The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk

This book seeks to reorient U.S. history by redressing the absence of American Indians within it. Covering five hundred years of history, it builds on the work of many other scholars while recognizing that not all peoples, themes, and places can be held within a single study. American history developed out of the epic encounter between Indians and European empires and out of the struggles for sovereignty between Native peoples and the United States. American Indians were central to every century of U.S. historical development.

Few history books have the kind of popular cache that Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America does. There have been other big "retellings" of American history through the lens of Indigenous Americans--Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz's comes to mind--but this one appeared to meet the moment of a post-Standing Rock awareness of Indigenous people. It won the National Book Award, and it's not hard to see why: it's a scrupulous, thoughtful telling of history that most readers have never heard before. It begins with the colonization of what's now the American Southwest by Spanish--a colonization effort that predates English and other powers on the east coast of the U.S. by over a century--and moves steadily toward the late 20th century, taking every opportunity to show the ways in which what we think of as American history is also Native American history. The "Rediscovery" in the title cheekily shows what the game is.

In many ways, the broader strokes will be familiar to anyone who has read about Indigenous Americans. I see reflected here the same periodizing that David Treuer talks about in The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee--colonization, frontier, allotment, termination, etc. I attended a seminar with an accomplished historian of Indigenous American history where I overheard her call the book a disappointment--I couldn't really hear much of her complaints, but I caught suggestions of cheap, sloppy errors and, most significantly, a sense that the book covers little ground that a historian wouldn't already know. That said, I'm not a historian, and I found a lot of the material here to be very new to me, if not in the broader strokes, the specific details that Blackhawk chooses to pull. I appreciated the reliance on specific anecdotes and primary sources from Indigenous people who lived through each of this different eras.

So, here are some of the big takeaways for me. I came away with a greater sense of how powerful Native tribes, especially the Iroquois/Haudenosaunee Confederacy, were during the colonial period. Far from being a vassal to great powers, the Iroquois were a powerful union of tribes whose possessions constituted, for Blackhawk, a true Empire. The Iroquois, according to Blackhawk, were both a formidable military foe who frequently got the better of the English and French, but clever diplomats who knew how to forge allies with one power or another to keep the other at bay. Such triangulation might have continued apace, if not for the collapse of the French control of Haiti and the country's swift divestment from North America. Nor did I realize how much of the Revolutionary War was precipitated by hatred and suspicion of Native peoples on the margin of the first colonies. Colonists turned to a strong patriot government to help protect them from the Native nations that they felt threatened them, and to help legitimize a growing sense of racial and ethnic superiority that entitled them to seize interior lands.

These battles for the first frontier--what Blackhawk calls the "Inland Sea," the Great Lakes--make up what felt like the most important and interesting part of the book, for me. It may be that I'm just less familiar with that chapter of American history than any other. The parts that were more familiar--the expansion of American interests across the interior west, then the legacies of allotment and termination in the 20th century--had less interest for me. More than anything, I came away thinking that I'd love to read a more specific and narrowly tailored history about the battles for the Great Lakes and the immediate interior preceding the Civil War. 

Rabbit Boss by Thomas Sanchez

I know of your Ancestors. The blood of your blood saw the Whites eat of their own flesh on yonder lake, Donner. Captain Rex gambled the money of the people away and lost his way in a blizzard, he came into a cabin and slept, when he awoke white bodies were lying dead all around him with the blood they had coughed up splattered on their clothes. he took their White death back to the people, that was the year all the Washo were burned to the ground at Elephant Head, one was saved, Ayas, the Antelope, who was sent into the valley of clouds to warm his sightless grandmother who wove flowing streams into her baskets... I can see into all the days past. I can see into all the days coming. Along the Big Lake of the Sky your son shall walk in a new Rabbit robe. Sparling his image on the quiet waters. The forest shall grow thick and free. The Birds return. The fences fall. In their shadow the openness will find its home once more.

Thomas Sanchez's Rabbit Boss begins with Gayabuc, a member of the Washo tribe of Nevada and Northern California, looking down at the infamous Donner Party. He watches them attack and eat each other, and he knows immediately that something evil has arrived in their lands. Rabbit Boss traces the history of this evil over four generations, beginning with Gayabuc, and continuing on with his son, Captain Rex, a gambler and petty criminal who makes money by recruiting other Indians to pick pigweed along the side of the transcontinental railroad. Captain Rex's son, a preacher named Hallelujah Bob, grows up among whites after all the other Washo are decimated by tuberculosis, and then burned in their huts by whites who fear the spread of the disease. Bob grows up knowing little about his background until he is taken to an Indian School (a real place in Carson City where, somewhat coincidentally, we were able to tour a small museum last week) and learns about his true identity. Hallelujah Bob's son is Joe Birdsong, who ekes out a proud but simple existence as a rabbit-hunter for large ranches during the Depression.

In Sanchez's telling, the Washo have always been a small tribe. They identify with the rabbit, whose medicine, or power, is small, but who gets by through tenacity and cleverness. They are few in comparison with the Shoshone or the Paiutes. Leaders of the Washo are said to wear the "Rabbit robe," and despite the designs that white settlers have on the land, it's exactly this identity and power that is passed down, perhaps unknowingly, to Birdsong. The stories of the four men resemble each other in certain important ways: the latter three are all, at times, hunted by white forces who want to destroy them or drive them out. For Captain Rex, it's marshals and bounty hunters that pursue him, in scenes that often provide the novel some of its blackest humor, as when the representatives of the federal and territorial government bicker over just who it is that's going to hang him, or when they realize they can't hang him, because the Nevada desert is short on trees. For Birdsong, it's a shadowy land company that has begun to make inquiries with all the landowners in the Lake Tahoe region. They begin by offering enormous sums, but when Birdsong refuses, they move against him with legal force, claiming that because Hallelujah Bob was not a U.S. citizen when he purchased the land (Native Americans were made citizens in the 1920s), his claim is null and void. They seize upon a murder and frame him for it, and Birdsong ends the novel like his grandfather: on the run.

As far as I know, the author, Thomas Sanchez, is not Native American, and I have to say, outside of perhaps Vollmann, I don't think I've ever read a fictional account of Indigenous history by a non-Indigenous writer that seems so scrupulously researched or knowledgeable. It was really something to be able to visit the actual residential school where Hallelujah Bob ends up, and where Birdsong must travel to search for the documents that prove his ownership of the land--I hadn't imagined such verisimilitude was necessary. It's especially impressive, I think, because the story is about the Washo, a small tribe whose history is not so popularly known as the Lakota or Cherokee, or even the larger local tribes like the Shoshone.

At the climax of his story, Hallelujah Bob has a vision of the Ghost Dance leader Wovoka (a member of the Paiutes, another Nevada tribe) who recognizes him as Ayas, the personification of the Antelope. Wovoka helpfully summarizes the novel for anyone who has missed it--Guyabuc has witnessed the arrival of a great evil, and Captain Rex has carried it along by unwittingly spreading the disease among his people, but Bob and his son Joe will oversee a rebirth of the Washo and the return of trees and animals. I found myself wondering, how does this novel think about the real-life prophecies of Wovoka? To me, it seems like there's a bitter irony here: Joe Birdsong ends up on the run just like his grandfather and his father did, hunted and dispossessed again. But then again there is the resilience of the rabbit power within Joe, and even when he is chased away by the predatory speculators, he ends up having a vision of ambiguous power on the shores of Lake Tahoe, the "Big Lake in the Sky." Is Joe the culmination of the rebirth of the Washo, as Bob hears from Wovoka--the one who wears the "Rabbit robe?" What does it mean to write such a book in the 1980s, and stop short of the next 50 years of the American Indian and environmental movements? I found Rabbit Boss troubling and ambiguous, but often very moving, even funny, and powerful.

Saving Yellowstone by Megan Kate Nelson

All three of these men--Jay Cooke, Sitting Bull, and Ferdinand Hayden--determined the future of the American West during the Reconstruction era. They were raised in different familial circumstances (Hayden's was the most hardscrabble and Sitting Bull's the most advantageous, born as he was into a family of Lakota chiefs), but they were all men of ambition. They discovered their talents as young men and worked to establish themselves as leaders in their respective communities.

They also had larger visions for the future of their nations, rooted in their beliefs about who should have rights as citizens and who should control the undulating prairies, jagged mountain peaks, and fertile valleys of the West.

I tell you what: Yellowstone is huge. It's bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, and you can feel it if you try to drive the entirety of the "double loop" that makes up the park roads. It seems incredible, as you journey through it, that such a place was preserved forever by presidential proclamation, an absolutely colossal land set aside for public marveling and enjoyment, set aside, really, just to set it aside. But, of course, it wasn't an inevitability; the preservation of Yellowstone as the world's first national park under Ulysses S. Grant was the end result of decades of exploration, persuasion, and advocacy--and also, in the case of Indigenous people, dispossession. Megan Kate Nelson's Saving Yellowstone tells the story of the park's preservation through the eyes of three men: explorer Ferdinand Hayden, railroad tycoon Jay Cooke, and Lakota leader Sitting Bull.

It's Hayden who is the book's focus by far, an ambitious naturalist whose aims in exploring the Yellowstone valley were as much about his own stature as the advancement of science. When Hayden and his team set out for Yellowstone, it was nearly unknown to white Americans. Just two years before, the Langford expedition had confirmed the "tall tales" that western trappers had been telling about the Yellowstone for years: towering hot geysers, brilliantly colored pools, and land that smoked. (It had also brought national attention to the area when one of its members got lost for a month before being miraculously saved.) But it was Hayden's expedition, as Nelson tells it, that convinced the public, and President Grant, to set the "wonderland" aside, not least because Hayden cannily brought along a photographer, William Henry Jackson, and a painter, Thomas Moran, both of whose images brought the remote landscape into a national consciousness.

Nelson contrasts Hayden and his expedition with Jay Cooke, a railroad tycoon who nearly went bankrupt trying to build a railroad to the Yellowstone area that would open it up to general tourism. It was Cooke's railroad that brought the ire of Sitting Bull, who rightly saw the encroachment of the trains as an imposition on the land that had been protected by treaty, and who periodically attacked soldiers and survey teams. "That the creation of America's national parks required Native land dispossession is a hard truth," Nelson writes, "one that does not often appear in popular accounts of this movement." A great deal of what Nelson writes about was already familiar to me from watching Ken Burns' National Parks: America's Best Idea, but I did find that Nelson's realist cynicism about the violent requirements of the creation of Yellowstone was an effective balance to the Burns' idealism, even as he takes care to mention the indigenous owners of the parks' land.

It was the inclusion of Sitting Bull and the Lakota perspective that drew me to Nelson's book, though in the end neither the Lakota chief nor the railroad tycoon is really at the heart of the story in the way that Hayden is. (And though I suppose it's outside of the book's scope, I thought it was interesting that the 1877 flight of the Nez Perce through the Yellowstone, in which several white tourists were killed in retaliation for U.S. Army ambushes, was omitted entirely.) I also thought that Nelson's attempts to connect the preservation of Yellowstone to larger themes about Reconstruction in America fell a little flat. Toward the end of the book she notes that Grant and his allies would have seen no contradiction between preserving the rights of Black Americans and dispossessing the Lakota, seeing them both as part of a larger project of civilizing the country--but this was a theme I thought might have been developed more.

Northland by Porter Fox

At sunset, the sky turned dark blue. I tried to remember the color of the stones, the cool air, the auburn sunlight touching my forehead. I thought about the first day of the trip at West Quoddy Head in Maine and tried to memorize the dark spires, rounded massifs, and marshmallow flanks of Mount Baker's glaciers. I thought about all the parts of the northland--oceans, rivers, lakes, plains, cities, reservations, towns--and how they linked from east to west. It was indeed its own territory: a forgotten belt of wild, old America delineated by iron monuments, rock piles, and clear-cuts.

We ended our trip through the Pacific Northwest last week at the Peace Arch, a monument that stands on the border between the towns of Blaine, Washington and Douglas, British Columbia. A tall white arch stands in the middle of a green park that stretches between both countries, with the entry lines on either side of it, the Canadian to the left, the American to the right. The monument is supposed to be a monument to peace between the two countries; in the middle, there is a ceremonial gate attached to the wall below a sign that reads MAY THESE GATES NEVER BE CLOSED. Just beyond the arch, a sign on the Canadian side reads, "Park Closed."

We saw a woman enter idly from the Canadian side and walk to the American, where she was collected by an official looking man who might have been from either country and directed toward a booth, presumably to be sent off to a black site. A few feet away the park becomes a stretch of carefully tended flowers and picnic benches (and the Peace Arch Park Snack Shack) on the American side. On the Canadian side, the border follows a street where a row of houses look out in to America, their residents only needing to make a few steps out of their door to enter another country. These houses made the stern theater of the border crossing stations seem performative and silly.

Porter Fox ended his journey along all 4,000+ miles of the USA-Canadian border at the Peace Arch, too. By then, the peculiar logic that exists at the Peace Arch has appeared many times: the world's longest peaceful border has, since 9/11, become hardened in ways that have sundered communities and put an end to the free travel that was once common between the two countries. The "Park Closed" signs we saw were, no doubt, the vestiges of Canadian COVID-19 policy, which has hardened the border even more--in many places, trains still can't pass through it. But even a few years ago, when Fox took up the project of canoeing, hiking, boating, and driving from the border's eastern terminus in Maine to its western one in Washington, the border was increasingly contentious.

The thesis of Fox's book is that the area around the border has its own particular identity and existence, as a region he calls "The Northland." He wants to explore the Northland, a region that is, with some exceptions, remarkably rural and remote, and understand how the border has shaped this identity. He begins in Maine, canoeing along the St Croix river, then hitches a ride on a Great Lakes tanker that takes him all the way from Lake Erie to Lake Superior. From there, he drives across the oil-rich boomlands of North Dakota, making a quick and timely sojourn into the protest camps at Standing Rock, which are not really near the border--though the oil in the pipeline is. His journey continues along the "Medicine Line," as the Native Americans who were pushed across it in the 19th century call it, stopping in at the Blackfeet Reservation and through Glacier National Park. In the North Cascades, he sleeps in a fire tower, as Jack Kerouac once did, during one of his most prolific periods.

The book is part travelogue, part social commentary, part history. As Fox travels, he recounts the history of the border, which has always been a contentious one. The 18th and 19th century politicians who negotiated the border really had no idea about the geography of the land they were dividing, and time and time again, created impossible borders that would lead to more contention, and more need for tenacious explorers and surveyors. The creation of Minnesota's Northwest Angle, for instance, the little chopped-off bit on the other side of the Lake of the Woods, exists because the agreed border point--the headwaters of the Mississippi--is a hundred miles south of where the negotiators thought it was. Fox adds to this history a sympathetic portrait of Angle Inlet, the Angle's only community, where schools and businesses have closed over the last few decades because of the stubborn and increasing difficulty of crossing the border--twice. And similar stories are told in Maine and along the Great Lakes.

I appreciated Fox's focus on Native Americans, for whom the border takes on a special relevance. Fox's sojourn to Standing Rock fits uncomfortably with the book's overall thesis (I mean, Google it, it's mostly in South Dakota) but along with his stop at the Blackfeet Nation, it gives an effective portrait of the way the border was placed over the existence of tribal nations, and which has profoundly shaped their existence. Even before the Indian Wars of the 19th century, the border was an indigenous problem, as Fox explains in his recounting of the alliance between Jesuit explorer Champlain and the Hurons against the Iroquois.

We crossed the border four times on our trip: twice by airplane, once by boat, and once on the road. But we experienced only one small part of its four thousand miles. I loved reading Northland while on this trip because it gave me a sense of exploring something larger; not merely of stepping over an imaginary line but passing through a real place on which history works its considerable, sometimes transformative, sometimes brutal efficacy.

The Dying Grass by William T. Vollmann

It must be here that the loneliness of the Indian country of which we have merely commenced to take possession, and at that so nominally that nothing but violence will save our claims from being laughed away, begins to march along with us, very quick and correct in its movements, although uncouth in the gaze and teeth it turns upon us, proposing to nibble us up before we notice, our desire consequently being to ride away from here , but now as long as we continue forward, everywhere we go will be again here in the dying golden grass of what is not yet America even though it will certainly become so, which is why we pursue Joseph as far as we must, our Springfields ready with a round in the chamber and our faces fixed as we seek earth stained by his sign, riding east now toward our dear United States, the general watching us without imparting anything but affable trivialities; we will carry Joseph to the gallows, and if that isn't good enough, we will kick him down to Hell.

The Nez Perce, like so many of the indigenous tribal nations of the 19th century in the land that is now the United States, were "good Indians" until they weren't. They cooperated with the U.S. government and the Army, they were friendly with settlers--even intermarrying with them--and signed a treaty agreeing to a large reservation in the land that now lies at the intersection of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon. But of course there isn't a single Indian treaty that the United States didn't break, and the thief treaty was the same: the Nez Perce saw their reservation chiseled away to a tiny fraction of what it had been. Many Christianized Nez Perce stuck to the reservation, took English names, and began the process of assimilation, but several bands totaling about 750 people decided to refuse the terms of the treaty, touching off a war of attrition that lasted from June to October of 1877. The Nez Perce led the Army on a strategic retreat through Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, before finally being routed just a few miles south of the Canadian border.

William T. Vollmann's novel The Dying Grass tells the story of the Nez Perce War from beginning to end, from both the perspective of the Nez Perce, and the Department of the Columbia that pursued them. It is the longest of Vollmann's five written Seven Dreams novels about conflict between settlers and Native Americans--at 1200 pages it is almost certainly, by page count at least, the longest book I have ever read--but also the most stylistically adventurous. When a perspective shifts--perhaps from one character to another, or from what someone is saying to what they are really thinking, or just from the action to a description of its natural surroundings--Vollmann indents that section or set of lines. The result looks and often reads like poetry, but it also reminded me of the "stacks" of computer code (sorry Brent that's probably not right). The result is that The Dying Grass seems uniquely polyphonic, woven from hundreds of different voices. More than any of the other Seven Dreams books, The Dying Grass captures the sheer breadth of the conflict and its many actors.

On the white side, Vollmann's main character is the General Oliver Otis Howard, known by his detractors as "Uh Oh Howard" for his defeat at the Battle of Chancellorville. Many of Howard's soldiers also call him "General Prayer Book" because of his piousness, and rankle under his proscription of alcohol and his friendliness toward Indians and blacks. Howard's virtues are indeed very virtuous: his sincere concern for black Americans--something that could not be said for many other Union generals--led him to found Howard University and steer the Freedman's Bureau. His attitude toward the Nez Perce is similar: when he says he had counted them friends and is aggrieved by their rebellion, we believe him, but he is blind to the limits of his own paternalism. He wants for the Nez Perce what he wanted for the Negroes--a little bit of land and assimilation into the social order of the United States--but cannot see how such largesse entails the destruction of the nation's cultural history and way of life. 

Only one of the soldiers, Howard's aide-de-camp Erskine Wood, slowly comes to believe that the Army's pursuit of the Nez Perce is a moral outrage; Vollmann's depiction of him is second only to Howard in its richness and sensitivity. And yet even Wood's protest remains in his heart only; his creeping doubt does not spur him to reject his Army commission or aid the Nez Perce (though we find, in a true and fascinating fact, that later in life Wood sent his son to learn "how to be an Indian" from the captured Nez Perce Chief Joseph). Wood's foil might be Ad Chapman, the volunteer interpreter who knows how to speak Nimipuutimt from his marriage to a Nez Perce woman. Crude, mercenary, and untrustworthy, it might be said that the whole war is Chapman's fault because he fires first on the Nez Perce, and yet his position between two worlds makes him indispensable. In a touch that is both meaningful and historically true, it's Wood and Chapman, dissident and bigot, who pen the famous translation of Chief Joseph's surrender speech: "From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever."

Howard's counterpart on the Nez Perce side is Chief Joseph himself, called by his true name, Heinmot Tooyalakekt. The Nez Perce's strategic retreat bestows upon Joseph the title of the Red Napoleon, but this relies on a grave misunderstanding: Joseph is the chief of his own small band of Nez Perce, but he's never made war chief, a role given to Looking-Glass (named for the shard of mirror he keeps around his neck) or Lean Elk. Jane Smiley's review of The Dying Grass suggests that Vollmann is so sympathetic to the Nez Perce that it verges on "noble savage" ideology, but not only is this a poor moral judgment--a kind of bothsidesism projected onto the past--I'm not sure how she could have read about the great disagreements between the restrained Joseph and the more militant members of the Nez Perce party, like the "Three Red Blankets" or the bloodthirsty Toohoolhoolsote, and came away with that conclusion. One thing Vollmann, who wrote an 800-page treatise on the nature of violence, does well is to show the way violence cycles out of control, no less among the Nez Perce than the Army: their rebellion against the "Bostons" becomes all too easily an excuse to raid and murder uninvolved white settlers.

For his part, Joseph always advocates for surrender and peace, though his stature is not such that he's often heeded. But among the many disputing chiefs Joseph emerges as the most virtuous because he unerringly thinks of the welfare of his people, and women and children especially, before abstract concerns like honor. The Dying Grass suggests that the American press might have it right when they imagine Joseph to be supreme among the Nez Perce:

now his heart begins too late to understand

--although many other best men dispute this, preferring White Bird, who planned our victory a Sparse-Snowed Place and led us across the Medicine Line--

that our greatest chief was Heinmot Tooyalakekt,

he who never had hope,

desiring only to help our women, children, and old ones:

Yet The Dying Grass echoes an idea that first came to me by way of Dee Brown's history of the Indian Wars, Bury Me at Wounded Knee: in the end, the various responses to removal mattered very little. The Bannocks and Cheyennes who help the "Bluecoats" stomp out the Nez Perce will find themselves at the barrel of their guns within a year, and even the disputation between the various Nez Perce chiefs seems, in the end, meaningless: "The prudent and trusting submission of Looking-Glass," Volmann writes, "the violent resistance of the Three Red Blankets, the flight of White Bird and the restraint of Chief Joseph all produced the same result. So did General Howard's kindheartedness and General Sherman's pitiless fury." It is interesting to think of Howard and Sherman--and Wood and Chapman, perhaps--in the same boat, one which rises on the tide of history but which can barely be guided or steered. Did the rush of settlement in the latter half of the 19th century mean that the cruelty of the Indian Wars and the reservation system were foregone conclusions? In Fathers and Crows, Vollmann wrote of the Jesuit conversion of the Haudenosaunee, "If it had to be done, it could have been done differently." Is that true here, too? Or is Howard right when he tells Wood that there's no other way?

Either way, The Dying Grass is a tremendous panorama of those caught in the rush of history. Beyond Howard, Wood, Chapman, Joseph, Looking-Glass, and Toohoolhoolsote there are dozens and dozens of individual characters whose interior lives are thoughtfully imagined and evoked by the unusual structural choices of the novel. It's a novel as big and breathtaking as the mixed-grass prairie, or the mountain valley, or the camas meadows over which that history moves.

Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

At first, I followed this wild boy hungering after his knowledge of the island--his deep understanding of everything that bloomed or swam or flew. Soon enough, a curiosity about an untamed soul had kindled, and this, too, caused me to seek him out. But it was his light temper and his easy laugh that drew me close to him, over time, until I forgot he was a half-naked, sassafras-scented heathen anointed with raccoon grease.

Martha's Vineyard, in the late 17th century, is a backwater outpost of a backwater outpost: Bethia Mayfield lives with her father, the Reverend Mayfield, and her brother Makepeace, live on the edge of a wilderness, having retreated from the strict Puritanism of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  But there are others, of course, for whom the island--as Bethia calls it--is no wilderness at all, but their home for millennia: the Wampanoag, with who the white Islanders have a tense and tenuous peace. Bethia's father sees himself as a missionary to the Wampanoag, and although he is respected by them, his mission is made difficult by the "wizard" Tequamuck, a powerful healer who agitates against the Christian religion among the Wampanoag.

Bethia's life is a proscribed one: she will grow up and marry, probably a local farmer. Yet she has a sharp mind and a gift for languages: while her lazy brother Makepeace struggles with his Latin and Greek, she listens on, learning twice as fast as he. From her father's dealings she even learns to speak the language of the Wampanoag, a feat that enables her to make secret friends with a Wampanoag boy she names Caleb. Caleb, the son of the sonquem, or chief, and nephew to the wizard Tequamuck, and Bethia are drawn to each other, despite their differences; though Bethia learns from her father to be suspicious of the Wampanoag religion--which they consider Satanic--she finds there is much to admire in it, like the way that Caleb awakes before the dawn to greet the personified sun. In their secret meetings, they spar curiously over these different ways of seeing the world. Bethia begins to fear for her own soul, but it's Caleb that should be worried: a plague of smallpox ravages the Wampanoag, and on his death bed the sonquem concedes to the Christianization of his people and asks Reverend Mayfield to take Caleb into his home.

Caleb is an interesting character, based on a real person, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard. His father's death and his adoption by the Reverend places him in an uneasy place, caught between two worlds. He learns quickly that he can never be Christian enough for the Puritans of Harvard, where is constantly suspected and belittled. He acquits himself with talent and integrity, but are his talent and integrity being used to raise himself up, or destroy his people? These are interesting and powerful questions.

And yet the major flaw of Caleb's Crossing is that Caleb grapples with these things "off screen." Once Caleb joins Bethia's household, and then later at Harvard, their lives are too proscribed for them to continue their meetings, and somehow Caleb vanishes from the narrative right under our noses. Caleb never leaves Bethia's orbit, but as the viewpoint character she becomes focused on other things, like a pair of competing marriage proposals from a local farmer and the son of a Harvard master, and the mistreatment of a young Nimpuc woman who comes to stay with them at Cambridge. The interests of the book turn from the alienation of the indigenous to the contradictions of life as a woman, and while it does these themes justice, they seem to me much more familiar, perhaps too familiar.

At the novel's climax, Bethia must travel back to the island to consult with the dreaded Tequamuck to find a cure for a disease that has struck Caleb--a disease we suspect may be more of the spirit than the body--and yet this moment, which should bring resolution to the schisms of Caleb's psyche, seem to be the ending to a book we didn't actually get. You know, a while back I told myself I should try harder to review the book as it is, rather than imagining a book that doesn't exist that I might have liked better. That's something I do a lot. But the book is called Caleb's Crossing, and I think the way the novel holds Caleb at arm's length is ultimately unsatisfying.

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.

God is Red: A Native View of Religion by Vine Deloria Jr.

American Indians and other tribal peoples did not take this path in interpreting revelations and religious experiences. The structure of their religious traditions is taken directly from the world around them, from their relationships with other forms of life. Context is therefore all-important for both practice and the understanding of reality. The places where revelations were experienced and remembered and set aside as locations where, through rituals and ceremonials, the people could one again communicate with the spirits. Thousands of years of occupancy on their lands taught tribal peoples the sacred landscapes for which they were responsible and gradually the structure of ceremonial reality became clear. It was not what people believed to be true that was important but what they experienced as true. Hence revelation was seen as a continuous process of adjustment to the natural surroundings and not as a specific message valid for all times and places.

Vine Deloria's influential comparison of Native American religions and Western Christianity begins by making a really fundamental and thoughtful distinction between religions of space and religions of time. Christianity, in Deloria's description, is a time-obsessed religion, articulated as a historical progress beginning with creation, moving through the fall, the crucifixion, and looking forward to Christ's return. Native American religions, on the other hand, are largely religions of space: they describe a particular relationship between a community and a place, and for their ceremonies to be fully articulated they cannot be severed from the place they describe.

God is Red is perhaps harsher than any book I've ever read toward Christianity. It's Christianity's time-orientation, Deloria says, that has made it the engine of colonialism and imperialism: the forced conversion of indigenous people is part of God's temporal design, and their subjugation a sign of progress toward Christianity's ultimate eschatological goals. Furthermore, that time-orientation has led Christianity to believe that its message is universal, and cut it off from its context as a religion particular to a community in the Ancient Near East.

It's hard to disagree with Deloria's sober assessment of Christianity as a force in the world. Most of the social ills of the past millennium, at least, are tied up with Christianity: imperialism, colonialism, slavery, racism, you name it. How can you argue with someone who looks at the state of the world and decides Christianity has failed it? The only real response to this, I think, is to note that there is a version of Christianity practiced throughout the Global South that is directly opposed to these forces. Deloria would say, well, where are these Christians in history? But that's the nature of power--it's visible in ways the powerless simply aren't. But you can hardly quibble with Deloria here; if more people in North America, at least, were honest assessors of the state of things, more people would probably see it his way than mine.

What I actually wanted more of from God is Red was a systematic, positive case for Native religions, but to the extent that Deloria does this, it's dwarfed by the criticisms of Western Christianity by at least two to one. That's in the nature of Deloria's argument, perhaps: because the indigenous religions of the Americas are community-oriented, it makes little sense to advocate for them; these religions have no missionaries and admit no converts. Native religion, Deloria says, flies in the face of our Eurocentric notions of what a religion even is: not a system of beliefs but a lived national, tribal, or communitarian experience. It's not enough to put a dreamcatcher in your window, or step into a sweat lodge. While that's certainly correct, Deloria leaves a lot of really pressing questions unaddressed, I think. For example, it seems clear that sacred Native spaces across the Americas need protecting because they are so crucial--and in some cases, equivalent--with Native religions. But how can a religion like that ever survive in an increasingly global world? If Christianity is to be abandoned in favor of religions that are national or ethnic in character, how can White Americans do this without resorting to literal white nationalism?

The weirdest thing about God is Red is that Deloria spends much of the book advocating for pseudoscience. The roots of Middle Eastern religions, he speculates, are probably ancient aliens, and the events of the Old Testament are probably reflections of ancient cosmic disasters. In this he relies on the work of Immanuel Velikovsky, a notorious but popular crackpot, one of those guys whose dismissal by fields of real scientists becomes part of his own legend. But in a weird way, Deloria's need to find Christianity's historical roots seems to me like a desire to make it cohere to the role he's assigned it, and to square his frustration with the ways in which Christianity can actually be ahistorical. Mostly, the attention to bad science undermines what's most captivating and thoughtful about the book: its vigorous defense of a religious outlook that's been ignored, undermined, and systematically oppressed for hundreds of years.

Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles by Gerald Vizenor

The silver convertible continued creeping up the hill.  So loaded with bodies and firewood, the rear tires exploded.  The sound seemed to panic the whitepeople who started cursing and fighting.  Several whitepeople used sticks of birch and oak as clubs to beat a path to the red padded wheel.  Faces and ears were crushed under the blows of firewood.  Slivers were sticking from the heads of the whitepeople.  Noses were broken and teeth were smashed.  More and more whitepeople tried to pile onto the convertible.  The rear bumper was dragging and the plush seats were torn and broken.

Bigfoot and Pure Gumption managed to crawl through the whitebodies struggling for the wheel.  The tribal pilgrims ran ahead of the car up the school hill road.  The seven clown crows flapped and hopped from tree to tree following the mass of whitepeople beating each other for less than half a tank of gasoline.

In the near future, the United States of America has literally run out of gas.  The country has become something out of Mad Max: an apocalyptic wasteland of freaks and weirdos traveling across a collapsed and ruined landscape.  In Minnesota, Proude Cedarfair, the Ojibwe protector of a band of cedar trees, is pushed out by federal agents who want to ransack his trees for fuel.  He joins with his wife, Rosina, and a host of other pilgrims, to travel across the United States to the safety of the pueblos of New Mexico.  The other pilgrims include: an enormous transwoman deprived of her hormones, a bishop who says everything three times, a woman who has sex with her two boxers, a man with huge feet who is in love with a bronze statue, two dogs, one of which glows, a couple other people, and seven helpful crows.

The pilgrims' movement over the land is an ironic reenactment of manifest destiny: this time it's "mixedblood" Natives moving west, and backwards in time to the oldest inhabited places in North America.  Through their pilgrimage, the Natives seek to reverse the proliferation of a culture that has led to ecological, spiritual, and psychological death.  In Iowa, they confront an evil gambler by the name of Sir Cecil Staples who gambles travelers' lives against five gallons of gasoline; hideous and cloistered, Sir Cecil is the avatar of the dying age, which Vizenor positions as the third age of the Hopi, who believe a fourth and prosperous age is yet to be born.  But the dying culture throws up its challenges and pitfalls--not only Sir Cecil, but a walled town of poisoners, a restaurant that hangs witches, a mysterious lightning field, and all sorts of other ornate phantasmagoria.

The country is suffering from what Vizenor calls "terminal creeds"--ideas and beliefs that lead to disintegration and death because they have no adaptability, no capacity for change.  Most of them are held by "whitepeople," but the "mixedbloods" suffer from them, too, as when the character Belladonna Darwin-Winter Catcher speaks up to insist on her superiority as an Indian by blood.  For Vizenor, most claims of indigeneity seem to be a kind of terminal creed also, a rigid way of defining the self against others that leads to stagnation and paralysis, and which are opposed to the spirit of fluidity and play that characterize the pilgrims, who are often called clowns, a word which makes a lot of sense when Vizenor describes them all cramming into or spilling out of an automobile:

The doors on the truck cab and trailer opened and out flew seven crows, out leaped four dogs, one glowing, out stepped a mammoth and a giant and a child and an old couple with braids and a woman wrapped in a constellation quilt and a bishop dressed in his ceremonial vestments and velvet dalmatic.

Bearheart is an exceedingly strange book, unlike anything else I've ever read in form, content, or execution.  The closest thing to it is the otherworldliness of William S. Burroughs, but Vizenor also seems inspired by some of the wordplay of Barthes and the Oulipo movement.  Like Burroughs, Vizenor's vision is comically violent and extremely sexual.  And like Burroughs, the sexuality, even with its anti-conformist and comic elements, often seems to put a special burden on the female characters.  Why does Lilith Mae need to have sex with dogs?  Why does one of the most sympathetic characters rape Proude's wife at the end of the novel, and why do I have to pay attention to the violent and sticky details?

(On that note, I was completely unconvinced by the afterword by Choctaw-Cherokee scholar Louis Owens, which talked about being reported to his dean for assigning Bearheart.  "In the end I realized it wasn't the novel's irrepressible sexuality, not the violence or bestiality, not the transsexual shape shifting that upset my students.  It was the novel's outrageous challenge to all preconceived definitions, which Bearheart calls 'terminal creeds.'"  Are you sure?  Are you sure they weren't complaining about the scene where a band of roving "cripples" tears the woman Little Big Mouse apart for her body parts?)

At its most ingenious, Bearheart seems admirably unafraid and entirely new.  But at its worse, it feels unforgivably retrograde, in thrall to a style and ethic that once seemed avant garde but now seems painfully dated, even as it cobbles something wholly unique out of that style and ethic.  I couldn't tell you whether I liked it or not; it's one of those books that just doesn't seem to care whether you do, even though the characters themselves seem to be having a whole lot of fun on path through apocalypse.

Ledfeather by Stephen Graham Jones

The only fitting sentence for his crimes would be to live as they did, as they had.  As an Indian.

It was why the girl he'd kissed up against the wall had black hair instead of blonde, and those perfect, heavier-than-the-world fingertips.

It was why he'd been remembering another's life.

It was his punishment, to become Blackfeet, to be Piegan.  To live on the reservation he'd created, the situation he was already leaving behind.  To replace his own life with an Indian one, and thus know firsthand the end result of his policies.  An end result generations away from last Winter, just so he could see the scope of what he'd done, that it still had a traceable effect.  So that, in a sense, he could be inflicting it upon himself.

Doby Saxon is a teenager living on the Blackfeet reservation that abuts Glacier National Park in Montana.  Doby is a down-and-out kid in a down-and-out place: he's missing three fingers from the time he and his father tried to poach elk from the park, and his father fell from his snowmobile and died.  He has a run of untold luck at a casino, then loses it all, and causes a violent scene that ends up putting his mother in jail.  He fails to save his friend from overdosing in a concrete tipi; he tries to kill himself in a hundred unsuccessful ways.

But Doby is also extraordinary: he discovers a cache of letters from a white Indian agent that lived on the reservation a century ago, and then begins to see the agent in visions.  Doby is torn between these two realities, and we come to learn that Doby might be the Indian agent himself, reborn as a Blackfeet Indian through a curse that condemns him to live as those he had a part in starving.

There's much to admire about Ledfeather.  It's a novel with one very good idea at its heart, but it's also a novel of terrific detail and writerly skill.  Unlike Moon of the Crusted Snow, which I bring up only because it seems to fit in the box of indigenous science fiction, though the context and community is much different, Ledfeather seems to understand that community life thrives in specifics.  Ledfeather, among other things, is a lovingly rendered version of what is often a difficult life on the Blackfeet reservation: it gives life to casinos, game wardens, schools, hospitals, chintzy little museums, basketball courts.

But I also have to admit that I found the whole thing extremely hard to follow.  Jones' novel has, if I'm counting correctly, at least four different narrative modes: 1.) first-person narratives by various people on the reservation about Doby, which ask us to piece together an understanding of him (these sections often refuse to identify clearly who the narrator is, in a way that seems self-consciously literary) 2.) the unsent letters of the Indian agent Francis Dalimpere to his wife Claire 3.) third-person accounts of the Indian agent flashing "forward" in time, 4.) second-person (!) accounts of Doby's life.  I could have managed maybe two of those, but not three, and certainly not four.  Ledfeather's not a long novel, but it just has one too many tricks up its sleeve, and I felt like some streamlining might have made it more readable.

As a result, I felt like the novel's many good ideas didn't land with enough emotional power for me.  And they are very good: I liked especially the novel's motif of self-sacrifice, which comes in both noble and misbegotten stripes.  One of the subplots of the modern narrative is that the local school's star basketball player has a terrible kidney disease, and young people from all over the reservation rush to commit suicide in order to give him their kidneys.  There's kind of grim, very grim, humor that works because it sits aside other kinds of sacrifice: the Indian agent's, for example, who first kills a herd of U.S.-owned cattle for the starving Blackfeet, knowing that he'll be put in prison, and then later "sacrifices" himself by becoming Doby Saxon.  Or Doby's mother, who goes to jail protecting her son in that casino fiasco.  These stories of self-sacrifice are linked by the image of the elk that Doby and his father go hunting:

The story, too, it was a joke mostly, like all of Earl's stories, was that one time an elk had found a white man lost and dying in the storm, and they'd talked to each other, and finally the elk, because it knew the man needed to live, to be warm, it took pity and laid on its side and let the man cut it open and crawl inside, and stay warm like that even though the snow piled up all around them for days and days and even years, only when the man finally crawled out again, everything was different, because that elk you crawl into, it's not the same one you crawl back out of, right?

In the end, Ledfeather is a hopeful kind of book, one that shows that nobility and selflessness are alive on the reservation, and that even has hope for white people, like Dalimpere, who think to make amends.  So much so that you might forgive it for asking a little too much of its readers.

House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

Abel walked into the canyon.  His return to the town had been a failure, for all his looking forward.  He had tried in the days that followed to speak to his grandfather, but he could not say the things he wanted; he had tried to pray, to sing, to enter into the old rhythm of the tongue, but he was no longer attuned to it.  And yet it was still there, like memory, in the reach of his hearing, as if Francisco or his mother or Vidal had spoken out of the past and the words had taken hold of the moment and made it eternal.  Had he been able to say it, anything out of his own language--even the commonplace formula of greeting "Where are you going"--which had no being beyond sound, no visible substance, would one again have shown him whole to himself; but he was dumb.

This semester, I'm teaching a class on Native American literature for the first time.  I had planned on teaching four texts: Tommy Orange's There There, LeAnne Howe's Savage Conversations, Louise Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God, and this novel, N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn.  Of course, the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has changed my plans.  I don't know if school will be happening this week or next, or if I'll be there even if it is.  If I have to cut a book from the curriculum, it's probably this one, important and vital as it is.  It's demanding, challenging--but I don't know if I'm in the right frame of mind for this kind of challenge right now, and I don't know if my students are either.

Anyway.  I did find that, reading it a second time, it wasn't as difficult a read as I had first found it.  It helps, of course, to know what happens; I spent the second time around not reading for the plot but for other things: the spareness of the language, for one, which is actually quite striking.  Some other things I discovered:

House Made of Dawn is a multiethnic and multicultural story.  On the surface, it's a story like Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, in which a Native man, his spirit ravaged from war, returns to his tribal home only to find he no longer fits.  When he finds a way at last to reintegrate himself into the cultural and religious life of his community, his mental anguish disappears.  But for Silko, this means a rejection of white culture, which she associates with a malevolent force named "witchery," and complete reabsorption into the lifeways of the Laguna Pueblo.

In House Made of Dawn, on the other hand, Abel already begins as a kind of outsider: his mother is not Pueblo but Navajo.  His community, Walatowa, has opened their doors to a small group of refugee Navajo, whose ceremonies become part of Pueblo life.  The rites of the community are a mishmash of traditional Pueblo religion, Navajo religion, and Catholicism, which Momaday seems to respect.  And furthermore, my first reading of Abel's trist with the white woman Angela St. John (whose name is an Anglicization [Angela-cization?] of Walotawa's patron saint-figure Santiago, who may or may not be the St. John of of the Bible) as something nefarious now strikes me as a mistake.  Angela, after all, ends up helping to nurse Abel through his hospitalization in Los Angeles, when his hands are badly broken by a corrupt cop.  It seems hard to read House Made of Dawn as an embrace of a specific cultural tradition; after all, Abel's friend and narrator Ben Benally, who is Navajo, seems to be comfortable in Anglo-dominated L.A.

House Made of Dawn is structured around rituals and rites.  Part of what makes the book a challenge at first is that these rites are totally unfamiliar, and Momaday is not particularly forthcoming with explanations or justifications.  At Walatowa, there is ritual distance running and the Navajo practice of hunting and capturing eagles (!).  In L.A., there is the peyote ritual of the Native American church.  These rituals are what give order to life among the Native people of House Made of Dawn, and Abel's distress is clearest when he is unable to comprehend them.  During the festival of Santiago at Walatowa, Abel is bested in a strange ritual by an albino man named Juan Reyes, who rubs a bloody chicken in his face.  The first time around I read this as an act of gloating, but now it seems to me that it may be part of the ritual itself--who knows, honestly--which Abel misinterprets.  He kills Reyes in a fit of anger, perhaps because his mind remains on the field of battle, rather than the world of ritual.

House Made of Dawn is very good.  I'm sorry to think I won't get a chance to read it with my seniors, if that's really what's happening.  Doubtless some of them would breathe a sigh of relief if they knew they were being absolved of reading such a challenging text, but that's OK.  Maybe some of them will come back to it someday, like I did, and see how stunning it can be.

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

"Yes, apocalypse!  What a silly word.  I can tell you there's no word like that in Ojibwe.  Well, I never heard a word like that from my elders anyway."

Evan nodded, giving the elder his full attention.

"The world isn't ending," she went on.  "Our world isn't ending.  It already ended.  It ended when the Zhaagnaash came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us.  That was our world.  When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that's when our world ended.  They made us come all the way up here.  This is not our homeland!  But we had to adapt and luckily we already know how to hunt and live on the land.  We learned to live out here."

Evan Whitesky is an Anishinaabe man living on a reserve in Ontario's far north with his wife and children.  When the power goes out, he's a little annoyed, but used to it: living so far away, the tribal council is more than prepared to survive a few weeks, perhaps even the whole winter, without internet, without television, without food shipments from the south.  But when a pair of local boys who've been away studying in college arrive with stories of looting, violence, and social dissolution, everyone realizes this is more than a temporary outage.  The Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) on the reserve are suddenly an outpost of civilization in a world where civilization has disappeared.

Who said that indigenous people have already experienced all the things we are afraid of when we write post-apocalyptic fiction?  Pandemic, exile, violence, genocide, disappearance.  The elder in the passage above makes that explicit: our world ended, she says, when white Europeans destroyed the land and forced us northward.  But for Rice, and for Evan, the end of the world offers an opportunity also.  If the Anishinaabe on the reserve are to survive the winter, they'll need to rely on traditional ways of hunting and trapping.  At home, Evan's young children discover that they don't need the television to pass the time; suddenly they are more excited, curious, and fulfilled than ever.  Evan dreams of his children, all grown up and living on the land once again.  Moon of the Crusted Snow inverts the old historical tale; here, the end of the white world means rebirth for the Anishinaabe.

Into this promise comes a white man, Scott, looking for refuge from the world to the south--although you would think he'd be safe enough with the number of guns he's carrying.  (Why don't they demand he give up his guns in exchange for safe passage?)  Scott is brash, cocky, not entirely realistic, but he does animate the novel in a way it badly needs.  He's a representation of white violence and greed; although he promises to pitch in by hunting and trapping, he makes vague and insidious threats about finding other ways to keep from starving, threats we understand to be suggestions of cannibalism.  Evan dreams of him as a horrible, black-eyed monster, as the Wendigo.  Can one white interloper ruin the promise of the Anishinaabe's rebirth?

Moon of the Crusted Snow offers a compelling vision of the "apocalypse."  I don't take any joy in saying it, but I wish the writing were better.  To work, the novel needs to show in vivid, real-seeming detail how the Anishinaabe are different from their white neighbors to the south, but instead there are a lot of paragraphs like this one:

Despite the hardship and tragedy that made up a significant part of this First Nation's legacy, the Anishinaabe spirit of community generally prevailed.  There was no panic on the night of the first blizzard, although there had been confusion in the days leading up to it.  Survival had always been an integral part of their culture.  It was their history.  The skills they needed to persevere in this norther terrain, far from their original homeland farther south, were proud knowledge held close through the decades of imposed adversity.  They were handed down to those in the next generation willing to learn.  Each winter marked another milestone.

Too much of the novel seems like pamphletese, a primer on Anishinaabe life that says nothing of real substance because its primary function is not mimesis but public relations.  What's the use of a paragraph like this one, when the novel opens with a patient, plainspoken description of Evan stalking and killing a moose?  Those paragraphs say all the one above says and much more, and I wish the book had had more like them.

Savage Conversations by LeAnne Howe

SAVAGE INDIAN

She,
Woman Who Strokes My Face,
Kisses my mouth,
Her hands slide up and down my body,
Gently scratching my belly.
We laugh unaware that in six moons hence,
I will be taken captive with
Her delicious scent still hovering in my dreams.

There is only the grimmest sketch of what happened
December 26, 1862.
The lamentable wailings, an anxious white child gawking,
wringing his hands,
Hangman William Duley's tight lips as he cut each rope,
His green eyes blazing,
Or red eyes popping blood,
My flesh becoming dust, my bones in a doctor's iron pot,
Only a story.  I am no one's uncle, no one's father,
No one's husband.

Serving a mad woman's unearthly pleasures.

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln ordered the execution by hanging of 38 Dakota Indians.  Their crime was, ostensibly, rebellion, having attacked several frontier towns.  But the Dakota were starving, left without resources after a series of broken treaties and maltreatment at the hand of white settlers.  The execution, which remains the largest mass execution in U.S. history, was not a punishment thought appropriate for rebellious white southerners.  And in what sense could the Dakota, whose people would not be U.S. citizens for sixty more years, "rebel" anyhow?

Later, after Lincoln's own execution, his wife Mary Todd Lincoln was placed in a sanitarium in Batavia, Illinois, where she claimed that every night, a "Savage Indian" crept into her room and sliced her eyelids open before scalping her.  He did this every night--presumably, she recovered between, like Prometheus chained to the rock.  In this book, LeAnne Howe imagines the interactions between Mary Todd and the "Savage Indian," who is both a figment of her own haunted conscience and a real ghost, chained to the widow of the man who ordered his death.

Savage Conversations is what you might call a "closet drama": It's written as a play, with lines, but it's mostly impossible to imagine staging.  Really, it's a book of poetry, written in free verse but redolent of Shakespeare more than anything.  (The Savage Indian knows a little Shakespeare, taught to him by a white man at Ft. Snelling--so don't think just because I can quote Shakespeare and the Bible that I'm all in your head, he tells Mary Todd.)  There are only three characters: Mary Todd Lincoln, the Savage Indian, and the Rope, a mysterious and sinister character who both is a rope and sits on stage fashioning 38 nooses.  He's a reminder, a physical instantiation, of Lincoln's sentence:

THE ROPE
I know the secret thrill of taut,
Tying up, tying down,
Binding tight,
Strapping hard,
Lashing knot to payload--for kicks,I am a collar,
A strangler,
I float in the wind like a flag on holidays.
I inspire national pride.

For the first few sections of Savage Conversations, it seems like Mary Todd and the Savage Indian are talking past each other.  She spends much of the time talking to the absent Lincoln, ignoring the Savage Indian sitting by her bed, trying on her pinafores.  The Savage Indian compels her to confront him, but she's unable, until the nightly moment when he slices her eyelid open.  Only when she's unable to close her eyes will she be able to really see those she has harmed, including her own children.  The Savage Indian calls her "Gar woman," in reference to a legend that Gar fish eat their own eggs, alluding to a theory that Mary Todd may have killed several of her and Abe's kids due to Munchausen's by proxy.  Mary Todd's conscience is the nation's conscience; it secretly craves to be forced, even at the price of great pain, to be forced to bear witness.

"Yesterday my shadow climbed out of the abyss," Mary Todd writes, "Leaving behind a human ruin in the asylum at Batavia."  But the Savage Indian follows her even outside of this place, forcing a final detente: in the final section, "An Uneasy Union" (har), the Savage Indian forces her to confront the truth of her life.  Is there a way out for Mary Todd?  Is there a way out for the nation?  Maybe, maybe not, but like Mary Todd, we keep needing our eyes opened again and again.  Her final words in the play are, "Again, please."

I was impressed with the quality of the poetry here.  Mary Todd is spiky and solipsistic, one of those Shakespearean blusterers who is always lying to themselves.  The "Savage Indian" is coy, wise, sympathetic, lost; his fate is to be Mary Todd's accuser, and never more.  His identity as a Dakota and his individuality as a person are subsumed in the historical task of making the oppressor see their wrongdoing; it is a tragic task because it keeps him subordinate to her moral life in unto eternity.  When, Savage Conversations ask, will the oppressed people of North America be more than the oppressor's conscience?

It's a slim little book, easy to speed through without stopping to navigate the poetry carefully, and even as I forced myself to take it slow, my first thought when I finished it was that I'd like to go back and read it again.  I think I will, with my students, later this year.  Again, please.

Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong by Paul Chaat Smith

Considering that recent decades have seen the most significant Indian political movement in a century, including much new sensitivity and education, we might have thought things had improved.  But the familiarity of the situation around these recent publications leaves me feeling that things haven't gotten any better, only more subtle.  The discourse on Indian art or politics or culture, even among people of goodwill, is consistently frustrated by the distinctive type of racism that confronts Indians today: romanticism.  Simply put, romanticism is a highly developed, deeply ideological system of racism toward Indians that encompasses language, culture, and history.  From the beginning of this history the specialized vocabulary created by Europeans for "Indians" ensured our status as strange and primitive.  Our political leaders might have been called kings or lords; instead, they were called chiefs.  Indian religious leaders could have just as accurately been called bishop or minister; instead, they were medicine men.  Instead of soldier or fighter, warrior.  And, perhaps, most significantly, tribe instead of nation.

Paul Chaat Smith occupies an interesting vantage point in the history and discourse over Native American life in the 20th century: once a committed member of the American Indian Movement and later a chronicler of it, producing one of the definitive accounts of the movement during the critical years between the occupation of Alcatraz and the occupation of Wounded Knee, he later became a curator at the National Museum of the American Indian.  He straddles, then, both the institutional "genteel" wing of Native activism and the grassroots.  His book Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong brings this perspective, along with a casual and irreverent voice, to bear on contemporary Native American issues.

Chaat Smith's book is one of those books of essays compiled from different times and places; here are remarks given at galleries and symposia along with newer works that seem to have been written for this collection specifically.  As with all books like that, it has a habit of repeating itself: by the end of the book, for example, you will not be able to ignore the oft-iterated idea that European exploration of the Americas is the most important event in world history, because it brought together two hemispheres that had operated independently of each other for millennia upon millennia for the first time.  (As repeated ideas go, this one at least is fascinating and persuasive.)  You'll also get to hear a lot about the movie Dances with Wolves.

I had expected this book to be more academic and historical, something like a more sophisticated version of the book Do All Indians Live in Tipis?  It's too disparate to be that book, too unfocused, and besides, Chaat Smith's interest is really in cultural criticism.  Several of these essays are reflections on the work of Native artists I've never heard of, and were clearly written explicitly for galleries and museums in which those artist's work were present.  Chaat Smith's essay is meant to contextualize the artwork, but without the artwork, it was hard for me to contextualize the essays.  I got less out of those essays than I wanted, but I'm content to let them be a gentle push to seek out the work of these artists, like James Luna and Faye HeavyShield, who Chaat Smith praises.

I especially liked the essay "On Romanticism," which describes romanticism as one of the most singular forms of racism facing Native Americans in the 20th and 21st centuries.  As an example, Chaat Smith discusses the children's book Brother Earth, Sister Sky, which is presented as a transcription of remarks made by Suquamish chief Seattle, but which in reality is a bunch of environmentalist pablum doctored up by white writers.  Chaat Smith suggests that white Americans who are "interested in" Natives are more harmful than those who merely ignore them (I admit that's a remark that might be made directly to me), but it's clear that Chaat Smith is correct about the dangerous effects of romanticizing indigenous Americans, of placing them in amber and denying their right to be living, flawed, complex.

The antidote, Chaat Smith describes, is to remember the Comanche hero Geronimo riding around the desert in his Cadillac.  Although in my last review I talked about how I didn't think that There There really works as a novel, you can see how Orange--by giving us uncertain Indians, listening to Madlib, flying drones, using 3D printers--is plying the same ground.  I'm going to keep "On Romanticism" in mind as I start teaching the novel in a few weeks; it might provide useful context.

There There by Tommy Orange

The trickster spider, Veho, her mom used to tell her and Opal about, he was always stealing eyes to see better.  Veho was the white man who came and made the old world watch with his eyes.  Look.  See here, the way it's gonna be is, first you're gonna give me all your land, then your attention, until you forget how to give it.  Until your eyes are drained and you can't see behind you and there's nothing ahead, and the needle, the bottle, or the pipe is the only thing in sight that makes any sense.

I'm going to make Cheyenne author Tommy Orange's There There the first book we read in my Contemporary Native Fiction class, which starts next week.  I think kids will like it: it's readable, accessible, and hypermodern.  It namechecks Madlib and Radiohead; a drone makes a starring appearance.  And the drama--long lost parents, grand scale robberies, alcoholism and sexual assault--is pitched at exactly the right level for teenagers, who crave, I think, a high-intensity version of the world because they are waiting on that intensity to appear in their own lives.

Reading it for the second time, I'm struck by a motif I think I missed the first time around: each of the major characters is caught staring for a moment at their own face in a reflective surface.  A mirror, a television set.  It's not the most original motif in the world, but it's effective here because, to varying degrees, the characters are all struggling with their own relationship to their indigeneity.  Some, like Edwin, know they're Native but don't know which tribal nation their heritage belongs to, thanks to their father's disappearance.  Others are told they are Native, but nothing more; they have Hispanic names.  So many of these characters stress about whether they have any right to claim indigeneity at all.  Some, like Orvil Red Feather, seek to embrace it headlong by dancing at the Oakland Pow Wow; others run from the claim on themselves.

Honestly, the second time through confirmed to me that the book doesn't work on a fundamental level.  I stumbled on the same two obstacles: First, there's just too many characters.  The climax of the novel (spoiler alert!) is a robbery at the Pow Wow that devolves into a mass shooting; there are four point of view characters involved in the robbery, and even having read through the book once it's difficult for me to separate them, psychologically and thematically, in my mind.  The other problem is the end itself, which seems gratuitously violent.  I was dreading it while reading, and encountering it again was almost physically repulsive.  Orange gives us, again and again, first-person perspectives on what it's like to be torn apart by a bullet, but no good reason that we should have to hear it again and again.  Violence is always gratuitous, you might say, always senseless, but I can't shake the idea that Orange is grasping at some kind of final statement and whiffing.

But that doesn't make it the wrong book for my class; in fact, sometimes books with big problems are better than books with few flaws.  I'm looking forward to having my students figure out why There There had to end in such a bloody way; maybe they'll have a perspective that persuades me I've been reading it all wrong.

Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King

First Woman's garden.  That good woman makes a garden and she lives there with Ahdamn.  I don't know where he comes from.  Things like that happen, you know.

So there is that garden.  And there is First Woman and Ahdamn.  And everything is perfect.  And everything is beautiful.  And everything is boring.

So First Woman goes walking around with her head in the clouds, looking in the sky for things that are bent and need fixing.  So she doesn't see that tree.  So they bump into each other.

Pardon me, says that Tree, maybe you would like something to eat.

That would be nice, says First Woman, and all sorts of good things to eat fall out of that Tree.  Apples fall out.  Melons fall out.  Bananas fall out.  Hot dogs.  Fry bread, corn, potatoes.  Pizza.  Extra-crispy fried chicken.

Thank you, says First Woman, and she picks up all that food and brings it back to Ahdamn.

Four elderly Indians--like, hundreds of years old elderly--disappear from a hospital somewhere in the middle west of the United States.  They're on their way, it seems, to Alberta, where a cast of characters converges on the reserve town of Blossom: Lionel, a 40-year old man whose dreams had long been shattered by a series of anti-Native misfortunes; Charlie, grappling with his father's abandoning him to play stereotypical Indians in Hollywood; Alberta (yes, I know), who loves Lionel and Charlie but can't imagine either of them giving her the child she desires; Eli, Lionel's uncle, who has returned from a comfortable life in Toronto to reside in his mother's shack, preventing it from being destroyed by an already-built dam.  These characters are all Blackfoot Pikuni, Indians living out their lives with an uneasy relationship to their own Indian-ness.  The four elderly Houdinis bring them together to "fix" some small part of the world, meaning both the problem of the dam and the problems of these characters.

Along with this narrative, King gives four versions of Native creation myths.  Each features a different first-woman figure--First Woman, Changing Woman, Thought Woman, and Old Woman--each of whom is associated with one of the elderly Indians, who seem to be telling these stories along with the trickster Coyote.  These stories are satirical and syncretic; they pull together not only different indigenous traditions but also the Bible, Moby Dick, westerns, and other Anglo cultural staples.  (This may explain why the old men are named Lone Ranger, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, and Hawkeye.)  These stories are often clever and funny, riffing broadly on the allusions they mash together, and they are meant to represent an indigenous worldview imagining its own relationship to the land and community in the midst of interference from settler colonialism.

Green Grass, Running Water zips along so breathlessly that you almost miss the cleverness of the way the four old men bridge the real world and the mythical or legendary one.  It also enables you to miss the thinness of the "real" story, and how it struggles to come together in a way that feels satisfactory or complete.  The best of these stories belongs to Lionel, whose pratfalls and misfortunes seem like a slapstick version of an Erdrich character--I particularly liked the detail that, as a teenager, Lionel accidentally got put on a plane to Toronto by a hospital nurse thinking he was supposed to have a heart transplant rather than a tonsillectomy.  (Although the error was fixed in time, his "heart trouble" prevents him from finding meaningful employment!)  It's the right kind of humor: broad and genial but also somehow sharp and funny, and the novel could have used more of it.  I found that the tone of the creation stories, which feature Coyote endlessly quipping like Kimmy Gibbler, ultimately wore thin, and that the "real" narrative didn't supply enough to balance it out.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

In the indigenous worldview, a healthy landscape is understood to be whole and generous enough to be able to sustain its partners.  It engages land not as a machine but as a community of respected non-human persons to whom we humans have a responsibility.  Restoration requires renewing the capacity not only for "ecosystem services" but for "cultural services" as well.  Restoring relationship means that when the eagles return, it will be safe for them to eat the fish.  People want that for themselves, too.  Biocultural restoration raises the bar for environmental quality of the reference ecosystem, so that as we care for the land, it can once again care for us.

Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise.  It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land.  Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants.  It is medicine for the earth.

It wasn't until the 1970's that the National Parks System here in the United States first began using prescribed burns in national parks to manage the ecosystems there.  Controlled burns, like unplanned burns caused by lightning, clear the landscape of heavy forest canopies and allow grasslands and savannas, to flourish in their place, renewing a cycle of growth that leads back to healthy forests.  Indigenous people in North America knew this, and used fire to keep the lands healthy on which they were living, but white settler colonialism dismissed this knowledge as barbaric, supplanting it with an ideology of the "undisturbed wilderness," as it simultaneously uprooted indigenous people from their homes and relocated them.  It took hundreds of years for settlers to understand what indigenous people always knew: fire is an important part of the reciprocal relationship between humans and the aland.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is both a professor of environmental biology and an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Nation living in upstate New York.  Her book Braiding Sweetgrass is full of narratives like this one, in which indigenous knowledge about the ecosystems of North America have proven to be more accurate and more productive than the ideologies of industry and unfettered capitalism.  Here's another example: while industrial farming practice still grows plants like squash, beans, and corn in careful, individual rows--drive past any plot of farmland in the county and you can see them--Native Americans have always known that these plants prosper when grown together.  Tall corn stalks provide support for bean vines; wide bean leaves provide shade for late-blooming squash; even their roots are placed strategically underground to help each plant prosper.  And yet, the fact that indigenous people were found growing the "three sisters" together was considered proof of their ignorance about agriculture.

Kimmerer speaks with special authority on these topics because she can bridge the gap between two languages: the scientific language of environmental science and horticulture, and the indigenous language of a reciprocal relationship with plants.  Her lucid discussion of petioles and rhizomes leads to a powerful discussion of plant personhood and even love.  For indigenous Americans, Kimmerer explains, plants were thought of not as objects but as subjects, having a personhood of their own and demanding the same kind of reciprocity as other human beings.  As the land gives to humans of itself, so humans must ask what the land demands of them.

Many people probably find that language silly.  Plants don't demand anything, they might say, they're plants, and even if they did, the word love--as in, plants show love by giving themselves to us--is a bridge too far.  Even I found myself a little squeamish about those metaphors.  And they are metaphors, to be sure; but all of the language we use about the word is metaphorical, isn't it?  There's no reason to think that love is any worse a metaphor than mast fruiting to describe the way that pecan trees deliver immense pecan harvests when they are in possession of excess energy, so that the pecans might be collected and saved for lean years.  As a metaphor, love may be even better, because it recognizes that we, too, have an obligation to protect the pecan trees, and the squash, and the cattails.

One thing that really appeals to me about the worldview Kimmerer describes is that it is actually very human.  Kimmerer describes asking hundreds of undergraduates to describe a positive interaction between people and their natural environment and gets no answer.  "How is it possible that in twenty years of education," she writes, "they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and the environment?"  But even our most well-meaning environmental ideologies are hopelessly mired in the fantasy that human beings are something separate from their environment, and that the best thing we can do for the land is to leave it alone.  We can't leave it alone, and it doesn't want us to.  The land needs us as we need the land, and only a reciprocal relationship with it will keep us from destroying it through overuse and neglect.

Braiding Sweetgrass is essentially a collection of essays.  The theme of reciprocity and indigenous knowledge informs each one, though the plants themselves are different: in this essay it's pecans, in that one cedar trees or lichens or strawberries.  It can be a bit uneven; it might have been even more impactful if the essays had been more carefully pruned.  (Horticultural pun intended.)  But even still, it's a powerful statement about what our relationship with the land might one day still be like, if we can find the humility to listen to those who have tended it for millennia.