenousNonfiction read? #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth #IndigAThon
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  • This book is “a collection of twenty-two essays on Native American life written by one of America’s foremost literary voices. Discussing such disparate topics as the role of rocks in Native American culture and her own encounters with the U.S. Border Patrol, Leslie Marmon Silko weaves a narrative web of experience that provides a powerful portrait of Native Americans and the realities of their life in America today.” (back cover) // This is my third non-fiction book of Silko’s and I look forward to reading one of her novels next. // “Because our family was such a mixture of Indian, Mexican, and white, I was acutely aware of the inherent conflicts between Indian and white, old-time beliefs and Christianity. I had no use for Christianity because the Christians made up such terrible lies about Indian people that it was clear to me that they would lie about other matters also.” (17) // “I completed three semesters in the American Indian Law School Fellowship Program before I realized that injustice is built into the Anglo-American legal system.” (19) // “Except for a few fragments, the magnificent folding books of the Maya and Aztec people were destroyed in 1540 by Bishop Landa, who burned the great libraries of the Americas. Europeans were anxious to be rid of all evidence that Native American cultures were intellectually equal to European cultures; they could then argue to the pope that those indigenous inhabitants were not fully human and that Europeans were therefore free to do with them and their land as they pleased.” (21) // I really learned a lot from this book. More quotes in the comments. #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth
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  • I read about this book of poetry in Daniel H. Justice’s wonderful book, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. He writes: “Poetry is a particularly compelling literary form for confronting the ruptures of history and the fragmenting effects of settler colonialism. Poetry distills the rage, pain, and defiance of Indigenous peoples, who remain under ideological and physical assault by settler populations that so often insist that our continued existence is an affront and an impossibility. Yet given its intimate subject matter, its sensual rhythms, and its bittersweet distillations of love and long, poetry is also an ideal form for naming the fierce beauty of contemporary Indigenous personhood. (60) // He says E. Pauline Johnson’s poetry is “very much concerned with the question of Indigenous humanity.” (61) “The book is named The White Wampum in reference to what is often considered the peace colour of wampum [a traditional shell bead], with the darker purple beads being representative of conflict or discord. Yet so many of Johnson’s poems in the collection are fierce condemnations of Canada’s inhumanity, spoken in the voices of defiant Indigenous women taking steady and unflinching aim at the blind self-justifications of the patriarchal Canadian state and its citizenry.” (63) // He also says, “This isn’t the Pauline Johnson many Canadian readers grew up with; this isn’t the Johnson that Canada regards as its own.” (63) (I encourage you to read his book—and The White Wampum—to find out more about her complicated relationship with Canada.) // I haven’t even shared any lines of her poetry yet. See my stories—and the comments—for some samples. #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth
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  • Another beautiful board book for our Bamboo Libraries! Because our libraries are open-air, and the weather here is super hot and humid for half the year and super hot and dusty for the other half, board books hold up the best. // “In this sweet and lyrical board book from the creators of the bestselling Little You, gentle rhythmic text captures the wonder new parents feel as they welcome baby into the world. A celebration of the bond between parent and child, this is the perfect song to share with your little ones.” (Amazon) // I was excited to discover that this book is also available from Orca Publishers as a dual-language paperback (Plains Cree and English) for just $2.54. (what??) It breaks my heart that so many Indigenous languages have been lost forever, and I think it’s so important to help the ones that are still around to thrive. In Louise Erdrich’s wonderful Birchbark House series for kids, she talks a lot about the Ojibwe language and how the people used to just memorize everything instead of writing it down. Young Omakayas is amazed when she discovers that the priest is writing down Ojibwe words, not just words in his own language. “Omakayas’s heart pounded. She was on the trail of this learning, but she had written only white people sounds. She wanted to know how she could write words out of sounds in her own language.” (188) // We have lots of English books with black and brown characters in our Bamboo Libraries, but even more importantly, we stock them with as many Khmer (Cambodian language) books as we can afford. If you’d like to sponsor any Khmer books, let me know. They range from $2.00 to $5.00 each. #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth
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  • This is one of those books I read on my Kindle and really wish I would’ve been able to hold in my hands as a physical book. It’s a work of art. It’s gorgeous. And really important. // “Whether looking back to a troubled past or welcoming a hopeful future, the powerful voices of Indigenous women across North America resound in this book... #Not Your Princess presents an eclectic collection of poems, essays, interviews, and art that combine to express the experience of being a Native woman. Stories of abuse, humiliation, and stereotyping are countered by the voices of passionate women making themselves heard and demanding change. Sometimes angry, often reflective, but always strong, the women in this book will give teen readers insight into the lives of women who, for so long, have been virtually invisible.” (Amazon) // From “The Things We Taught Our Daughters” by Helen Knott (Dane Zaa/Cree): sometimes we taught them silence / to let the secrets stay on their lips / sometimes we taught them to look away / to forget and not bear witness / we showed them how / to play hide-and-seek / with historical afflictions / to pretend that the monsters from the closet / Didn’t escape. Don’t exist. Are not real… / somewhere we learned how to create an asylum / for the very things /that plague our dreams / somewhere we learned blind eyes and buried skeletons / provide just enough relief / to live just enough / without ever really living. (44) // Nathalie Bertin (Metis): “We never learned about Indigenous communities in school. My mom never told us about our Indigenous roots. I spent the first twenty-five years of my life feeling incomplete. Now almost twenty-five years later, I still can’t help but feel ripped off and angry that my culture was kept from me. It feels like someone stole a piece of my soul—and I’ve been working ever since to get it back.” (55) // I highly recommend this gorgeous, moving book. #lisacharleyboy #marybethleatherdale #notyourprincess #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth
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  • This gorgeous book changed me. I’m a fast reader, but I took my sweet time with this one (pun intended). I had heard nothing but praise for this book, and it did not disappoint. It was like balm to my soul. I’ll be thinking about it—and referring back to it—for a long, long time. It took me almost as long to type up all the beautiful quotes I’d underlined as it did to read the book. // She offers us Braiding Sweetgrass as a “braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world. This braid is woven from three strands: indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service of what matters most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with the earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.” (x) // “I’m a plant scientist and I want to be clear, but I am also a poet and the world speaks to me in metaphor.” (29) // “Plants mirror changes in culture and ownership of land. Today this field is choked by a vigorous sward of foreign plants that the first sweetgrass pickers would not recognize: quackgrass, timothy, clover, daisies. A way of invasive purple loosestrife threatens from along the slough. To restore sweetgrass here we’ll need to loosen the hold of the colonists, opening a way for the return of the natives.” (261) // I’ll keep sharing quotes in the days to come. HIGHLY RECOMMEND this treasure of a book. #RobinWallKimmerer #IndigAThon #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth
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  • This book is infuriating and horrifying, and we U.S. Americans (white folks in particular) have a responsibility to know the truth about how our country came to be. It should be required reading for every U.S. citizen. // “I have lived with this book for six years starting over a dozen times before I settled on this narrative thread… Although it was to be a history of the United States as experienced by Indigenous inhabitants, how could I possibly do justice to that varied experience over a span of two centuries? How could I make it comprehensible to the general reader who would likely have little knowledge of Native American history on one hand, but might consciously or unconsciously have a set of narrative of US history on the other? … Indigenous survival as peoples is due to centuries of resistance and storytelling passed through the generations, and I sought to demonstrate that this survival is dynamic, not passive. Surviving genocide, by whatever means, is resistance: non-Indians must know this in order to more accurately understand the history of the United States. My hope is that this book will be a springboard to dialogue about history, the present reality of Indigenous peoples’ experience, and the meaning and future of the United States itself.” // “To learn and know this history is both a necessity and a responsibility to the ancestors and descendants of all parties.” (1) // “The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism—the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft.” (2) // “To say that the United States is a colonialist settler-state is not to make an accusation but rather to face historical reality, without which consideration not much in US history makes sense, unless Indigenous people are erased. But Indigenous nations, through resistance, have survived and bear witness to this history.” (6) // Lots more quotes in the comments. #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth
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  • Happy Sunday! Today’s #SundaySixStack is another edition of #SpinePoetry, where you stack books to make a poem, reading the titles from top to bottom. This one is called Little You and is made up of books by Indigenous authors: Little You, My Heart Fills With Happiness. We Sang You Home The Birchbark House. Glory Happening There There. From top to bottom: Little You (@richardvancamp and @julie_flett); My Heart Fills With Happiness (@moniquegraysmith); We Sang You Home (@richardvancamp and @julie_flett); The Birchbark House (#louiseerdrich); Glory Happening (@kaitlincurtice); There There (#tommyorange). #SpinePoetry #SundaySixStack #IndigenousBooks #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth #IndigAThon
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  • The author comes from a long line of people who loved books and encouraged her to read voraciously and to become a writer. I love that. She talks of hummah-hah stories in which humans converse with animals. “As I got older, I realized the clouds and winds and rivers also have their ways of communication; I became interested in what these entities had to say. My imagination became engaged in discovering what can be known without words. Stories themselves have spirit and being.” (45) // “The old folks used to admonish us to leave things as they are, not to disturb the natural world or her creatures because this would disrupt and endanger everything, including us humans.” (69) // She makes friends with rattlesnakes & pack rats & grasshoppers & hummingbirds & lizards & rocks & clouds & star beings, and she sincerely believes they communicate with her and send her messages. And, while I’m tempted to think that’s a bit hokey, it’s really no different than ideas we have about God—talking to us, sending God’s spirit to live inside us. The Bible even says that, if we don’t share the good news, the rocks will cry out for us. // “From the evidence in ancient Pueblo kiva frescoes and in the petroglyphs and pictographs of the Southwest and Mexico, before they return to this planet, the Star Beings customarily make contact with the dreams and imaginations of selected artists whose consciousness is open to them.” (136) I would love for a Star Being to make contact with me, but I’m afraid I have a lot of work to do to open my consciousness first. // She collects rocks, particularly turquoise ones, and keeps them on her writing desk. I kind of have a thing for rocks too, but my writing desk right now is my bed (or the kitchen table), neither of which is a great place for a rock collection. // I have a deep desire to connect more with nature, and I’m thankful for Indigenous authors who inspire me to do just that. #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth
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  • Happy November! It’s Native American Heritage Month! I’ll be posting a book by an Indigenous author every day for the next 30 days, and I’m REALLY excited about it. This book, from Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, answered a lot of questions I had (and a bunch I never thought to ask). // “How much do you really know about totem poles, tipis, and Tonto? From Pocahontas to popular film and from reservation life to the ‘urban Indian’ experience, the experts at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian answer the most frequently asked questions and debunk the most common myths about Native Americans. You will discover the facts about sports mascots, casinos, dream catchers, and much more. Accessible and informative, this is the perfect introduction to the diverse, contemporary peoples of the Americas.” (back cover) // A sampling of questions: Do Indians do rain dances? Are dream catchers an authentic tradition? Did Indians have alphabets and writing before contact with Europeans? Did Native Americans use sign language? Why do Indians wear feathers? Why is the word “squaw” offensive? How have Native Americans viewed sexuality and gender? Why did the U.S. government force Indian children into boarding schools? What distinct roles did men and women play in Native communities? // This year (and not just in November), I’ve made a conscious effort to read more works by Indigenous authors. Daniel Heath Justice’s book, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter is a fabulous resource that sent my TBR list skyrocketing. I’m really excited to share a lot of awesome books with you this month. It will be so much fun to learn together! What’s your favorite book by an Indigenous author? (See comments for quotes from this book.) #nativeamericanheritagemonth
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