Oyate Fundraiser

[sanguinity]

What is Oyate?

Oyate is a Native organization working to see that our lives and histories are portrayed honestly, and so that all people will know our stories belong to us. For Indian children, it is as important as it has ever been for them to know who they are and what they come from. For all children, it is time to know and acknowledge the truths of history. Only then will they come to have the understanding and respect for each other that now, more than ever, will be necessary for life to continue.

The great Lakota leader, Tatanka Iotanka—Sitting Bull—said, “Let us put our minds together and see what life we will make for our children.” The great Cuban revolutionary, José Martí, said, “We work for children because children know how to love, because children are the hope of the world.” Our work is to nurture in our children a sense of self and community. Our hope is that they will grow up healthy and whole.

Our work includes critical evaluation of books and curricula with Indian themes, conducting of “Teaching Respect for Native Peoples” workshops and institutes; administration of a small resource center and reference library; and distribution of children’s, young adult, and teacher books and materials, with an emphasis on writing and illustration by Native people.

Our hope is that by making many excellent books available to encourage many more, especially from Native writers and artists. Oyate, our organization’s, is the Dakota word for people. It was given to us by a Dakota friend.

One of the prominent things Oyate does is to assess and critique children's books from American Indian perspectives, in an attempt to improve what portrayals are handed to children. Here's my own account of being raised on well-meaning but racist and distorted books that were supposed to teach me "pride in my heritage". And not just me: Oyate has collected many stories of children dealing with the fallout from bad books in their schools. Go read. Oyate's work matters.

Another big thing they do is to maintain a catalog of awesome children's books about American Indians, most of which are Native-authored. (And they make it easy to find out which books are Native-authored. Yay!) That catalog is a stunning resource. Unfortunately, if you go and click around for a while -- please do! -- you'll discover that it isn't very web-friendly as a book-selling mechanism. It's not searchable or sortable. There is no shopping cart. Indeed, you have to download a pdf order form, print it, fill it out with a pen or pencil, and send it in by snail mail.

How many people actually bother doing that, do you think?

Oyate has access to a matching grant in order to overhaul their website, including adding a proper shopping cart. But it's a matching grant, and the deadline for matching donations is this Saturday. As of this morning, they've got $1783 left to raise. This request is getting passed around IBARW already, but I think it's worth bringing to all y'all's attention, too: between us, we could probably do a bit to fill in that remaining $1783, no?

Oyate is doing a lot to bring books written by American Indians to people's attention, and they're working similarly hard to educate people that such books matter. Go chip something in, would you?

Origins of Chinese Food Culture, by Asiapac Books, illustrated by Fu Chunjiang. 41.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

A completely charming introduction to Chinese food culture, cooking theory, history, and folklore, thoroughly illustrated and told partly in comic book form.

I can’t guarantee the accuracy of the entire thing, but the material that I did recognize didn’t contradict what I already knew (except for the part that said that in America, tofu is sometimes used to make wedding cakes, which is probably true for some couple somewhere on cake wrecks), and the illustrations certainly have that meticulously researched look.

It begins with the discovery of cooking, when unhappy Early Men, often subject to stomach aches, find a burned goat after a forest fire: “Indeed, it smells good and it’s easy to chew, too.” The ensuing whirlwind tour of Chinese foodways touches on Confucius’s ten perfections of Chinese cuisine (like many key terms, these are helpfully shown in hanzi as well as English), banquet etiquette, superstitions and songs about chopsticks, regional cuisine, which foods should not be eaten together, and a great many anecdotes in comic book form about the origin of various foods, including one in which the ubiquitous Zhuge Liang improves his soldiers’ morale via a meat dumpling shaped like an enemy’s head. (There’s another story in which a guy shapes dough into the form of a tyrannical minister and fries it.)

Many of the food origin stories follow this pattern: Political problem; new dish invented; new dish cures ailing person, improves morale, or is used to metaphorically illuminate the political situation; political problem solved!

Yi Yin once carried his cooking utensils and used cooking methods and flavorings to persuade King Cheng Tang to take up leadership of the state and successfully overthrow the corrupt Xia Dynasty.

Comic book Yi Yin, magisterial: “Every food item has unique qualities. You are only the king of a small state. You can’t possibly sample all of the delicacies of this great land. You have to take control of all China, and become the emperor to possess everything.

A tremendously entertaining read in its own right, but also an excellent springboard for further study of Chinese food culture.

Check it out on Amazon: Origins Of Chinese Food Culture

The Talkative Man

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

19)R.K. Narayan's The Talkative Man, like The Vendor of Sweets which I previously reviewed, is a short portrait of Indian life, a comedy which thankfully doesn't end in a wedding. They feel similar in a sort of whimsical love of the people he's telling tales of, flaws and all. But they're very different books in character.

The Talkative Man's hero is T.M., a rich and idle ne'er-do-well who occupies himself telling other peoples' stories as both a journalist and a gossip until he gets sucked into participating in someone else's story. What struck me most about the story is how the most significant moments in the story are the moments when the Talkative Man is tongue-tied, whether when he is so cowed by the Commandant that he listens to her whole story or when he is so intent on avoiding injury that he refuses to tell the librarian of his granddaughter's plan to elope.

Without ever calling attention to it, Narayan steers the reader to a powerful conclusion about the significance of being talkative, and how to find the time and place for it. The more I read Narayan, the more I want to read more. He has so much to share with the reader.

When I finished this, I picked up Delany's Dhalgren. It scares the crap out of me. Wish me luck.