The Light in the Forest by Conrad Richter

John Butler is taken from his family at age four in an Indian raid against English settlers during the French and Indian War. This was when the French and British were fighting over the rights to colonize in North America, and the Indians got involved helping the French. John’s family lived in what is today Ohio. Much of the Indian land had been lost to the whites by that time, so that there was no love lost between the colonists and the Indians. Two years after the British won the war, there was an exchange of prisoners, in 1765. Because so much time had passed, many of the younger captives had been raised as Indians, and they did not always want to return to their first families. In Richter’s novel, John Butler is one of these, having to leave the Indians when he is 15 years old.

The book was published in 1957, at a time when the United States was emerging as a dominant world culture and was engaged in building commercial empires. Some of the people living in developing countries feared the impact of the United States culture on their own traditions.

Richter had sympathy with native peoples, here and abroad, and distrusted the development and expansion of modern cities and suburbs. Having spent his early childhood in a rural Pennsylvania setting, he mourned the passing of what he saw as the pastoral Indian way of life, the “light” in the forest.

The story is simply told, from the young man’s point of view. True Son (John Butler’s Indian name) not only hates the white men for what they have done to his people, but feels imprisoned and suffocated in their culture. All the white adults in the story know nothing about the Indian culture, simply classifying them as primitive and murderous. There is no wiser person present to offer some mediating point of view, which is to be regretted. A minister does try to explain to True Son the horrors that Indians had committed against some colonists, but True Son cannot believe it, since in his village no one ever boasted of killing women or children.

Richter has been criticized for idealizing the Indian culture as reverent and spiritual in all its ways, and showing the colonists’ lifestyle as greedy and materialistic, lived out of harmony with nature and its laws. Yet at the end, when True Son tries to go back to the Indians, Richter shows us, that as the minister insisted, there is cruelty on both sides. We can see greed and imperious pride in some of the warriors in True Son’s tribe.

However, for the most part, “The Light in the Forest” paints an unforgettable portrait of the beauty in the Indian’s lifestyle. This lifestyle is doomed to perish by those intent on conquering the wilderness to serve their own way of life. The story raises the question of what true progress consists of – a question that we are still pondering, a half century later.

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Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed by Judy Pasternak

“Yellow dirt” is the translation for “leetso” – the Navajo Indian word for uranium. Starting in the early 1940’s, the federal government contracted with private industry and the Navajo nation, constructing mines on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. The first mineral they were seeking was vanadium which helped to harden steel for warships. But mixed in with vanadium and radium was uranium, an element that was needed to build the atom bomb. After World War II was over, there was still a huge demand for nuclear production because of the Cold War. It turned out that the tribal lands contained huge amounts of uranium and so the saga began. The Navajo government provided the workers and got a small percentage of the profits. The mining companies provided the equipment and operators, and the U.S. government got the uranium.

Early on reports began to surface of how hazardous uranium is. When it is mined and the uranium leached out of the ore, the remaining dirt still contains uranium. As uranium breaks down, it gives off a gas which you can’t see or smell, but is deadly. Miners in Europe as far back as the 1500’s were documented as falling prey to a “mountain sickness” which we know now was lung cancer, caused by uranium gas.

The miners were not protected as they worked, and they sat and ate their lunch while covered in the yellow uranium dust. After the uranium boom was over in the early 1960’s, the mines and their huge waste piles needed to be cleaned up. This was done minimally or not at all. Actual mine sites were filled in, with no thought to the damage done to the groundwater or attention paid to houses that were built with cement mixed with the yellow dirt. The pits left by the mines filled with groundwater and families and sheep used that water, not knowing the dangers. Not only lung cancer but other cancers and crippling birth defects became suspect among the families exposed to the gas and water.

Judy Pasternak’s book documents different people’s struggles to broadcast the devastation and find someone accountable, at the local, state and federal level. She herself, as a journalist, helped bring the story to the public in a Los Angeles Times series in 2006. A key figure in finally bringing the Navajo government, the federal government, and the mining companies to the table was Henry Waxman, a Democratic congressman, in 2008.

The story continues today, with companies wanting to mine for uranium again on reservation land, with a process that they call safer and not as invasive as earlier methods. The litigation and clean up efforts continue also, with parent companies such as El Paso Natural Gas Corporation wrangling with the Department of Energy about who is responsible for this terrible legacy.

Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge

Although this book was first published in 1929, it still has resonance as a novel commenting on the fate of the native American Indian tribes when their lands were invaded by the settlers from European countries. Oliver La Farge, the author, was an anthropologist who studied the Mayan culture in Central America and the Indian population of the American Southwest.

The story concerns Laughing Boy, a young Navajo man who meets another young Navajo woman, Slim Girl, at a native dance ceremony, and falls in love with her. She actually seeks him out, but is not as smitten with love as he is. Her motives are more self-seeking, as she is determined to use him to remold her life into an Indian one.

What we know about Slim Girl is her resolve and her anger against white people. She was reared away from her family in a missionary school. As a young woman, she had embraced the Christian faith and the American culture, when something happened that caused her to abandon the whites and all that they offered her. When she meets Laughing Boy, she has renounced her upbringing, and is trying to find her way back to her people and their values.

Right away, Slim Girl finds that her course is not so simple, and that she could not foresee the complications that present themselves. She herself falls deeply in love, and finds herself in sway to a “real” Navajo brave…one who can order her to wait when an adventure calls him. Tension in the story arises from Slim Girls’ hidden strategies to have an Indian life, but one without undue hardship and sacrifice.

The story is as much a love story as a story of Slim Girl’s “hubris”, and how her ruthless planning will rend the two asunder. With vivid descriptions of the Navajo religious ceremonies and of the beautiful desert setting, the book is a testimony to how the Indian’s tribal life managed to linger on, before the white man’s civilization fully encroached it.

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