Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Popular Native American Author Book List

Want something to read? Check out this book list...



1) "Shadows Cast By Stars" by Catherine Knutsson

A post-apocalyptic debut breathes new life into a quickly flagging genre with its setting among the First Nations peoples of the Pacific Northwest.

Even though they live in the Corridor, Cassandra Mercredi and her family have kept to the Old Way. When a new strain of the Plague that killed their mother emerges, she, her twin brother, Paul, and her father flee to the Island, where the Band clings to treaty lands. Métis, they are apart from the specific culture of the Island, but they are nevertheless Other, and their blood contains the only known cure for the Plague. Cass finds herself apprenticed to healer Madda and increasingly drawn to Bran, the son of the Island's vanished leader. She also experiences a terrifying connection to the Sisiutl, the serpent-spirit that dwells in the lake by her house. Knutsson's narrative is ambitious, twining together Pacific Northwest mythology, standard post-apocalyptic tropes and a coming-of-age story inflected with romance. Readers of Sherman Alexie'sThe Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian will recognize the harsh realities portrayed, albeit within the science-fictional framework. Knutsson’s language is often atmospherically beautiful, but the story flounders at times, introducing unfulfilled subplots that may be foreshadowing for events in future volumes or simply red herrings.

Nevertheless, it's an absorbing read populated by characters hardly ever found in teen novels.(Science fiction. 12 & up)



2) "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heave" by Sherman Alexie

With wrenching pain and wry humor, the talented Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian--and previously a small-press author (The Business of Fancydancing, a collection of poetry and prose-- not reviewed--etc.)--presents contemporary life on the Spokane Indian Reservation through 22 linked stories. Here, people treat each other (and life) with amused tolerance--although anger can easily erupt in this environment of endemic alcoholism and despair. The history of defeat is ever- present; every attempt to hold onto cultural tradition aches with poignancy: Thomas-Builds-the-Fire is the storyteller everyone mocks and no one listens to; Aunt Nezzy, who sews a traditional full- length beaded dress that turns out to be too heavy to wear, believes that the woman ``who can carry the weight of this dress on her back...will save us all.'' Meanwhile, young men dream of escape--going to college, being a basketball star--but failure seems preordained. These tales, though sad and at times plain- spokenly didactic, are often lyrically beautiful and almost always very funny. Chapters focus on and are narrated by several different characters, but voices and perspectives often become somewhat indistinguishable--confusing until you stop worrying about who is speaking and choose to listen to the voice of the book itself and enter into its particular sensibility. Irony, grim humor, and forgiveness help characters transcend pain, anger and loss while the same qualities make it possible to read Alexie's fiction without succumbing to hopelessness. Forgiveness seems to be the last moral/ethical value left standing: the ability both to judge and to love gives the book its searing yet affectionate honesty.




3) "Ceremony" by Leslie Marmon Silko

The central character of this haunting first novel by a Native American is a young World War II veteran, Tayo, born of a promiscuous Navajo mother and a nameless white father. He has retreated into mental illness from the horrors of the war against the Japanese in the Philippine jungles and is kept for a while in a Veterans hospital where his identity becomes as insubstantial as smoke. Released to his mother's family on a reservation in New Mexico, he is confronted once again with rejection for being part white and for the shame his now dead mother had brought to her kin. The novel traces his efforts to become whole again among a dispossessed people in an arid land where the ex-GIs drink up their disability checks to forget what the whites have taken from them. There are naturalistic scenes of skid row squalor in contrast to scenes of human dignity deriving from the folk traditions of the Navajo, with their deep respect for nature. As the story weaves back and forth between Tayo's past and present, it sometimes blurs a little, and readers may lose their bearings for a moment. But they will be rewarded, if they keep reading, with an emotionally convincing picture of a culture unfamiliar to most.



4) "Winter in the Blood" by James Welch

The narrator lives on a Montana reservation with his outspoken mother Teresa, her new husband Lame Bull, and memories of his father and brother Mose -- the latter killed at fourteen in an automobile accident so meaningless it permeates his life with its own kind of symbolism. He dreams about the woman people thought his wife -- a worthless Cree who stole his gun and an electric razor he couldn't use anyway because there's no electricity in his house. He helps his stepfather with the harvest. When he finally does get to town, a long car and bus ride away, it is to get drunk, walk in and out of strange bedrooms with women whose faces he doesn't remember, get beaten up for no good reason, and to accept drinks from white men whose lies are no more real than his own life. It is a world in which time passes in odd jerks -- the world of a drunk in which minutes stand out with stunning clarity but the days disappear -- all of which he accepts as naturally as the lack of money, discrimination, and the copped-out Indians who accept the governance of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the rigged tribal elections. A laconic, extremely naturalistic dialogue fits oddly well with a prose so spare it emerges on the far side of poetry. A very fine first novel.




5) "Love Medicine" by Louise Erdich

Called a novel, Erdrich's book of powerful stories interlocks the lives of two Chippewa families in North Dakota, the Kashpaws and the Lamartines (though some are Morrisseys too, and Nanapushes)--a tribal chronicle of defeat that ranges from 1934 to the present, Illegitimacy, alcoholism, prison, and aborted dreams of something better mark both clans; and the fluidity of exchange between them is echoed by poet Erdrich's loose, time-shifting approach--an oblique sort of narration that sometimes makes it difficult to remember who's who among the characters. Even when hard to follow, however, this web of stories keeps its theme vividly in focus: the magical haunting that reminds the various generations of the families of their basic identity. And, whether the haunting comes in the form of nightmares or supernatural powers, Erdrich convinces us that these people, sunk as low as imaginable, retain powers, the "love medicine" of the title. (When, astoundingly drunk, Gordie Kashpaw hits a deer on the road with his car, he drags it into the car, onto the backseat; the deer, merely stunned, awakens--and Gordie soon knows that the deer is also his dead ex-wife June, whom he must kill again. "Ears pricked, gravely alert, she gazed into the rearview and met Gordie's eyes. Her look was black and endless and melting pure. She looked through him. She saw into the troubled thrashing woods of him, a rattling thicket of bones. She saw how he'd woven his own crown of thorns. She saw how although he was not worthy he'd jammed this relief on his brow. Her eyes stared into some hidden place but blocked him out. Flat black.") Erdrich fuses mystery and violence, exaltation and deepest despair--so poetically that the rich prose sometimes clots. But, despite flaws and excesses, this is a notable, impressive book of first fiction: the unique evocation of a culture in severe social ruin, yet still aglow with the privilege and power of access to the spirit-world.

County Cat Link






6) "House Made of Dawn" by N. Scott Momaday

To call this first novel ""strongly lyrical"" and ""evocative,"" as the publishers do, though the description is an accurate one, may be to give it the kiss of death. We are probably more willing to admire this kind of ""fine"" naturalist writing (by a young American Indian, a poet and a scholar) than to really enjoy it. It is doubtless this part of the novel, however, including a section on eagle trapping and bear hunting, which drew praise from Yvor Winters as ""one of the great short pieces of prose in English."" The general theme of the book is the disintegration of a young ""longhair"" Indian named Abel who is unwilling and unable to adapt himself to the white man's 'notions of ""civilization."" Momaday's writing, when dealing not only with natural phenomena but with characters, is detailed and explicit (this includes the young man's sexual encounters) and one's sympathies are aroused in a general way but we remain, finally, uninvolved in his tragedy.







7) "Reservation Blues" by Sherman Alexie

With the same brilliant mix of dark humor, sorrow, and cultural awareness that distinguished The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), Alexie's first novel tells the bittersweet story of an all-Indian blues and rock-and-roll band. Thomas Builds-the-Fire is the Spokane Reservation's resident storyteller, but everyone there ignores him. Driving around one day, he happens upon legendary blues singer Robert Johnson, who says he's been drawn to the reservation by recurring dreams of Big Mom, an ancient, mysterious woman who lives in the clouds. Johnson, now claiming that he faked his death in 1938, believes that Big Mom alone can relieve the burden he acquired some 60 years ago when he made his famous deal ``at the crossroads'' with the devil. After Thomas leads Johnson to Big Mom, he inherits the singer's guitar. Touched by its power, he decides to form a blues band, recruiting a guitarist, a drummer, and two backup singers from Spokane and another nearby reservation. Their band, Coyote Springs, soon attracts attention from whites, including New Age groupies Betty and Veronica and Cavalry Records A&R men Sheridan and Wright, who appear to be the reincarnations (or did they ever die?) of notoriously ruthless 19th-century US Cavalry officers. Careening nearly out of control, Alexie's text playfully mixes past and present, fanciful dreams with the harsh reality of a tribe whose traditional livelihood is fishing and who are now stuck on land with dammed-up rivers. His razor wit is at its most poignant when dealing with Indian tradition, hope, and despair as his characters confront white religion and duplicity. All the while, Alexie successfully dances around culture-clash clichÇs in this fresh, vibrant modern fairy tale. Blues as biting, sharp and timeless as any by Robert Johnson or Bessie Smith.





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