Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

28. Joseph Bruchac, Skeleton Man.

One day Molly's parents didn't come home. Nor the next day. Nor the day after that. Eventually one of Molly's teachers figured out that her parents were missing and called social services. And social services placed her in the home of a man she had never before met nor heard of, but who claimed to be her uncle.

On the one hand, very definitely a creepy story, and effective in its creepiness. Molly is brave and clever and resourceful, and absolutely a heroine to be proud of.

On the other hand, the major plot point of being placed into someone's legal guardianship, and thereafter not being taken seriously that you don't know this person, that this person scares you, that this person is mistreating you? And that the people who do believe you can't help you because the law says they're not allowed to? That is not just a creepy story; that's some people's lives. And consequently, some people, like myself, will find it very difficult to sit back and enjoy this as a pleasantly creepy story.


29. Joseph Bruchac, Return of Skeleton Man.

After the first, I didn't have much desire to read the second, but it was already in my hands and I had enjoyed aspects of Bearwalker (reviewed below, and yes, I'm reviewing them in the order that makes sense, not in the order I read them) so much that I decided to give Return a go.

And I am very glad I did.

This is very much not a retread of the first book. ( Spoilers for the original book )

As in Bearwalker, Bruchac does some cool deconstruction of standard horror tropes: in this case, the action takes place around Día de los Muertos, but instead of the holiday being billed as creepy-creepy-exotic-ooh-creepy, Bruchac frames it as an indigenous holy day, and one that ultimately helps Molly and her family in their resistance against Skeleton Man.

There are more things I like, too. I'd recommend this even as a stand-alone, especially since Bruchac seems to recap most of what you need from the first book.


30. Joseph Bruchac, Bearwalker.

I fell all over myself with joy for most of the book. However, I do think Bruchac made a serious misstep at the end, so warnings for ablism, specifically (skip spoiler)


On to the review...

"You know," Willy says, "Camp Chuckamuck was built on an old Indian graveyard."

Now I roll my eyes. It always comes back to that. Every spooky place in America, it seems, was built on an old Indian graveyard. I'm as sick of hearing that as I am of being told that the only real Indians live west of the Mississippi.

And that, right there, is a big part of why I was so excited about this book. There's a lot of social commentary going on throughout. Some is foregrounded (Indian graveyards, above), some is backgrounded (no Indians east of the Mississippi, above), and some is woven into the action (for example, the way zero-tolerance anti-violence policies tend to make things more violent for victims of aggression, rather than less). One of the social subtexts in this story that I particularly enjoyed is that the elderly characters, even while being physically frail, were people to be reckoned with. They had been invited to camp with the plan that they would become victims; in fact, their presence is a good part of the reason that the dastardly plan fails.

There are also a lot of rich details in the way Baron's Mohawk identity is portrayed. Skeleton Man and Return of were much briefer in their depictions -- Molly's Mohawk identity mostly came through in her knowledge of the traditional stories and the virtues and strategies they highlighted. Baron's world has many more NDN and specifically Mohawk markers in it: there are references to steelworkers, military service, basketball, clan membership, Mohawk language, and more. And there's cool stuff going on with overlapping and interlocking communities, too.

Basically, much coolness! I could list the coolnesses for quite a while. Which made the misstep at the end that I alluded to above that much more disappointing. Discussed behind the spoiler-cut (with black-outs, so people can comment without fear of spoiling themselves)...

( Read more... )

So, yeah. I can't wholeheartedly recommend Bearwalker. Even despite all the awesome in the first parts of the book. I wish I could! I really, really wish I could. :-(

(additional tags: Mohawk characters, Abenaki author, scary stories, middle grades)

Two signal boosts:

The editor of The Mammoth Book of Steampunk is looking for recs on what should be included in the collection. If you have a favorite POC-authored steampunk work, you might want to go rec it.

(List of POC-authored steampunk works that are available online; print-published works are also eligible, but I don't have a handy list for you.)



Joseph Bruchac is trying to bring Hidden Roots back into print via his own press, but Scholastic won't revert the rights back to him.

For those unfamiliar with the book, it's about an Abenaki family who has been hiding from the Vermont Eugenics Project. (Sorry for the cursory summary; I haven't yet read it.) Bruchac himself is Abenaki, and on this particular topic, I strongly desire to hear an Abenaki author. I am especially distressed to report that with Hidden Roots out of print, the only in-print MG/YA book about the Abenaki and the Vermont Eugenics Project is Darkness Under Water.

You can tell Scholastic your opinion of whether they should release the rights to Hidden Roots. Reblogging might also be helpful.

Both these selections are collected in Reasoning Together, by The Native Critics Collective, editors Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton.

nb: I have a STEM background, not a lit-crit background, which means that there are significant parts of these essays that went whoosh, right past my head. Someone with a lit-crit background may pull very different things from these essays.


21. Tol Foster (Anglo-Creek), "Of One Blood: An Argument for Relations and Regionality in Native American Literary Studies."

After a brief history of the classic biases coming out of the academy about Native Americans (not the least of which is casting Native people as "the Other" with a legitimate identity and existence only to the extent that they are unlike the "Americans" that they allegedly exist in opposition to -- a conceptualization, btw, which tends to cast contemporary Indians as not being "real" Indians), he instead looks to Native cultures as their own sources of critical theory:

Instead of looking for some theory to import into indigenous communities, we yield a far more rigorous understanding by both valuing and critiquing the historical and cultural archive as a theoretically sophisticated site of its own. One's history and experience can provide a testable and portable framework for understanding relations between individuals, institutions, and historical forces. Given these claims, I argue here that tribal figures like the Cherokee writer Will Rogers are historically suited actors who utilize the counternarratives of their communities as a theoretical base from which to conduct anticolonialist and cosmopolitan critique.

One of the key points of this essay comes back to "regionality": Will Rogers is a Cherokee writer, and one can and should go to Cherokee history, culture, and literature for context and insights to his work. To that end, Foster gives a capsule political and social history of the Cherokee and Creeks in Indian Territory, from Removal through the Civil War and Reconstruction and on to Oklahoma statehood, with special attention to issues of political alliances, sovereignty, and differing responses of the two tribes to incursions by non-Native African Americans and whites. (That history alone is worth the price of admission.) Within that context, there's then a discussion of the racial politics in Will Rogers' writing -- a discussion that highlighted for me a number of issues I've been poking at for a while now.

There's more good stuff in there, too -- including a discussion of the potential pitfalls of regional literary criticism (f'rex, overlooking members of the community that are commonly labeled as being outside of the community -- Afro-Creek writer Melvin Tolson -- or giving too much weight to the most culturally conservative parts of the community) but I want to emphasize that even people who don't "do" lit-crit can still get good stuff out of this article.

22. Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee), "'Go Away Water!' : Kinship Criticism and the Decolonization Imperative."

Tol Foster referred a few times to Daniel Heath Justice's essay, so I turned to that next. (And it's likely the only other essay I'll be reading from the volume for the forseeable future, because it was a weekend-loaner.)

Justice places discusses some of the problems of developing an ethical Native literary criticism, especially around peoplehood and decolonization. Again, there's the note that mainstream American definitions of Indians is centered around Indians being "the Other" -- a definition that disenfranchises Indians who are not Other enough -- while Native conceptions tend to center around peoplehood and community identity. Justice then illustrates these ideas with two intra-Native disputes about Native identity: Delphine Redshirt's (Oglala Sioux) charge that the Connecticut Pequot aren't "real" Indians, and the question of whether mixed-blood, urban Indians can be "real" Indians, especially if they're disconnected from land and community.

...and if you don't think that both of those discussions pushed my buttons hard, then you don't know me. However, Justice did a really nice job teasing out and clarifying a lot of my thoughts on both those issues, and both those critiques. And he did a nice job negotiating the ethical issues, in my opinion. There are big honkin' huge issues of context and regionality there -- it is not random that the first critique came from an Oglala full-blood -- and in my opinion, Justice did a nice job of honoring that while still centering the ethics of the situation.


...like I said, I'm not sure I'm going to make it through the rest of the anthology. Lit-crit is a seriously uphill battle for me, and I have to give this anthology back in a few hours. But these two essays alone were more than worth my time, and did a lot to clarify my thinking about certain thorny intra-Indian and intra-POC issues. If you "do" lit-crit, and if you're looking for insights into approaching Native writings, I recommend the anthology.

(additional tags: Creek; Cherokee)

18. Thomas King, "The One About Coyote Going West."
(Collected in An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, 1998, among other places.)

Coyote dropping by the narrator's for tea on her way out west to visit Raven and fix up the world, but deciding to stay a little while to hear the story of how Coyote, that clever one, that tricky one, created the world.

What was the first thing Coyote created? Not the rainbow, not the moon, not the oceans (and in fact, these things were never created by Coyote at all, neither first nor later). No, the first thing Coyote created was a Mistake. The second thing she created? Farts. And while she was busy creating farts, things that Coyote was supposed to have created got tired of waiting around on her and went ahead and created themselves, her Mistake went off and started ordering a bunch of things from the Sears catalog, and Coyote.... Well, that was when Coyote decided that the world had gotten messed up and needed some fixing.

That Coyote, she's a tricky one. You've got to keep your eye on her.

And the narrator? She's a tricky one, too. ;-)


19. Dennis Martinez, with Enrique Salmón and Melissa K. Nelson, "Restoring Indigenous History and Culture to Nature."
20. Greg Cajete, John Mohawk, and Julio Valladolid Rivera, "Re-Indigenization Defined."
(Both collected in Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future, 2008.)

"There is no Indian word for wilderness because there was no wilderness." -- Dennis Martinez

The Martinez article blew me away. Martinez does a lot of work with introducing Traditional Ecological Knowledge to ecologists; this article is an easily-accessible, conversation-format introduction to those ideas. Forget the trope about Indians walking lightly on the land, leaving nothing but footprints: Indian cultures cultivated entire ecosystems, but did/do so with a very different worldview and process than Euro-Americans use to manage ecosystems. Martinez uses "kincentric" to describe the indigenous ecosystem worldview -- one cannot (and should not!) attempt to control or impose one's will on an ecosystem, but one approaches the ecosystem as an equal partner with the other entities in it. ("We are comanagers with animals and plants. We don't have the right to extend anything [such as ethics]. What we have the right to do is to make our case, as human beings, to the natural world.") In terms of restoration and conservation, the goal is not to return "wild" areas to a "natural" state, but to use pre-conquest ecosystems as reference models for workable local stable-enough ecosystems, while looking to indigenous cultures for the processes and models that encourage the development of moderately-paced, human-inclusive coevolutionary ecosystems. (That's a lot of academic buzzwords, but that's because I'm trying to summarize. The article is pretty much buzzword-free.)

And if that isn't enough awesome for you, there's a ton of examples here of indigenous comanagement practices from Northern California through Alaska; discussions of how ecosystems, cultures, and languages cannot be preserved separately from each other, nor through documentation, but must be conserved in situ (and that includes doing things like developing viable economies in rural communities so that young people have the option to learn from elders); and discussion of how to bring non-Native rural people into the ecological framework Martinez proposes, in order to help them maintain and develop their ties to the land.

The second article is a wide-ranging conversation between the authors about re-indigenization, which Mohawk defines as envisioning the world in a "postconquest, postmodernist, postprogressive era... the re-biodiversity, the recultural diversity, the rethinking of the earth as a living being." Quite a lot of the discussion centers around contrasting currently dominant institutions and practices with indigenous institutions and practices, with a special emphasis on the biases and faults of the dominant systems, and some discussion of how those systems might be leveraged, used, or revamped toward re-indiginezation. This article/interview didn't hit me with the awesome the way the previous one did, but I suspect that's more a function of me than a function of the article -- I'm already familiar with a lot of the critiques in here, and don't feel much hope that re-indigenization on a broad scale is possible. But then, part of my lack of faith is based in the fact that these critiques aren't widely understood, and the remedy to that is to talk about these things more, not less, eh?

All said, I want to get my hands on this anthology.


(additional author tags: Cherokee, Canadian. O'odham, Crow; Rarámuri; Anishinaabe, Métis. Pueblo; Iroquois; Andean.)

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)

(Oh, but I'm behind with posting!)

5. Joseph Bruchac, Children of the Longhouse.

Set in a Mohawk town in 1491, Children of the Longhouse alternates between Ohkwa'ri and Otsi:stia, twin brother and sister, as they work together to outwit the town bully.

Even though the POV alternates between the pair, this is very much the brother's story. It is Ohkwa'ri who is threatened by the bully (even if Otsi:stia does much of the strategic thinking), and it is Ohkwa'ri who gets to do the exciting things, such as build a personal lodge in the forest or take an honorary role on the adults' team in the big lacrosse game. (I just went through the book again to see if I had overlooked cool stuff Otsi:stia did, but not so much: her chapters tend to relate what happened to her brother at the council meetings.)

By the way, the cover teaser -- "It's a man's game— but he's still a boy" -- is a stupid misrepresentation of both the tekwaarathon game depicted on the cover and the book itself. This isn't a book about a boy who has to, somehow, against all odds, live up to a man's role. Quite the opposite, in fact: the book is downright critical of what happens when boys have to find their own way into manhood (as has happened to the bully), and Bruchac places quite a lot of attention on how the adults care for and guide Ohkwa'ri and Otsi:stia. Bah, Puffin Books! Bah!


6. Joseph Bruchac, The Arrow Over the Door.

Bruchac's version of a story traditional among Friends (pdf) about an encounter between American Indians and Quakers during the American Revolution.

In Bruchac's version, French-speaking Abenaki travel south to investigate for themselves the war between the Songlismoniak (English) and the Bostoniak, in order to decide if it is in their best interest to join the war or not. There is a lot of excellent Native-centric historical framework set out here, and that alone is worth the price of the book, in my opinion. Bruchac makes it clear that there has already been a century of heavy interaction between Indians and Europeans, and that history has shaped both Indians and colonists. F'rinstance, the Abenakis and French cannot be distinguished from each other by clothing, and it is made clear that this not a case of Abenakis "modernizing" and adopting "European" clothing, but local clothing being a synthesis of both French and Indian cultures. Bruchac gives a quick review of the political situation from an Abenaki perspective, with the American Revolution being yet another intercolonial war, hot on the heels of the previous one, and the Abenaki characters are well aware that they are being recruited by King George in order to replace Indian allies that had left the war in disgust at imperial racism.

In addition to the Native-centric history, there's other subtle stuff going on in here that I like lots. One of the common tropes in white-authored children's lit about American Indians is the Indian kid who is embarrassed by his family and is considering turning his back on their way of life; in this book, that kid is the Quaker kid. (I laughed and laughed, when I realized.) Stands Straight, the kid on the Abenaki side of the story, feels no such conflict about his family -- and why should he? Unlike Friends in New York society, Stands Straight's family is not othered in his greater community, and Stands Straight is in no way convinced of European supremacy.

Bruchac's historical notes, in which he describes his research and explains the changes he made to the Quaker source material, are nearly as interesting as the book. The "original" source material was written much later than the events, and drips with racism and cultural improbabilities -- see the pdf linked above for details. No one seems to deny that the Quaker story is based on an actual event; however, it's not clear what the event actually was, other than that there were unspecified French-speaking Indians, a Quaker meeting for worship, and no bloodshed. While there is much fabrication in Bruchac's version, there was no less fabrication in the Quaker version -- both versions of the story are told with a particular goal in mind, and I like that Bruchac lays out his goals and reasoning for us.

My sole reservation about the book: Bruchac is quite a bit more laudatory about Quaker/Indian interactions than sets easy with me. While Quakers have a long and well-earned reputation for staunchly opposing virulent racism, the Equality Testimony did not prevent them from buying into white supremacy, which is unremarked upon here. Bruchac points out several things that do credit to Quakers, such as Ely S. Parker selecting Quakers to be Indian agents as part of his reforms of the BIA, but Bruchac declines to note areas where Quakers contributed to harm, such as supporting the Carlisle Indian Industrial School or running "civilizing" Indian schools of their own. I know that it's not Bruchac's job to push Quakers to be honest with themselves about their own history, but since Quaker tradition often runs toward self-congratulation with regards to racism, I would rather that Bruchac's praise had been a little more restrained, yanno?

3. Cynthia Leitich Smith, Tantalize.
4. Cynthia Leitich Smith, Eternal.

Both novels are set in the same world, but Eternal is a prequel to Tantalize. Even though the two books don't share any cast members in common, the sequence would have been nice to know going in: what happens to the Eternal cast sets up the possibilities established for the Tantalize storyline, and there are aspects of the two stories that seem not to mesh properly unless you realize that Eternal happens first. It's hard to say anything more concrete about the interrelationship of the two without spoiling the conclusions of both books, so let's just leave it there: Eternal happened first. Okay?

(Book three, by the way, is supposed to integrate both casts: yay! I want book three!)

Tantalize was a nice enough -- light, fast, funny -- for about the first half. The premise seemed a bit ridiculous and lightweight to hang an entire book on -- an Italian-American high-schooler, with the help of her uncle, is trying to retool the family Italian restaurant around a vampire theme -- but around the halfway mark the plot became OMG OMG OMG I CAN'T TALK TO YOU I'M READING OMG OMG. I wish the ending wasn't so young-adult-page-limit-reached, because I wanted a lot more book. It's sequel-ready, of course, but who wants to wait for the sequel? My favorite part in most novels is the middle third, where everything is deliciously messed up (similarly, my favorite part of any trilogy is always the second book) and Tantalize left off precisely at the point where it was ready to start hitting all my personal narrative buttons. (insert growl of pain here) MUST HAVE SEQUEL.

Eternal, to my disappointment, was not the sequel that Tantalize was setting up. Also, it's about a guardian angel, which is totally the sort of narrative device that makes me roll my eyes hard. But then Eternal caught me, too -- not as hard as Tantalize, but still, it caught me good and solid. And it resolved all its black-and-white good-and-evil stuff to my satisfaction (that is, good-and-evil does not, and cannot, crisply divide into black hats and white hats). And its conclusion makes me want the sequel -- which will be a crossover sequel for both books, apparently -- even more.

Some random things:

• In Tantalize, Quincie's boyfriend Kiernan is both Latino and half-werewolf. (Ethnicity =/= species! Yay!) He needs to join a wolfpack, for both his safety and emotional wholeness, but he can't just trot off and join: he as much doesn't fit among the Wolves as he does among non-Wolves. Even though biology is a major part of what makes one a Wolf, there is no biological essentialism to being a Wolf: if he is to join a pack, he has to study and learn and catch up on the things that he did not learn when he was growing up outside of a pack. He has to earn his way in.
  
  
• In Eternal, the heir to Dracula's throne is half-Taiwanese (I think -- I can't find the reference) and half-white. Dracula is a hereditary title, based on the Latin word for dragon, and it is thus customary to refer to the bearer as the Dragon, or to his heir as the Dragon Princess. Even so, Dracula executed the henchman who referred to her as the Dragon Lady.
  
  
• Dorky whitebread vampires in polo shirts and khakis.
  
  
• Weredeer! Werebears! Wereopossoms! Werearmadillos!