Shaman King by Mitsui Hideki

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Title: Shaman King
Author: Mitsui Hideki
Number of Pages: 220 pages
My Rating: 1.5/5

Wow, what a waste of time this book was. It is basically a retelling of the early volumes of Shaman King with a tiny bit of new content tacked on at the end. Seriously, while the jacket flap promised a new character exclusive to the novelisation (which is why I bought it, because I only wanted to read it if it was an original story, not a retelling of the manga), it was only about the last twenty pages that contained any new content.

I'm not sure who would be a good audience for this book, because it ends with a "to be continued" sort of vibe that means you're going to have to go read the manga to find out what happens to Yoh and Amidamaru and Manta and Anna and Ren and the whole Shaman Fight thing, but when you do, you'll be retreading old ground if you start from the beginning of the manga. And yet as a fan of the manga, it's really redundant.

I do, however, highly recommend the manga of Shaman King, which unlike this book has actually been released in English and is therefore more accessible to readers of this comm, I'm sure. Even though it has a non-ending ending, it's still worth it, IMO.

When Thunders Spoke; Black Hills: Sacred Hills

[sanguinity]

15. Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, When Thunders Spoke.

It's tricksy to summarize some of Sneve's books: by the time you've laid out enough of the different threads to be able to give a sense of what's happening and why it matters, what you've written isn't really a "summary" anymore. However...

Norman is fifteen, poor, and Sioux. In one thread of the story, Norman struggles with the white owner of his reservation's trading post, Mr. Brannon, who has been systematically cheating Norman over the agates that Norman collects on Thunder Butte. In another thread of the story, Norman's grandfather has had a holy dream that Norman should climb the traditional vision quest route on Thunder Butte -- a request Norman is happy enough to fulfill (in part because that side of the butte has been heretofore forbidden to him, and forbidden things have allure, but also because doing the climb is a simple way to please his grandfather).

...and it's hard to take the story any further than that without flattening it.

I liked When Thunders Spoke very much in its own right, but I also like it as a contrast to Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian -- which was a very good book, indeed, but one which appears to be running the danger of becoming the single story about teenagers and reservation poverty.

16. Tom Charging Eagle and Ron Zeilinger, Black Hills: Sacred Hills.

(Both of these authors are obscure. I'm somewhat confident that Tom Charging Eagle is Native; I have no idea about Ron Zellinger. If someone has better info, please let me know so I can correct this entry.)

Child-compatible^* picture book about the Lakota relationship to the Black Hills. Written in free verse, plural first person (such that "we" refers to the Lakota), with full-page black and white photographs of the Hills. Production values are low -- some of these photos are grainy at this size -- but I don't really care that much, because its mere existence kinda blows all other considerations away for me. Sure, low production values, yes, it's a cottage press, but who else would care enough to publish this? (The publishing house, Tipi Press, closed a few years ago, but apparently was part of St. Joseph's Indian School.)

Interestingly to me, the book repeatedly builds parallels between aspects of Christian faith and Lakota reverence for the Hills, using Christianity both as an analogy ("It is like the holy places of the Jews and Christians...") but also as validation for Lakota beliefs: "Our people today know / that it was the rock with held the body of Jesus / for three days after he died, / and it was the rock which Moses struck / to bring forth water to keep his people alive. / For all of us, / regardless of race and creed, / the rocks have a spiritual meaning." Christianity and Lakota spirituality are not in opposition here; in many ways, this book strives to ease any conflicts that Christian Lakota might feel between the two spiritual traditions.

Black Hills: Sacred Hills was published in 1987, not too long after the final ruling in United States v. Sioux Nation, in which the U.S. offered cash compensation to the Sioux for the Black Hills. The book's introduction walks through a timeline of the dispute, from the Fort Laramie treaty through the lawsuit and Bradley's act. The book ends with an allusion to the lawsuit, and the Sioux resolve with respect to it:

Our proud
and spiritual people
have been deprived of this sacred heritage,
yet they continue to cling to the belief
that this is a nation of law and order.

They believe
that in this land guided by the Constitution,
that all men are created equal
and blessed by their Creator with rights and liberties.
Therefore,
they seek to regain what is rightfully theirs
according to solemn treaties.

The book then closes with a quote from Frank Fools Crow's speech, "We Shall Never Sell Our Sacred Black Hills."

* I'm loathe to say it is a children's book, mostly because of the way that traditional Native stories are systematically and inappropriately repackaged as children's stories by non-Native authors, editors, and publishers. This isn't a traditional story, per se, but the "could be for kids, thus is for kids" error could as easily apply to this volume as a traditional story, I think, and thus my hesitation.

(additional tags: Lakota)