Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline

And then the creature dipped its head, tucking its narrow snout into its chest. In a moment its legs unfolded, covered in dark fur and bent like a dog's, but much too long. It stood up on its rear paws, which were the size of an adult's splayed hand, revealing a torso that was sleek and wrapped in fur but without the barrel of protruding canine ribs. This chest was flatter and wider, muscled like a man's. The face was dominated by glint and wet--bright yellow eyes rimmed with a pink third lid, and a mouth rammed with splintery teeth, too many to comprehend.

Joan's husband Victor has been gone for over a year, but she hasn't given up searching. Her family suspects he has left her, but her grandmother and her friend, a foul-mouthed elder named Ajean, know there are dangers in the northern Ontario woods where their Metis community is located. Joan grew up hearing stories of the rogarou, the fearsome werewolf-like creature that possesses a man, wearing his skin like a suit, making him forget he was a man. When Joan discovers Victor has become a traveling preacher under the name Eugene Wolff (get it), she realizes that he has been possessed by the malevolent rogarou--but is it Victor who is the rogarou, or the sinister German man bankrolling the Reverend Wolff's tent revival?

The rogarou, in Cherie Dimaline's Empire of the Wild, is a representation of all the malicious forces that drive the Metis, the descendants of Cree and French voyageurs, off of their traditional homes. Just before his disappearance, Joan and Victor argued about his desire to sell a tract of valuable lakefront property to white developers--a lucrative deal, to be sure, but one that would leave the Metis pushed back once again into the depths of the woods. When Joan confronts Heiser, the sinister German, he confesses that the tent revival is the perfect thing to distract "Indians" from the pipeline being built in their backyard, pipelines which will make him even richer.

There's an interesting distinction the novel make between revival-style evangelical Christianity, which is a lie and a distraction, and the traditional Catholicism of Joan's Metis family, which, like the traditional beliefs that help ward off the rogarou, are potent and communitarian. Heiser, for his part, turns out to be a Wolffsegner, which--I'm only guessing here--is a figure of Germanic legend who control wolves, including rogarous. It's Victor who is the rogarou, the betrayer figure who is taken in, like possession, by the insane idea to give away the land. Heiser is the white European all to ready to make use of those who would betray the Metis community from the inside.

I suspected as much going into it, but despite the interesting First Nations cultural gloss, Empire of Wild struck me as a standard pulp thriller, the kind of book with obscene grandmas and plucky teen sidekicks, and where people say things like, "I knew it was you, you son of a bitch!" There's something all-too cinematic about it, as if the book itself exists to be turned into a film or a television show, where the horror and suspense can be buoyed by special effect and swelling strings. As a book, though, it wasn't for me.

Miko Kings by LeAnne Howe

"You know, just about everyone in America believes Abner Doubleday invented baseball."

"A myth," says Ezol, touching the water glass absentmindedly, then pushing it away. "How plausible is it that white people, who live by the clock and sword, would invent a game without time, one that must be played counter-clockwise?"

The 1907 Miko Kings out of the town of Ada are the greatest Indian baseball team that ever lived. They are anchored by Blip Bleen, the Indian Territory's most powerful hitter, and Hope Little Leader, their tenacious and brilliant pitcher. Their ultimate test: a nine-game series against the Seventh Cavalrymen out of Fort Sill, the very same U.S. Army outpost that keeps the warrior Geronimo imprisoned or own show, and whose supporters have not forgotten Custer's Last Stand. The symbolism isn't lost on anybody, but for many the game is reenacting these in even more literal ways, like the gamblers who stand to take over the Miko Kings if they lose the ninth game. The game comes at the pinnacle of the allotment era of U.S.-Native relations, when everything that the Indians own has begun to pass into white hands.

I loved LeAnne Howe's play Savage Conversations, which imagines a relationship between Mary Todd Lincoln and a the spirit of a "Savage Indian" killed by her husband, the president, in Minnesota. There are many echoes of the play in Miko Kings, especially in the way history becomes instantiated in a spirit or apparition: the story of the Miko Kings is collected by a Choctaw journalist who is visited by the ghost of Ezol Day, the brilliant young postal clerk and lover of Blip Bleen, who was a witness to the climactic series nearly a hundred years prior. Ezol insists to the journalist that baseball is an Indian game, and that its strangeness--"a game without time, one that must be played counter-clockwise"--has its echoes in the same Choctaw language and philosophy that allow her to time travel to the future and converse with her descendant. A large section of the novel's middle is designed to represent Ezol's first-hand diaries and correspondence, down to the childish script, along with cuttings from newspapers and photographs.

Miko Kings echoes Savage Conversations, too, in its interest in bodily mutilation, as in the sections where we see an aged Hope Little Leader, languishing in an old folks' home in the 1960s and missing his hands. The story of how Hope lost his hands, we suspect, will turn out to be the same story as the final game against the Seventh Cavalrymen. And though the novel has an essential optimism, I think, centered on the metaphorical possibility of returning through time, the loss of Hope's hands seems to suggest an irrevocable loss that mirrors the loss of land, the loss of place, the loss of community. Losing these things, Howe suggests, we lose a part of ourselves.

There are a few too many ideas in Miko Kings, I think, in too little space. I was never quite able to mentally incorporate the story of Justine, Hope's beloved, who becomes a Black nationalist militant in New Orleans. And the skipping between narrative points of view--from Hope to Ezol to the Kings' owner to a journalist interviewing Justine--took some of the power away from the frame narrative, which comes out of the narrator's research into the Kings and her own past. But Miko Kings is bold and inventive, and it seems silly to complain that it is too full of riches. I hate conceding that there's anything cosmic or profound about baseball people, because baseball people are annoying about that sort of thing. But Miko Kings persuaded me.

White Magic by Elissa Washuta

White occultists' fascination with caricatures of Indigeneity turns up in so many corners of New Age, metaphysical, and occult practice. It always has. In the late 1800s, white people asked long-hared Indian spirit maidens to visit seance tables and tell them how to live. In the 1940s, white people visiting a Manitoba residential school offered candy to starving Indigenous children to secure their participation in a study about whether they could, using Indian senses, read researchers' minds.

I don't know what a vibration is. I know that for thousands of years, my people have had an agreement with the salmon that they will allow us to eat them, and every year, in honor of this relationship, we take a fish from the river, kill it, cook it the way we always have, and eat the flesh. This is not magic, black or white: it's tending and care.

Magic is a seductive idea. Astrology, crystals, tarot--these pursuits that seek to locate and harness an influence on human life that exists outside of both the scientific and the religious--remain as popular as ever. They offer, perhaps, the possibility of control when life seems beyond control, not merely because fate is fickle, but because the world is organized to keep control in the hands of some and out of the hands of others. But even the world of magic is not immune from this. In her essay collection, Cowlitz writer Elissa Washuta highlights the double meaning of "white magic," which in one sense represents the way that whiteness has appropriated Native practices--sage, dreamcatchers, etc.--for their own use. A real white magic, a magic that is used for healing, is not just separate from whiteness but opposes it; it works to heal, and the wounds of racism, anti-indigeneity, and sexism are some of the most powerful in existence.

I'm not really the right audience for the "personal essay." There's something about it, and about White Magic specifically, that makes me feel like a voyeur, looking over someone's shoulder while they talk to their therapist. There's an unfinished quality to them that is epitomized in these essays, by which I mean are about the process of self-investigation and discovery, not merely cognizant of the way resolution and closure are elusive, but written before the possibility of resolution and closure even presents itself. If a memoir is in past tense, the personal essay is the present tense. For that reason, the focus of White Magic on Washuta's trauma made me frustrated, made me squirm. That's the point, of course. And it goes without saying that it takes an enormous amount of bravery to be so vulnerable on the page, to write about rape and addiction, and perhaps even more bravery to write about these things with so little distance.

White Magic is suffused with popular culture, and television and internet culture specifically. The process of self-reflection, for Washuta, passes through Tinder, Instagram, Wikipedia, Twin Peaks, Fleetwood Mac, Oregon Trail, and even former Twitter main character "cliff wife": "This never would've happened to me. I would not walk a cliff's edge. I'm afraid of heights. America would love to shove me off. No, actually, America asks me to do it myself." There's a risk of silliness to this, but how many among us can deny that Twitter has an outsized role in the production of our public and private selves? The essays seem to me to avoid clear theses in favor of a style that jumps from these cultural products to the personal and back again, exploring what Washuta calls "synchronicities." Finding oneself in a meme or a YouTube video is not so different than pulling the right card from the tarot deck.

The most successful essay, to me, recounts Washuta's months-long experience as the "writer-in-residence" for the Fremont Bridge in Seattle. Washuta's application was chosen because she wanted to write about the bridge from an indigenous perspective: the bridge passes over a canal that, when built, obliterated a traditional Duwamish meeting place. A Duwamish story says that a river monster once lived in this place, but disappeared; Washuta hoped to discover why it went away. From her perch above canal Washuta looks down superyachts cruising through the place where the Duwamish and the salmon no longer are, and thinks on the ways in which the scarring of the earth overlaps with the scarring of the self, and how the same historical forces are at work. I found White Magic most effective when it is about place, in this essay, but elsewhere also, as when Washuta recounts the story of the sacrificial Native maiden who gives Jenny Jump mountain in her home state of New Jersey its name, or in a playthrough of Oregon Trail II, searching for the indigenous presence in the Cowlitz lands that were taken from her forebears.

At the end of her experience on the bridge, Washuta is forced to admit she has no idea why the river monster went away. She can barely write the piece she was given a stipend to write. She turns to magic to make the spirits in things come back again--a tolerable self, the "twin flame" of love--but the results are yet to be determined there, too. I don't believe in astrology; I don't believe in magic, but these essays made me understand why you would.

The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday

I remember coming out upon the northern Great Plains in the late spring. There were meadows of blue and yellow wildflowers on the slopes, and I could see the still, sunlit plain below, reaching away out of sight. At first there is no discrimination in the eye, nothing but the land itself, whole and impenetrable. But then the smallest things began to stand out of the depths--herds and rivers and groves--and each of these has perfect being in terms of distance and of silence and of age. Yes, I thought, now I see the earth as it really is; never again will I see things as I saw them yesterday or the day before.

The Kiowa people, as their stories say, came out of the Rocky Mountains and into the Great Plains hundreds of years ago, settling in central Oklahoma by a hill called Rainy Mountain. The hallmarks of Kiowa culture were developed along the way: their religion, centered on a figure called Tai-me, their ways of hunting, the horse prowess that helped them, along with the Comanches, dominated the southern plains for a century and a half. When his grandmother died, N. Scott Momaday--a Kiowa who grew up not, like his grandmother, near Rainy Mountain, but in New Mexico--decided to follow the footsteps of the first Kiowa to his grandmother's home, and The Way to Rainy Mountain records his observations.

But Momaday's travels and reminiscences only make up a third of the book. "The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices," he writes. "The first is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice." The first vignette, for example, begins with Momaday's father's voice telling the story of the ancient Kiowa emerging into the world through a hollow log. On the opposite page, the historical voice tells us, "They called themselves Kwuda and later Tepda, both of which mean 'coming out.'" And below that, Momaday records his own impressions of coming out into the plains for the first time, the beautiful and simple description I have excerpted at the top of the page.

"There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout," Momaday writes, "a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself." The three voices, woven together, have a remarkable cumulative power. When they seem markedly different, they seem to suggest that the present and the past can rhyme, and that even though our language puts us at a great distance from our ancestors, something between us remains unbroken. When the voices seem strangely similar, as happens more and more later in the book, as Al Momaday's stories of the past combine with Momaday's own memory of his grandparents and great-grandparents, the past seems somehow literally present--transubstantiated. And while, as David Treuer notes in Native American Fiction: A User's Guide, claims about modernist writers drawing from oral culture are often cant, one can see how the voice of legend has influenced the style Momaday uses here and in A House Made of Dawn. Al, like N. Scott, has a way with words, and more: the book is illustrated with very impressive black-and-white drawings by Al himself.

I was touched by The Way to Rainy Mountain. Clearly the book emerges from grief, grief over the loss of Momaday's grandmother, but a loss, too, of a living link to the past at a time when the Kiowa language and culture are at risk of disappearing. Wouldn't it be a shame if the "historical voice" were the only one that remained? But Momaday's pilgrimage to Rainy Mountain, and the threading of voices together into a single tight braid, seem like a preservative and hopeful act. 

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

He had been night watchman for seven months. In the beginning, his post as chairman of the Turtle Mountain Advisory Committee could be dealt with in the late afternoons and evenings. He'd been able to sleep most mornings after his shift. When lucky, like tonight, he even grabbed an additional catnap before driving to work. But every so often the government remembered the Indians. And when they did, they always tried to solve Indians, thought Thomas. They solve us by getting rid of us. And do they tell us when they plan to get rid of us? Ha and ha. He had received no word from the government. By reading the Minot Daily News, he'd found out something was up. Then Moses had to pry the papers out of his contact down in Aberdeen. It had taken precious time to even get confirmation, or see the actual House Resolution stating, as its author said, that the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa was targeted by the United States Congress for emancipation. E-man-ci-pation. Eman-cipaton. The word would not stop banging around in his head. Emancipated. But they were not enslaved. Freed from being Indians was the idea. Emancipated from their land. Freed from the treaties that Thomas's father and grandfather had signed and that were promised to last forever. So as usual, by getting rid of us, the Indian problem would be solved.

Overnight the tribal chairman job had turned into a struggle to remain a problem. To not be solved.

Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at a jewel bearing plant on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. His name means muskrat, the humble creature who, in Ojibwe myth, descended to the bottom of the waters that covered the world at its birth and retrieved a bit of earth when no other animal could. As night watchman, and as the reservation's part-time chairman--a thankless and unpaid role--Thomas is like his namesake, doing the unseen work that maintains the reservation and its residents. Thomas is about to face his, and the reservation's, greatest challenge in decades: termination.

In his history book The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer describes the Termination era as one of the epochs of Indian history after the Wounded Knee Massacre. It comes after the boarding school era, in which Indian children were forced to attend assimilationist schools that would expunge the Indian from them, and termination, too, is a kind of erasure: it would dissolve the reservation completely, forfeiting the responsibility for the land and its people to the state rather than the federal government, and relocating many of its impoverished residents to large cities. Termination, like so much shitty conservative policy today, was justified by arguments about self-reliance. "You learn to walk by walking," a pro-termination Senator tells Thomas on the Senate floor. Thomas thinks: "We didn't get to the Turtle Mountains by riding in a covered wagon." The hard work of countering termination--persuading the residents it's a bad idea, making petitions, commissioning studies--is Thomas' version of descending to the bottom of the waters of the world.

Though he's the title character, Thomas' story is often overshadowed by that of Patrice "Pixie" Paranteau, his niece and an employee at the jewel bearing plant. Patrice, dogged and determined, is worried about her sister Vera, who has disappeared into Minneapolis among pimps and addicts. On a trip to find her, it looks for a moment as if Patrice may follow into her footsteps, impulsively taking a job as an erotic dancer in a lumberjack-themed bar, where she's dressed as Babe the Blue Ox. (It's weird.) Vera's disappearance, and the threat to Patrice, are like sirens warning against what might happen if termination is allowed to go through: forced relocation to the city, to addiction, to crime, to dissolution. Returning home, Patrice's story becomes about her difficulty managing several suitors, including a charismatic Ojibwe boxer and a clueless white math teacher--but I didn't think these storylines had nearly as much energy or cleverness as her odyssey in the city, which ends, I felt, much too soon.

It's touching to know that Thomas is based on Erdrich's grandfather, who really was the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, and who really did spearhead the campaign--a successful campaign--to save Turtle Mountain from termination. But it's Patrice who interests Erdrich most, I think, the headstrong young woman who is on the precipice of deciding who she is and what she wants. How could someone like Patrice do something like that, torn from the community in which she was born, where she knows the names and uses of the plants, where she lives with her mother by the "old ways," where she can sleep in a cave alongside a hibernating bear, where she can see the spirits of her ancestors as the Northern Lights in the sky? Thomas might be the novel's heart, but Patrice represents its stakes.

Erdrich's early novels and stories are interconnected, featuring a huge cast that appears and reappears from different angles in a way that make you feel as if you are deepening your understanding of them the more books you read. Her later work, like this novel and the two before it, LaRose and The Future Home of the Living God, seem like attempts to reproduce the breadth of those early books with fresh faces. Though it doesn't always work, and never as persuasively as in Tracks or The Bingo Palace, The Night Watchman is probably the most successful of these attempts. I hope she'll consider writing more about Patrice and Thomas, the humble muskrat.

Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt

It is hard to follow one great vision of this world of darkness and of many changing shadows. Among those shadows men get lost.

"My friend," said Nicholas Black Elk to the poet and writer John G. Neihardt on his visit to Black Elk's home near Manderson, South Dakota in the 1930's, "I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I should not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow? So many other men have lived and shall live that story, to be grass upon the hill." And yet, though many Lakota (and Cheyenne and Arapaho) lived alongside Black Elk during the Indian Wars of the late 19th century, few stories in their own words seem to remain. I was struck, actually, reading Neihardt's version of Black Elk's life, that I have never read about these conflicts in the words of those who suffered most in them at all.

There is some controversy, I think, surrounding the question of how much in Black Elk Speaks is Black Elk and how much is Neihardt, and certainly Black Elk's words have been filtered twice over, once through his translator and son Ben Black Elk, and then again through Neihardt's lucid and elegant poetic sensibility. But even taken with a grain of salt, the book is remarkable. Black Elk's life touches upon all the tumultuous events of the Indian Wars, from the skirmishes and assassination of Crazy Horse to the Ghost Dance craze that led ultimately to the killing of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee.

But I loved hearing, too, about Black Elk's journey to the east and to Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, complete with his descriptions of Riker's Island ("This made me feel very sad, because my people too were penned up in islands, and maybe that was the way the Wasichus were going to treat them") and Queen Victoria, whom the Lakota call, amazingly, Grandmother England ("She was little but fat and we liked her, because she was good to us"). And I was moved by the Black Elk's description of the starvation and humiliation the Lakota faced at the hands of the United States, who lied when they told the Lakota they would keep their lands as long as the grass grew long and the water flowed. "You can see that it is not the grass and the water that have forgotten," writes Black Elk.

But the story in Black Elk Speaks is not just the story of a Lakota everyman, but a medicine man and a man beset by visions. Black Elk describes having his first vision at nine years old, a cosmic dream of horses, the Six Grandfathers, and the sacred hoop. It isn't until Black Elk is a teenager that he tells anyone about this vision, and a fellow medicine man tells him that a vision is not real until it is danced for the tribe, which he does, ushering in his new identity as a healer and holy man. Black Elk Speaks, too, struck me as a kind of dancing of Black Elk's visions, a way of bringing them into the world.

But the saddest thing about Black Elk Speaks is that, by his own admission, Black Elk's visions had little effect. Speaking from his house near Manderson--a gray box, and not the tepee, whose circular shape signifies wholeness, he points out--Black Elk bemoans himself as "a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered," and thinks himself to weak for his visions. Like Dee Brown, Black Elk--or perhaps Neihardt--sees the massacre at Wounded Knee as the end of visions:

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.

 

Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg

 

One star and then another detached from its place and flamed across the dark.  The skies were dense with constellations.  Whole galaxies streamed toward the porch where she sat with Nonie and Munsen on her nights off, watching the coded messages from her future, light years away.

 

Eisenberg is one of the rare writers to take on mastery of the short story and then stay there.  After writing one play early in her career, she has produced 7 volumes of short stories (and some art criticism).  Her stories are deeply literate, beautifully realized, with a deep sense of characterization and a complex mastery of metaphor.  Most of the five stories in this slim volume contain passages like the one quoted above - in which the narrator or the character takes stock of their tiny place in the vast universe.  It is as if she is drawing attention to the small moments she is elevating in this art form.

 

Her narratives are often fractured – stories told in pieces, sometimes moving among several characters, with a fluid and creative approach to chronology.

 

In “Window” for example, we begin with Kristina checking on Noah, who has been having a bit of a tantrum. The two have recently arrived at Alma’s and we slowly realize that the arrival was unexpected and reluctantly welcomed.  When Alma goes out with her boyfriend, Kristina takes us through a lengthy flashback – her childhood with half-sister Alma, a desultory adolescence as an attractive female resulting in restaurant work in a resort town and then a passionate relationship with Eli.  Kristina seems to develop genuine feelings for Eli and takes seriously the charge of becoming a trusted parent-figure for Noah, Eli’s child by a previous relationship.  The story then begins working us back towards her arrival alone with Noah at Alma’s.  This story has the most conventional narrative arc and the tightest chronology.  Part of the joy of it is how much less we know of Kristina and Noah than we thought we did at the opening.

 

Perhaps at the opposite end of these techniques is the title story, “Twilight of the Superheroes.”  In this story we observe Lucien who remembers his late wife and frets over finding a new apartment for his nephew, Nathaniel.  We also see Nathaniel mourn the loss of the wonderful sub-let Lucien found for him years earlier which is now being reclaimed by its very wealthy Japanese owner.  The apartment, which Nathaniel has been sharing with several friends from college, is almost a character itself, with long passages dedicated to its spaciousness, its views, the fact that – because of the connection through Lucien – its affordability.  While the recent college graduates have been living in this luxurious setting, the millennium has changed (there are references to Y2K, the disaster that wasn’t) and the Twin Towers have been attacked and destroyed.  There is a palpable sense that Nathaniel will have to move out into a city totally different from the one he moved in to, but there is little in the sense of plot – the renters never get around to moving and Lucien never does more than worry about their move.  We end with Nathaniel remembering a pleasant moment from childhood and Lucien remembering his dead wife – who was Nathaniel’s aunt.  One of these has never grown capable of being an adult and the other has lost his motivation for his own adulthood.

 

“Some Other, Better Otto” falls between these extremes – Otto is an irritable and irritating man whose husband gets along better with his in-laws than Otto does.  Otto has a genuine desire to be a kinder person, but can never manage his dyspeptic impulses.  He has his own wonderings about the universe, hoping that in the billions of possible universes there is somewhere another, better version of himself he might someday tap into. In “The Flaw in the Design,” a woman tries to bridge the growing political chasm between her husband and son while also beginning an affair.  In “Revenge of the Dinosaurs” a family visits their incapacitated and very wealthy grandmother and fight over the responsibilities of taking care of her.  In “Like it or Not,” Kate reluctantly takes a tour of small Italian towns with Harry and seems afraid he will construe this as a romantic opportunity, but he sleeps with the beautiful daughter of the obnoxious family they meet at dinner.

 

The characters in these stories are complex and real.  Thinking back on them, I have the vague sense that I really knew them.  I don’t exactly miss them – as I sometimes do with well-drawn characters – because they are so clearly limited:  flawed, angry, pretentious. They are more like neighbors than friends. 

 

The first story, “Twilight of the Superheroes,” begins with the recollection of the hype around Y2K and the memory of what an anti-climax that became is a kind of ironic prelude to the tone of the volume.  These stories are suffused with a sense of loss – Nana, the dying grandmother is recalled as a beautiful woman who took care of her family, though currently she is a physical wreck unable to stop the crisis taking place around her.  Harry collects antiques but finds contemporary people shallow and greedy.  There are several references to the major calamities that have already beset this century – 9-11 and the financial crisis among them.  One wonders what she will produce relative to the pandemic.  

 

It is possible to note a brightness in the ending – the mother who goes off for an affair is at least taking some agency.  At the end of her story, Kristina may be alone with a kidnapped child, but she has at least found something to live for.

Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford

Granny held tightly to the roof outside the rolled-down window and muttered something in Cherokee that Justine couldn't understand. Lula's shouting only goaded John Joseph. He pressed the car faster up the big hill into town. The wind whipped in the windows, and Justine forgot for a minute what would happen when they got home and the real questions and the crying bean. She couldn't know how in a few months she'd be flooded with a crippling love for another human being that would wound he for the rest of her days, how her insides would be wiped clean, burdened, and saved by a kid who'd come kicking into this world with Justine's own blue eyes, a full head of black hair, and lips Justine would swear looked just like a rosebud. For now, that little car filled with three--almost four--generations flew. And when they dropped over the top of the hill, Justine threw her hands up, her mouth agape in wonder.

Justine lives in the Sequoyah Hills of Oklahoma with her mother Lula, a fanatic Pentecostal, and her grandmother, who keeps the old ways of her Cherokee upbringing alive. She's not allowed to bare her arms or legs, but that doesn't keep her from being victimized--it never does, does it--when she's raped by an older Choctaw man at the age of fifteen. Her daughter Reney grows up ping-ponging across the Red River between the oil-scarred fields of North Texas where Justine's cowboy husband Pitch lives, and Oklahoma's Indian Country, where--I'm sorry, but it's a cursed phrase to type--four generations of powerful women reside over one roof.

That's selling Crooked Hallelujah short: it's never glib, but I found it often stepped right up to the edge of cloying. To its credit, the novel is attentive to the ways that Lula's Holiness Church traumatizes Justine and Reney in turn, even as it holds that the power of love between mothers and daughters is sacrosanct. I was interested in the way charismatic Christianity colors the dynamic between these women, for good and bad, and veils in some way the connection to the Cherokee heritage represented by the aging Granny. A healthy respect for the ways of the heartland is at the heart of the novel, and not just the ranchers, cowboys, and oilhands: several key scenes take place at a Dairy Queen, and everyone seems to constantly be drinking Dr. Pepper.

But mostly I found Crooked Hallelujah to be too scattered to really enjoy: third-person narratives are interrupted by first-person ones, and I had a hard time telling Justine and Reney in these sections, and even sometimes Lula. But I absolutely did not want to be distracted by the first-person narratives of ancillary characters, even when, like Pitch's callous, aging father, they provide some of the novel's more challenging and interesting moments. I couldn't stand the section from the point of view of Justine's neighbor, a wayward young man who loses his mother before becoming fast friends with a lesbian couple who move in down the street. What's that about?

An even more baffling choice--although perhaps the best choice in the novel--comes at the end, when the novel suddenly becomes a work of dystopian fiction. The hyperrealism, the sentimentalism, give way to a vision of ecological collapse: the oil fields of North Texas where an older Justine is still living are beset by earthquakes, fires, horde of locusts. These things have their foreshadowing in more mundane catastrophes--a tornado and a brushfire--in the book's earlier chapters, but nothing prepared me for the final chapter, in which Reney and her new husband must decide whether to force Justine to leave her home, which has become the epicenter of the End of Days. Is it a testament to the power of love to overcome everything? No, it deserves more credit than that. But it does open up, at the last available moment, a possibility for what the novel might have been, a possibility I think I might have liked more.

Indian Horse by RIchard Wagamese

When I released myself to the mystery of the ice I became a different creature. I could slow down time, choose the tempo I needed whenever I launched myself into learning a new skill. I could hurtle down the ice at full speed and then bend time in upon itself to slow the turn, every muscle, every tendon, every sinew in my body remembering the movement, learning it, making it a part of me.

As a child, Saul Indian Horse has a vision: at his family's ancestral home at Gods Lake in northern Ontario, he sees his ancestors, living the way they once did at the water's edge. He sees his great-grandfather, the original Indian Horse who first brought horses to the local tribes from the plains Ojibwe. But Saul's vision is of little help when his parents disappear, taking his little brother's body--he has just died of tuberculosis--to a distant priest, never to be seen again. He and his grandmother travel painstakingly through the dead of winter the closest town, where Saul is taken by the whites who find him and placed into one of Canada's notorious residential schools.

If nothing else, Richard Wagamese's Indian Horse presents a damning account of the brutality of the residential schools, where students are beaten, tormented, and killed. Children, stolen from their parents, punished with long bouts of solitary confinement inside the freezing "Iron Sister," hands tied behind their back, forced to work, respond by breaking, even committing suicide. Deaths are a frequent occurrence, but never mentioned; children's bodies are dumped into an anonymous grave and the nuns move on. It would be tempting to say that Wagamese's account is overly dramatic, if you didn't know that such things really did happen with great frequency.

One priest, a Father Leboutilier, takes to the young Saul, allowing him to serve as a kind of manager for the school's hockey team. Enamored of the older boys and the NHL Leboutilier shows him on TV, Saul practices in the early morning when no one is watching, and he turns out to be preternaturally talented: the vision that showed him his ancestors can show him the space of the ice and the movement of the game. I'll say this about Indian Horse: it's a good hockey novel. The descriptions of Saul's exploits in the game are easy to follow and exciting, without being impenetrable or repetitive, as sports writing might be, but Wagamese is well served by the simplicity and lucidity of his style. Perhaps hockey, the reader thinks, can bring Saul a life to replace the one he lost.

But as another Native coach tells him, the white people of Canada think hockey is "their game." Saul is coveted for his talent and moves up the ladder of amateur hockey, but he's resented for his Indianness by his teammates and mocked by fans. He responds by becoming a fighter, a goon. If it's a savage they want, he reasons, it's a savage they'll get, and the results reverberate off the ice: Saul quits hockey and begins to drift. As the novel opens, he makes it clear that he's writing from a rehab facility.

The biggest gut-punch in Indian Horse--here's the spoiler alert, folks--is when, toward the end of the novel, Saul remembers what he has suppressed: Father Leboutilier, the man who taught him hockey, the man who told him he was "a glory," the only one at the residential school who seemed to care if he lived or died, sexually abused him for years. It's a moment that takes your breath away. How can hockey save Saul when it's inextricable from the torture he received, and the brutality of white Canadians? Indian Horse is, at its heart, about the repercussions of that cruelty, and whether what it breaks can ever be remade. 

Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God by Kaitlin B. Curtice

And so, I loosely call myself a Christian. And so, I also call myself Indigenous. I am Potawatomi, constantly being called to my belonging with the love that only Creator, Mamogosnan, can hold, has always held, and always will hold for all of us. It is a difficult journey, and I don't know where it will lead. Years from now, I may no longer call myself Christian, no longer engage with the church, and if so, I will still call this journey sacred as the thing it is, the truths it has taught me, the people it has brought into my life. My faith is not a faith to be hold over others or a faith that forces others into submission but an inclusive, universal faith constantly asking what the gift of Mystery is and how we can better care for the earth we live on, who constantly teach us what it means to be humble. 

"Every day I would sit on our living room couch and watch live streams," Kaitlin B. Curtice writes in Native about the standoff at Standing Rock in 2016, "from my phone, my laptop--horrified, surprised, but also coming alive to the realization that it has always been this way. History herself was coming to tell me that I belong to her, that I belong to all these stories that have been covered up in dust, covered up by  whiteness." These lines hit me with force as I read them today, the day after a mob of pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol. The uncanny sense of watching history unfold from a distance, and trying to situate your own place into it, the understanding that whiteness has brought us to this point--well, who can reasonably deny it? It brought me low to see that the rioters had put up a cross on the lawn of the Capitol and carried signs with Jesus' name; it's enough to make you think that Christianity is not worth rescuing from the mess it's made for itself.

Curtice's story should be familiar, at least in part, to those who grew up in evangelical culture, which is toxic in ways many don't see or understand until they've grown out of it. Curtice talks about the misogyny of purity culture, and the way the American church centralizes whiteness. When it circles the wagons and acts as if its only goal is self-preservation, the church is preserving whiteness, too. For Curtice, the way out of the poison of evangelical culture is the embrace of a side of her identity she barely recognized as a young person: her indigeneity. Learning about her Potawatomi self allowed Curtice to rethink her Christian self, and to envision a kind of Christianity which is "loosely worn" and which looks outward. In this way Curtice's individual experience seems to suggest a way forward for Christianity as a whole; only decolonization can make it a worthwhile endeavor.

What kind of book is this? It's not quite theology--there's little scripture--and it's not really memoir, though the points Curtice makes are rooted inextricably in her own experiences. The word that kept coming to my mind is testimony, a genre I recognize from my own evangelical upbringing and which has no real analogs, I think, in the secular world. Testimony shares the same root as the word witness, and though that word makes slightly different demands on evangelicals, it seems to rightly emphasize the first-person. Testimony emerges from identity, it is an expression of one's indelible and irreproducible experience. Strange to observe that when so much of the Christian world has become inimical to the word identity at all. There are a lot of books like this, I bet, in the testimonial mode, but I don't think I've read any. I was touched--sometimes quite deeply--but I didn't ever quite feel invited into the deep thinking I was hoping for.

One of the things that will stick with me, though, is Curtice's interpretation of the story of the prodigal son. The church, Curtice tells us, think of this as a story about itself: a boy returns home to God's people. But there are more kinds of returning than this. We can return, perhaps, to the land we have brutalized. We can return to the identities that have been repressed and made invisible, like Curtice's Potawatomi self. We can return at last to each other--not merely the "church" but brothers and sisters of all kinds. Just to hear that such a return is possible was comforting in these difficult times.

Winter in the Blood by James Welch

I had had enough of Havre, enough of town, of walking home, hung over, beaten up, or both. I had had enough of the people, the bartenders, the bars, the cars, the hotels, but mostly, I had had enough of myself. I wanted to lose myself, to ditch these clothes, to outrun the burning sun, to stand beneath the clouds and have my shadow erased, myself along with it.

The unnamed narrator of James Welch's Winter in the Blood returns home to his mother's house on the Ft. Belknap Reservation in Montana with a hangover and a bum knee. His girl has left him, running off with his gun and his electric razor. His mother is set to marry a man who covets her land more than he does her, and she may be a little too close to a white priest who refuses to set foot on the reservation. He barely knows or understands his aging grandmother, referred to mostly as "the old lady," and who was once the teenage bride of a renowned Blackfoot chief. In this inhospitable environment there is, unsurprisingly, no rest, no solace, and he cruises back out into the street again. He zips between small towns like Malta and Havre, looking for his girl, his gun, and his razor, drinking too much and slipping into bed with strange women.

More than anything, the middle of Winter in the Blood reminded me of the kind of drugged-out spacemen you find in the books of Denis Johnson. The narrator's wanderings are episodic, peripatetic; he does things without giving a reason, or without having one. In a barroom a man offers to give him a car if he'll drive him to Calgary, where he can elude the police; they plan it as they play the bar's punchboard game, winning box after box of chocolate-covered cherries. Welch skirts close to stereotypes about Native Americans and alcohol, but like any good novelist, imbues his narrator with a specificity and detail that brings the link between alcohol abuse and trauma--both personal and historical--to life. "They were the same faces I had memorized so many years before," the narrator says of the wanted posters at the Havre post office. "Only the names were different."

The secret to Winter in the Blood is that the scattered nature of the narrator's boozing and bar-hopping conceals a more conventionally causal story, running through it like an underground stream. The clue is in the title: although the novel itself takes place during a stiflingly hot summer, the narrator cannot shake the memory of a fatal wintertime accident--involving a horse and a car--that took his brother's life. His grandmother, too, the "old lady" has "winter in the blood"--she carries with her the experience of being blamed, after her husband's death, for the wintertime starvation of her people, the Gros Ventre. This story goes untold until the narrator hears it from the blind hermit Yellow Calf, who turns out to know more--and be more entangled--with the narrator's family history than he knew. In this you get glimpses for the first time of the mythic-historical epic that Welch would later write in Fools Crow, which seems otherwise like a very different book.

I didn't realize it while reading, but looking back, I see that Winter in the Blood is, at least in some part, about the narrator's need to reconcile himself with the women in his life. His relationships with them are largely rotten: he's ambivalent at best toward the girl he claims to be searching for, and the sexual dalliances he gets into during his bar-hopping are pathetic, even violent. He claims to have "no particular feelings" toward his mother or grandmother, and he identifies that disinterest as a distance with himself: "But the distance I felt came not from country or people; it came from within me. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon."

Yellow Calf's story points the way forward, but still his grandmother dies before he can talk with her about her experience. The novel ends, not with a final engagement between grandmother and grandson, but with the narrator rescuing a wayward cow from drowning in the mud. There's something there about the feminine principle, about women as the physical links to history and lineage--the cow's calf looks on, panicked--but the symbolism seems slippery, partial, troubling. It seems not enough, and perhaps that's why it's so perfect for such a slippery and troubling book.

Antarctic Navigation by Elizabeth Arthur

So here I was. My core body temperature was dropping; it was about zero, with a stiff wind blowing; I had a compound fracture and was severely snow-blind. It was late summer in the Antarctic, we were four hundred fifty miles from Framheim, and we didn't even have an HF radio. Moreover, even if we had, there would have been no way for our companions back at Cape Evans to assist us in any way that would matter much. For the moment, I was lying on my side, my tiny feet dangling over the lip of a crevasse, peering through slit eyes at the ice of the world's largest glacier. My country had just gone to war, my lover had left the Antarctic, and my life had just been saved by a man whom I had betrayed and lied to. If I could have thought anything at that instant, I would have thought that though there were many compass bearings, there was finally, in life, only one direction, and that was downwards.

Morgan Lamont dreams of Antarctica. A series of events in her childhood have produced this dream in here: being a child and sledding too far out in the Colorado foothills and making her way back on her own; seeing an intriguing sculpture by Robert Falcon Scott's widow Kathleen in her mother's art book. She becomes obsessed with Scott in particular, the "loser" in the competition to reach the South Pole, who not only was beaten there by Roald Amundsen, but who died on Ross Ice Shelf when a storm prevented his team from reaching their base on the Antarctic coast. But it's Scott, not Amundsen, who attracts Morgan's admiration, because while Amundsen was willing to do whatever it takes to reach the pole first, Scott was a kinder, gentler kind of explorer, one whose failure has often been attributed to his unwillingness to kill his sled dogs. Morgan's dream is to recreate Scott's expedition and prove that it could be done the way Scott imagined it.

Antarctic Navigation is a long novel. I'm trying to be better about how the length of novels affects my impression of them; I spend too much time thinking about how a novel ought to be: it ought to be longer, it ought to be shorter, whatever. But the size and scope of Antarctic Navigation surely come out of an experience of personal magnitude for author Elizabeth Arthur, who was the first laureate of the United States Antarctic Program's writer and artist residency. Can you imagine: six weeks at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, with no responsibility other than getting inspired? In her afterword, Arthur claims that her depiction of McMurdo--a fascistic outpost and a particularly American blight on the last great frontier--is not based on her experience there, but you can't help but wonder if the folks at the USAP felt like they didn't quite get the PR bump they were expecting. (It can't have been too bad, the program for 20+ years, up until the present moment, when COVID budget cuts seem to have threatened it.)

Most of Antarctic Navigation takes place in the regular, continental United States, faithfully recounting Morgan's childhood and the development of her interest in the Antarctic: her parents' troubled marriage, her sadistic scientist stepfather she calls "Dr. Jim," her aimless drift through a postgraduate education in history. Morgan grows up, makes friends, and you can pick up pretty quickly that each friend will be someone who takes part on the Ninety South Expedition to recreate Scott's footsteps. How lucky she was to have a friend who won the Iditarod, and a boyfriend who seems to be specially tuned to the magnetic poles of the earth! It reminded me of The Sparrow, another novel where a group of friends turn out to be just the right set of folks to make a journey to a newfound alien civilization, but here it seemed charming, rather than implausible, and rooted in the strength of Morgan as a character. Morgan's sudden discovery that she has a millionaire grandfather willing to bankroll the expedition is the silliest part, but Arthur does a good job of encouraging you not to squint too hard.

The journey, when it's finally underway, is a hell of an undertaking. It means living on the ice for two years, setting up an expedition base and living there through the Arctic winter so they'll be ready to journey out as soon as spring hits. The journey itself involves setting several enormous "depots" of supplies and food for the return journey, and sending a smaller team out from each depot. Arthur's descriptions of the Antarctic landscape are detailed and (I assume) faithfully rendered, though they lack some of the sense of alienness and wonder that I got from William T. Vollmann's Artic novel, The Rifles.

Arthur is more interested in Antarctica as a way to explore big ideas about science, about history, about geopolitics. The Ninety South expedition begins just before the outbreak of the Gulf War, which seems like a strange reference point, but one which Arthur makes much of: Morgan's interest in Antarctica is, at least in part, an attraction to a landscape that's been unspoiled by human greed and war. But as she learns at McMurdo, where oil spills and pollution are unpleasant truths, even this last frontier already bears the pressure of human evils. She has come to think of Scott as someone who sets out to the pole not to conquer, but to atone for what the British did to the world in the 19th and early 20th centuries; only once on the ice does she realize that as an American--and the beneficiary of her grandfather's lucrative contract with the Navy--that she is more like them than she thought.

The best part of the novel is right where you'd think it would be: when the expedition, having reached the South Pole and turned back to the coast, begins to go wrong. Disasters befall Morgan, one after the other, each one mostly the result of her own misjudgments, and she comes perilously close to imitating her idol Robert Falcon Scott's ignominious death as well. She survives (not a spoiler, I think, when you realize the book is written in the first person), but only by letting go of the idea that the expedition is her dream alone but something shared by the friends and loved ones in her expeditionary group, and with humanity at large. That sounds cheesy, but Arthur manages to make it convincing. Like Antarctica itself, Antarctic Navigation is enormous and daunting, but offers an opportunity for deep reflection on our place in the world.

Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.  By Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.

 

The American idea is indeed in trouble.  It should be.  We have told ourselves a story that secures our virtue and protects us from our vices.  But today we confront the ugliness of who we are – our darker angels reign.  That ugliness isn’t just Donald Trump or murderous police officers or loud racists screaming horrible things.  It is the image of children in cages with mucus-smeared shirts and soiled pants glaring back at us.  Fourteen-year-old girls forced to take care of two-year-old children they do not even know.  It is sleep-deprived babies in rooms where the lights never go off, crying for loved ones who risked everything to come here only because they believed the idea.  It is Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his twenty-three-month-old daughter facedown, washed on the banks of our border.  Reality can be hard and heartless.

 

 

This is an unusual little volume – part biography, part appreciation, part literary criticism and part jeremiad.  Glaude is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton and a long-time scholar of religion.  Here, he puts forward a case for certain underappreciated Baldwin essays, putting them in the context of contemporary American politics.  He is essentially arguing that Baldwin foresaw the rise of Trumpism and offers us a path towards a healthier country.

 

His thesis is simple:  Baldwin’s career straddles the life and death of the Civil Rights movement.  The popular view of his career is that the artistic power and promise of his early work is spoiled by his bitter involvement with the Black Power movement.  Glaude suggests – actually, he does not suggest, he states outright – that this is a misreading.  He argues that the collapse of the Civil Rights Movement hurt Baldwin deeply because Baldwin was not willing to sugarcoat that collapse.  He saw that America had – again – passed up the chance to tell the truth about itself, which was (and remains) a necessary first step on the road to healing.  Baldwin was not duped by Eldridge Cleaver, nor was Black Power an easy way to avoid the nuanced and challenging work of non-violence.  After Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, Baldwin recognized that a more radical path was the only path left.

 

Glaude examines this thesis through a reading of one of Baldwin’s less famous books, No Name In The Street.  Published in 1972, No Name is a loose collection of memory and analysis that looks back on key moments in Baldwin’s own involvement with the Movement, mourns its passing and argues that the memory of the movement is being coopted by white liberals to condemn the Black Panther Party and avoid facing the truth about the collapse of non-violence.  For Baldwin, the non-violent movement collapsed because of the violence white people used against it and our nation’s fundamental inability to tell the truth about our history.  We search for a way to rewrite history so that the facts of slavery and oppression are minimized or ignored.  So we can tell a version of ourselves constantly in search of a more perfect union, one that makes slavery, genocide, various oppressions people of color face in the North and South, simple anomalies in a society fundamentally pursuing justice for all.  For Baldwin, that is the lie of America and until we face that lie for what it is, we will not be able to move past racial hatred.

 

Glaude observes that this analysis of Baldwin’s represents his view of the time after the collapse of the Civil Rights movement, in much the same way that W.E.B. DuBois’s analysis of race in America captures the time after the collapse of Reconstruction.  For Glaude, these “time after” periods present the need and the opportunity for America to regroup and find a new path towards the truth.  He sees the election of Donald Trump as a third time after – coming as it does after the end of the Obama administration.  Glaude was not a fan of Obama as president, pointing to the rise in deportations, the continued high rate of incarceration and Obama’s general unwillingness to lead a full-throated progressive agenda on race and economic issues.  He likens the election of the first Black president to the Civil Rights Movement in that it did not solve the fundamental problems of white supremacy.  Obama’s passing from history presents a time to regroup and find a new path forward.  Instead, once again, America has chosen oppression.  For Glaude (and, he presumes, for Baldwin) Trump’s election is neither a backlash nor a return to old paradigms – it is a sign that those paradigms never really got old. 

 

He offers No Name in the Street, several uncollected essays and a later Baldwin documentary as a source of ideas and energy to rethink and redirect our energy towards the destruction of white supremacy.  Glaude writes and argues effectively, and he has come up with an interesting hybrid.  I don’t finish this with the sense of having read a biography, but I do feel I know Baldwin in a deeper and more interesting way than I did before.  I got a lot out of his discussions because I read the book along with Baldwin’s Collected Essays and was able to read the essays he discussed at length while reading the book.  It is hard to say what value his discussion of No Name would have if I were not reading Baldwin’s words as Glaude was analyzing them.  And even at 225 pages, the book feels padded.  In general, his reading of other essays is cursory and used to reinforce ideas established in his reading of No Name.  The documentary (I Heard it Through the Grapevine) is not available to stream.  Based solely on the clip available online, It is not clear what it would add to Glaude’s case other than demonstrating that Baldwin was as compelling a talker as he was a writer.

 

While I enjoyed the book, I am not sure I wouldn’t recommend spending the time reading more of Baldwin’s brilliant essays instead .