Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

24. Cynthia Leitich Smith, Blessed.

I liked Eternal. I did. But I was still stuck on the cliffhanger ending of Tantalize, and getting a prequel with an independent cast for the second volume was... well, a prequel with an independent cast. I wanted Quincie and Kiernan back, damnit. And I needed to know if (rot13) Dhvapvr jnf qnzarq be abg. Yes, I wanted to trust Smith. But there's trust, and then there's trust. You know how it is.

So when I finally, finally, got my hands on a copy of Blessed, I inhaled it. I had a stupid-ass work schedule with exactly one full day off in a five week period, and I spent that whole day on the couch with Blessed. (Don't bug me, I'm reading.)

Blessed begins mere minutes after the end of Tantalize (yay!), which means that enjoying the one is fully dependent on having read and enjoyed the other. Some of the cast/events/society of Eternal shows up, but you could probably get by okay without having read Eternal, if you wanted to.

You could also probably get by okay without having read Stoker's Dracula, but there's a lot more to enjoy here if you have. As Smith says in her author's note

Blessed and my two novels that preceded it -- Tantalize and Eternal -- are a conversation of sorts between me and Stoker about several of his themes, including the "other," the "dark" foreigner, invasion, plague, the lore of religion, and gender-power dynamics.

The conversation-with-Stoker elements were not particularly prominent in the other two novels, but the plot of Blessed hinges on the plot of Dracula. Smith tells you what you need to know as she goes, but I'm guessing it goes a lot more smoothly if you've read the scenes the characters are discussing.

...and it's hard to find anything to say about it that doesn't reek of spoilers, but which I didn't already say about the first two books.

( So, spoilers. )



23. Cynthia Leitich Smith, "Haunted Love" (collected in Immortal: Love Stories with Bite).

(different count, because I'm keeping track of isolated short stories and essays separately from full books)

I was jonesing for more Smith, and even though I'm not a fan of the vampire genre in general, individual stories and novels can work for me, especially if it's by an author I otherwise like. (Oddly, the Tantalize/Eternal/Blessed series doesn't ping "vampire" for me, despite being about vampires. Go figure.)

"Haunted Love" is about a teenage boy in a small South Texas town who unwittingly became a vampire via a mail order pyramid scheme in a desperate bid to defend himself against his abusive uncle.

And right there, I'm sold. But that's all backstory.

Cody doesn't regret becoming a vampire, not much, but he's now trying to figure out how to make a go of it in a town small enough that everyone knows everyone else's business (awkward, when one is a vampire and a murderer), and small enough that there's not much of an economy anymore. He's got his hopes pinned on reopening the town's movie house: maybe, by the time people notice he doesn't age anymore, he'll have become such a fixture of the town's life that they don't mind. (Ah, classic cinemas. Again, I'm sold.)

By the time we're done, the story has gone off toward mystery and romance, as well as vampires, but y'know, I enjoyed it. I'd definitely check out more of her short stories, vampire fic or not.


(Additional tags: creek/muscogee author, vampires)

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.)