Friday, November 13, 2009

Celebrate Native American Heritage Month: New Native American Fiction

People of the Thunder / W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear
Three wanderers--the prophet Old White, a noble warrior named Trader and a mysterious shaman woman, Two Petals--travel across the North A
merican Southeast before it was ever America and long before it was ever civilized, striving to establish peace in a desparately savage land. The territory they cross is controlled by the Sky Hand tribe, ruled by the cunning and ruthless Chief Flying Hawk and his evil nephew Smoke Shield. Together this awkward, but curiously powerful trio must bring down Flying Hawk and Smoke Shield who themselves are bent on wiping out all but their own kind.

The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008 / by Louise Erdrich

Erdrich, whose willowy novels and stories have mirrored her own Midwest-Native American heritage, has compiled a new collection of some of her most personal stories and essays. As expected, most of her protagonists are female and Indian, or Indian hybrids (Chipewa, Cherokee, Ottawa, etc. mixed with French & German ancestries) and their circumstances are embedded with varying degrees ambiguity over the fact. Some laugh, some cry and some simply ignore the constrasts present between their daily lives and the heritage of their ancestors, aspects of modern life overshadowing any semblance of customs and traditions their forefathers once shared even as Indian lore and mysticism crop up in the backs of their minds during things like thunderstorms, traffic jams, TV news and their children's gadgets.


The Reason For Crows: A Kateri Tekakwitha Story / by Diane Glancy
The real life Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680, birth-name Kahenta), daughter to a Mohawk warrior during the period when the Europeans were infil
trating the Native tribes of North America, is rehashed in this extraordinary tale of two cultures colliding and a young girl's passion in the midst of violence, pestilence and death. Nearly blind after the smallpox has wiped out most of her camp and nearly killed all of her family, a young, still-ailing Kateri is pitied by a Jesuit priest, Jacques de Lambervilles who cares for her at the mission. After nursing her back to health and reading the scripture to her, Kateri is converted to Christianity and begins a life of chastity and penitence, wholly devoted to her faith until her death at 24. Today, Kateri Tekakwitha has been venerated as a Saint among Jesuit catholics and several churches, even a summer camp in Maine, bear her name.


Runner / by Thomas Perry
Runner is Thomas Perry's sixth Jane Whitefield novel following Jane, a Native American female and skilled Indian guide with a knack for
"disappearing" who aids people who themselves need hiding. Currently Jane's living in upstate New York, married to a surgeon and keeping her own, other calling pretty much under wraps. Sure enough, though, action finds Jane in the form of Christine Monahan, a pregnant woman on the run from her abusive husband and another, more grisly assortment of shady characters seemingly bent on hunting her down. Soon both women are fleeing cross-country as Jane works fast, doing what she does best, pairing her neo-mystical Native American talents with her own tech-savvy, identity-falsifying skills to help Christine and her baby ultimately find safety.


War Dances / by Sherman Alexie
Alexie, himself a member of the Spokane tribe of the Pacific Northwest, is the award-winning author of Smoke Signals and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian. Much of his fiction has been labeled as a com
edically scathing characterization of the plight of Native Americans, his penetrating voice expertly mixing humor with anger and tragedy with comedy. His newest collection of short stories, War Dances, confronts family life through various ordinary characters, each flawed in their own unique ways yet appealing in a quite real, naturalistic sense. In his title story "War Dances", a dying man reflects back on the death of his own alcoholic father while in "The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless", a married clothing salesman slowly falls out of love with his wife after she bears him three children. While all of his stories may not connect the same, the collection as a whole presents a "spiritedly provocative array of tragic comedies"*.

*Booklist

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