What are you reading?

'siyo!

What Native lit are folks currently reading or have recently read? Right now I'm rereading Citizen Indians by Lucy Maddox. It's an excellent book.

I most recently read The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative by Thomas King, who also wrote one of my favorite novels, Green Grass, Running Water. TAS explores and juxtaposes the storytelling styles of First Nations peoples with a more mainstream European/"Western"/Christian style, and the way each ties into a more general worldview. I'm really interested in the overall concepts, and I thought he made some really insightful observations and presented them in a way that really hit home. There's a good blend of humor and introspection to it. He also references a lot of contemporary works by First Nations authors who are writing for a First Nations audience rather than the American/Western mainstream. Highly recommended.

I agree, The Truth About Stories is excellent.

Okay, it's not a book, but I just subscribed to the weekly newspaper Indian Country Today. It's nice to read viewpoints that I simply cannot get in the mainstream press.

Rereading Custer Died for Your Sins by Vine Deloria and Red Power: The American Indians Fight for Freedom (2nd edition).

Right now I'm rereading Black Indian Slave Narratives edited by
Patrick Minges.

Just started rereading Solar Storms by Linda Hogan. It's one of my favorite books.

Writing exams for school, so I'm rereading a lot right now: Writing Indian Nations by Maureen Konkle, To Do Good to my Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751-1776 edtied by Laura J. Murray, and Manifest Manners by Gerald Vizenor.

I just got Spirit of the Harvest: North American Indian Cooking by Beverly Cox and Martin Jacobs. It has really beautiful photos and great recipies, as well as some good introductory materials by Clara Sue Kidwell. The text by Cox, however, is often problematic and racist, and for a non-Native audience. Too rarely does Cox connect the recipies with contemporary Native communities, some historical information is decontextualized or blurred, and some of her language (the use of the word "squaw" for Native women, for instance) has long been challenged by Native activists and scholars. Nevertheless, this has some wonderful recipies that are important in a process of decolonizing our diets. (I'm looking forward to reading Devon A. Mihesuah's Recovering Our Ancestors' Gardens as well.

What's good out there recently for Young Adult Natives? Most recently I've read The Poisonwood Bible, by Barabara Kingsolver, and it was the kind of book you wanted to read v-e-r-y slowly...I intend to reread it one day. Pigs in Heaven was awesome.

Have you read Grand Avenue by Greg Sarris? That's a good one. What age range are you looking for?

I just recently got the children's book Crossing Bok Chitto by Tim Tingle and illustrations by Jeanne Rorex Bridges. It's a beautiful book about a Choctaw girl who helps a Black family escape slavery. And I love Rorex Bridges illustrations, she's one of my favorite artists.

Excuse a whimsical detour: On the middle of my desk I have now Maria Hirszowicz: Industrial Sociology - An Introduction, Oxford, 1981. This after reading Thomas King: Green Grass, Running Water, and Vine Deloria, Jr.: Red Earth, White Lies, both on recommendation of native informants. I got Maria H. in a library give-away for nothing, and it is somewhat old, but I am examining if it recognizes, perhaps in the voices of native-minded whites, complaints about white society frequently piled up by natives.
Sure enough, it tried to pull me back to Jacques Ellul: " . . . the two most relevant features of modern technology are its rationality and its artificiality". Specifically, "Every intervention of technique is, in effect, a reduction of facts, forces, phenomena, means and instruments of the schema of logic." (Deloria complained about reductionism.) In particular, "Technique is opposed to nature. Art, artifice, artificial . . ." ('Technique' stalls the works linguistically a bit, because Ellul's translator apparently was unaware how glorious and automatically ok 'technology' is, when it refers to cell phones, outboard motors, and off-road pickup trucks, let alone automatic rifles, more than Clovis points.)
Although "real progress cannot be achieved by using a master key supplied by any of the big names of the past", Marx was an expert at diagnosing alienation. "We arrive at the result that man (the worker) feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions - eating, drinking and procreating, or at most also in his dwelling and in personal adornment - while in his human functions he is reduced to an animal. . . . " (Aside from Maria S., I ran into an interesting assessment by John Dewey in his Ethics, how Indians can be expected to live happily in Western poverty: In white America, the well-to-do make a sport of hunting and fishing during their holidays, that traditional Indians enjoyed as a matter of course almost all year, regardless of social status.) Both King and Deloria seemed to me to quietly work towards a synthesis, or perhaps just towards making white society actually work as advertised in its own propaganda. (Frances Fox Piven had the misfortune of thinking that poverty could be solved by just giving the poor the actual right and opportunity to vote, and finding then that after arduous work to change the voting laws and rules in line with the Constitution, the poor are still poor. When I see the chiefs politely hold out their hand, I sometimes wonder if they would be willing to study other cultures which were confronted with the assault of the West, like e.g. the Japanese in the 1800s, when an American war ship with latest gadgetry delivered an ultimatum to the Emperor, or the lesser Europeans in the times of Julius Caesar. These people ended up learning from and outdoing their oppressors - although it took up to 2000 years.)

Re-reading Emma Perez' The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Into History right now, and highly recommend it.

I'm in the middle of Jared Diamond's "Collapse." There are some interesting mentions of the Inuit in relation to the Norse settlements in Greenland and the Arctic. It also seems to break some new ground, at least to me, about Easter Island and the Pacific islands.

Currently reading Eckberg's book: "Stealing Indian Women: Native Slavery in the Illinois Country".

The book explores the very beginnings of Indian slavery in the trans-Mississippi area. It's really quite interesting.

Practicing Ethnohistory, by Patricia Kay Galloway, the best historian ever to come out of Mississippi, IMHO.

Currently reading ""Andele, the Mexican-Kiowa Captive: A Story of Real Life Among the Indians".

Interesting story essentially following a traditional pattern: boy abducted... adopted... goes home to original parents... returns to adopted family.

The First New Chronicle and Good Government by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. One of many writings my Native authors in the Americas during the European "Renaissance."

Currently rereading Jack Weatherford's Indian Givers. Just started a three week vacation to recover from a particularly brutal fall homeless street outreach effort and am working up inner fortitude and strength to read Ward Churchill's A Little Matter of Genocide.

Currently reading Tribes Of The Southern Woodlands in the Time-Life American Indians series. I bought the whole series on eBay last summer and am about halfway through it. Today in the mail I just got The Voice Of The Crane Echoes Afar: The Sociopolitical Organization Of The Lake Superior Ojibwa, 1640-1855, though it'll be a while before I can read it, I have an entire library of these things! (ETA: For some reason it's not touchstoning the second book I've named here.)

Reading books tangentially related: Traveling the Natchez Trace, The Devil's Backbone: The Story of the Natchez Trace, Wildflowers of the Natchez Trace, Native American Place Names in Mississippi.

I also found a book written by a school teacher on the Choctaw Reservation in Mississippi for the children. Can't remember the name of it just now. It's on my list for the future.

I just found Stolen Continents rumaging around in a used book store on the eastern shore. I am still looking for Helen Rountree's Eastern Shore (American) Indians of Virginia and Maryland or John Smith's Chesapeake Voyages, or really anything on the Pocomokes, Nanticokes, Assateaques, or other tribes living along Delmarva Peninsula. Any recommendations or hints about where to look for these books is greatly appreciated!

Our Savage Neighbors by Peter Silver. Fascinating look at the development of powerful anti-Indian rhetoric as a unifying force among fractious settlers. The setting is (mainly) Pennsylvania between the 1750s and the end of the Revolution. He argues that political leaders cultivated the idea of real or imagined victimization by Indians as the cornerstone of shared identity as "white people."

When the colony's Quaker government seemed insufficiently belligerent toward Indians, public ire turned on the Quakers as being indifferent to white suffering and in league with the "savages." (The myth of wicked white people inciting Indians to commit atrocities is a persistent theme in our history, at least since the "French and Indian War.")

This book is a major contribution to the "ethnohistory" of white intruders on Indian lands, just before and during the establishment of the USA.

Found another great book this month, although not one that you read cover-to-cover. Beginning Creek: Mvskoke Emponvkv is a textbook in the Muskogee Creek language, which I've been eager to learn for some time. A Creek language instructor in Oklahoma personally recommended this, and I'm pleased with it. The book comes with two audio CDs, including both practice exercises and some recordings of a story, songs, a formal speech, and a stomp dance. It's an accessible book, but also gives pointers to advanced scholarship on Creek linguistics. Now if only I knew someone else in Birmingham, Alabama, who wanted to practice the language!

I *love* this book.

Siyo!

I'm reading The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction by Robert Warrior.

From the Introduction to The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction by Robert Warrior where he quotes Joan W. Scott's essay "The Evidence of Experience":

"'Given the ubiquity of the term (experience),' Scott writes reluctantly, 'it seems more useful to work with it (instead of separating experience from language), to analyze its operations and to redefine its meaning. This entails focusing on processes of identity production, insisting on the discursive nature of "experience" and on the politics of it's construction. Experience is at once always already an interpretation and is in need of interpretation' (797)" (xxiii).
I think this approach is what I was searching for when the postmodernists' critiques of Indigenous histories upset me so much. It has never been that traditional Indigenous stories are 100% true in every iteration ever recorded, but traditional stories are also not 100% untrue to Native audiences interacting with a text. Before I read this I was unable to articulate what I have found as a Native perspective on literary criticism that is critical of the postmodern aversion to "voice" and "truth."

Then, Warrior gives us a quote a couple pages later by Shari Stone-Mediatore: "'experience-oriented writing brings into public discussion questions and concerns excluded in dominant ideologies, ideologies which sustain and are sustained by political and economic hierarchies' ('Chondra Mohanty,' 126)" (xxiv).

If I have the opportunity to teach another Native Lit class, I would have the class read Tom Holm's "Peoplehood Matrix" and then Robert Warrior's Introduction to The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction because, to use only the Peoplehood Matrix, or Vizenor's Survivance, or Daniel Heath Justice's community-based theories never fit perfectly for me. But Warrior, when he quotes Stone-Mediatore, has given me a new theory lens by which to read Native Literature from (at least for now): "'If we want to rehtink self-hoood in . . . pluralist, collective terms, we cannot simply assert fragmented identities; we need to reckon with the complexities of marginalized people's historically specific struggles' (127)" (xxv). I think that, if a class wants to analyze a Native literary text, it only makes sense to analyze how peoplehood is expressed in a specific historical moment.

Anyone else here interested in reviving this group? I'm not in school this year (graduate level Cherokee Studies at Western Carolina University) but I'm still reading.