The Brave

By James Bird

Feiwel & Friends     2020

311 pages     Middle Grade

The Brave is a brave, sober, loving book that was introduced to me by my sixth grade granddaughter, Adela. I bought the book at her request, and we will have a book discussion after she finishes. While it is realistic fiction, it has some aspects of magical realism.

Collin is a 12-year-old with an OCD problem that makes it difficult for him at school. He counts all the letters in the words that people say to him. When he responds, he begins with the number of letters. So if his teacher says, “Good morning, Collin.” He would respond : “17. Good morning,” No matter how hard he tries, he can’t stop counting, and the school kids can’t stop harassing him. When things become unbearable, his alcoholic father sends him across the country with his dog, Seven, to live with his mother, whom he has never met.

Cecilia, his mother, is Ojibwe and lives on the Fond du Lac reservation outside of Duluth MN. Wait! Duluth! My home town! I called Adela and said, “You didn’t tell me it takes place in Duluth.” Oh yeah” she responded, “I forgot.” Actually, the reservation is about 15 miles from town.  Of course, to me, that made the book all the more important.  As a kid growing up in Duluth, there were kids from the reservation in our school, but native culture was pretty much a given in the culture of Duluth.

The native culture takes a secondary role in the story line, except, perhaps, for the magic that seems to surround a new acquaintance, Orenda. Orenda lives mostly in a tree house next door to Collin’s mother and grandmother. She believes that she is turning into a butterfly as her body deteriorates from ALS. Her mother, who died of ALS, is a butterfly that visits her frequently. Orenda is an incredible character in the book, and the fact that her father built her a treehouse makes her all the more magical.

As Collin becomes her friend, she teaches him about strength and bravery, and the stronger he becomes, the easier it is for him to manage at school and control his counting obsession. His mother teaches him about the purity of love, and he finds himself growing into the person that he wants to become. He gains enough mastery over his life that when Orenda is dying. he is able to manage the pain and grief. Collin muses at one point: “I wish I could take her pain away. I’d happily feel it if it meant she would feel better, but I also know she would never let me. It’s hers. It’s part of her story.”

I tried to read the book through the eyes of my 11-year-old granddaughter. She definitely will have seen the depth of the crisis at hand, and is responding to the challenges of bullying and the joys of beautiful relationships. One reviewer complained that some of the natives were stereotypes. “Still we should be past stereotypes of stoic, wise Indians who speak little and are abnormally attached to the great outdoors.” These details were things I was looking for as I read, but I became so involved in the beauty of the story line and the relationships that I didn’t pay attention to potential stereotypes.

Before I began The Brave, I read that it was on several lists of best books of 2020, including School Library Journal, and the New York Public Library, so I was surprised when I read negative reviews in The New York Times, The Circle Newspaper, among others. They felt that the Native American experience wasn’t accurate enough. But, that’s wasn’t what I was reading the book for. I saw a young boy and a teenage girl struggling, finding, and becoming the butterflies that they were destined to become. In my opinion, The Brave was just that, brave and beautiful.

Just two small caveats: Orenda is constantly followed by butterflies, and the woods around their homes are filled with butterflies. Ah, butterflies have a very short season in northeastern Minnesota. Likely they aren’t there in the autumn and winter. Also, she feeds peaches to  the butterflies. Peaches don’t grow in Minnesota—too cold. Oh well, but it’s a beautiful illustration.

James Bird, the author of The Brave, is a filmmaker and author. He is of Ojibwe descent and went to school in Minnesota. He has a new book, No Place Like Home, coming out in August.

The Sentence

 By Louise Erdrich

Harper     2021

400 pages     Literary

Louise Erdrich owns the bookstore Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, which specializes in indigenous materials. Her newest novel takes place in that bookstore, and the major protagonist is Tookie, a bookseller at the store. Louise, herself, makes an appearance as well as a ghost named Flora, who haunts Tookie every day at the store.

The first half of the book is a delight. We learn about how Tookie, an indigenous woman, makes a very stupid move and ends up in prison for ten years. She reads everything she can get her hands on while she is in prison, and when she gets released, she gets a job at Louise’s bookstore. She is really intimidating looking with black eyeliner, black stompers, a nose ring and eyebrow cuff. She says, “Who would dare not buy a book from me?”

Tookie is quite an incredible woman, and the reader is totally drawn to her. Her marriage to Pollux has its ups and downs. He was the tribal policeman who was involved in her arrest. He  says, “You could be anything. You make my brain boil. You make my heart flip over. Twist in a knot. It’s like you never learned that our choices get us where we are.” But when she reaches out her arms to meet his—he slaps handcuffs on her and arrests her. When she is released from prison, they meet again, fall in love and get married.

Life improves for Tookie and the reader is drawn into her brilliance as a bookseller, as a wife, and as a stepmother/grandmother to Pollux’s daughter and her baby. But then the pandemic hits followed by the murder of George Floyd, just down the street from the bookstore. The tone of the book changes, and the reader is caught with the ferocity of life in Minneapolis as it is engulfed in protests. Everyone is scared; everyone is worried, and the air around the bookstore is filled with tear gas.

The bookstore has closed because of the pandemic and the protests, so Tookie spends a great deal of time alone in the store, pulling books from the shelves for online orders.  “Everyone who wasn’t out on the streets wanted to read about why everyone else was out on the streets.”  Oh—and Tookie spends a great deal of time fending off Flora, the ghost, who is bound and determined to inhabit Tookie’s body, mind, and spirit. Flora plays an pivotal role in the plot so I won’t go into more details about her. The reviewer in the Washington Post says that “The novel’s ectoplasm hovers between the realms of historical horror and cultural comedy.”

Interspersed with the crazy plot is the world of books and bookstores. Tookie really knows her books and is able to pick the perfect book for her customers. Titles of books are everywhere in the text—so much so, that there is a bibliography at the end of the book. Tookie also consults a dictionary frequently, and the book begins and ends with her defining her word of the day.

There is so much going on in The Sentence that I hesitate to go much further. I was entranced with a chapter about a dinner party where the conversation is about wild rice—a conversation that could only happen in Minnesota. I laughed aloud because I had cooked a wild rice casserole for Thanksgiving and I had trouble softening the wild rice, a problem that the wild rice chapter was able to solve for me.

Additionally, the narration about the protests after the George Floyd murder was compelling and profound. Obviously the author had witnessed the mayhem firsthand. I read those chapters with great attention. My niece, Cory, had been involved in the protests as a medic, and I could almost find her on the streets with Tookie’s coworker and Tookie’s husband. Spellbinding.

Louise Erdrich is one of America’s best authors. Her recent book, The Night Watchman, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, and I read and reviewed The Round House in  2013. She has the unique ability to weave indigenous wisdom and history with modern sensibility. One reviewer has said, "Novelists who can create vivid, plausible, living characters are rare, but novelists who also can create a believable world and a compelling story for those characters are blessed. Louise Erdrich is blessed."

Here is a terrific review of The Sentence in the New York Times. Next time I am in Minneapolis, I am going to be sure to visit Erdrich’s store, Birchbark Books. 

Dovetails in Tall Grass

By Samantha Specks

Spark Press     2021

310 pages     Historical Fiction

The Shortlist

This summer I was privileged to read several books about relationships between native peoples and white Americans in Minnesota. They included This Tender Land and Lightning Strike by William Kent Krueger and also Dovetails in Tall Grass, by Samantha Specks. One of the troubling things that I have learned is that I was never taught anything about the Dakota Wars or anything about the treatment of Native Americans as Minnesota was being established and settled.

I learned nothing about any of this in any history class I took as a young person. However, I was very aware of native reservations  that were prevalent in the Minnesota of my childhood. It seems ironic that I was so troubled when we all learned about the destruction of the “Black Wall Street” and the death of African Americans in 1918 Tulsa, Oklahoma, while I knew nothing about the thirty-eight Dakota men who were hung in 1862 in Mankato, Minnesota. ”To this day, this is the largest mass execution in United States history.” An article on Minnesota Public Radio discusses why the topic is not taught in Minnesota schools.

Specks does a remarkable job of telling the story of the Dakota Wars through the lens of two teenage girls, Emma Heard, the daughter of settlers in New Ulm, Minnesota, and Oenikika, the daughter of Chief Little Crow. I was particularly taken by Oenikika. She knew that she was born to be a healer. She notices the pull of the plants as she walks in the prairie: “My soul was listening as much as my ears. I was sensing it again—their pull. The plants of healing whispered through the rustling grasses.” Reminded me so much of Robin Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass. Emma thinks that she is called to be a teacher. Both are remarkable young women and great witnesses to the conflict that emerges.

This is a beautifully-written witness to Minnesota during the Civil War, the Dakota Wars, as well as an eloquent observation of teenage girls of any generation.

 Here is the Kirkus review. Samantha Specks website.

 

 

Lightning Strike

 By William Kent Krueger

Atria     2021

400 pages     Thriller

 Let me just say at the outset that I love anything by William Kent Krueger, and its not just because he writes about Northern Minnesota, my home turf. The protagonist in his mystery series, Cork O’Connor, is a skilled detective, and a former sheriff in the same community that his father Liam O’Connor served as sheriff. Krueger does a great job laying plot groundwork and creating the setting. His characters are realistic, recognizable, and in most cases, redemptive.

Lightning Strike is a prequel to the Cork O’Connor series. Cork is 12 years old, a product of the Aurora community. He is one quarter Ojibwe on his mother’s side, so he is particularly attuned to the native community; his grandmother lives in the community; and he has several friends who are Ojibwe. Liam, his dad, while no stranger to the native community, is not particularly trusted as the sheriff, even though he has interactions every day within the community. He is an Irish-American transplant from Chicago, and therefore an outlier. Cork's grandmother, on the other hand, is one of the matriarch's of the Ojibwe community.

The plot begins when Cork and a friend are hiking near Iron Lake in the Superior National Forest when they make a horrifying discovery. One of the community elders, Big John Manydeeds is hanging from a tree at Lightning Strike, a clearing where Cork and his friends often hang out. The native community doesn’t believe that Manydeeds could possibly have committed suicide, and Liam comes to believe that it was a homicide. A cryptic note at the murder scene and Cork’s insistence that he help his dad with the case keep away the rush to judgement that Liam might have initially considered.

I loved how Krueger created the character of 12-year-old Cork. Like most boys his age, he hangs out with his buddies, delivers his newspapers, and maintains his natural curiosity. Every parent of boys can identify with Cork, his parents, and his grandmother as they deal with this pre-adolescent detective. He and his friends are haunted by the specter of Manydeeds hanging in the tree, and they set out to help Liam solve the crime. Because they know the streams leading into Iron Lake from Boy Scouts, they know that Manydeeds knew the streams as well as they do. On one excursion, the boys find Manydeeds’ canoe in one of the streams leading into the big lake, and they know that they are on the right track to solving the crime. On the other hand, Krueger does not glorify the boys and their detective skills; they are not the Hardy Boys.

Like he did in This Tender Land, Krueger explores the complexity of the white community’s relationship with the Native community. I appreciated this so much. One reviewer says that he “shows rather than tells why with a subtle but unflinching touch.” Additionally, Cork is growing in his understanding of his own relationship to the Ojibwe community, what that means, and what his response and responsibility should be. At the same time, I could relate to the communities and the scenery of the region. It is a unique Minnesota spot.

Can you read Lightning Strike without having read any of the other eighteen Cork O’Connor detective books? I think so. I have read several of them, including Manitou Canyon, which I reviewed in 2016. Krueger believes that Lightning Strike is the perfect starting point. He says, “I love that this look at Cork has allowed me to explore the complex relationship between father and son, so important in shaping Cork into the man who occupies center stage in the series.”

 I highly recommend Krueger’s novels. If you haven’t read any of them, start now. Here is his website.

 

Manitou Canyon

by William Kent Kruger

Atria Books    2016

336 pages     Mystery

Cork O'Connor is the former sheriff of Tamarack County, Minnesota. Now he owns a burger joint/detective agency at the edge of Iron Lake, and as Manitou Canyon opens, he is closing the restaurant and dreading November. Even though his daughter Jennifer is going to be married later in the month, many ghosts of Novembers past haunt Cork even more than the prospect of the harsh winter ahead. He thinks of November as the "shoulder season, right on the cusp of winter."

Cork is drawn into the search for a missing civil engineer, John Harris. Harris designed some of the largest dams and bridges in the world, and he and Cork were childhood friends. Harris went into the Boundary Waters area with his two adult grandchildren, Trevor and Lindsay, and disappeared while he was out fishing. Although a search doesn't find his body, Trevor and Lindsay believe that he is out in the wilderness somewhere, and they know that Cork knows the territory well and can help them.

The mystery evolves slowly and builds to a page-turning, breathtaking finish. There is a tremendous interplay between the ancient and the modern in the plot. While it begins with a search for a missing person, it becomes a life and death battle for Cork to save himself and others during an evolving fight to save tribal lands from an environmental disaster. Militant natives fighting the mining industry. Interestingly enough, when I looked at the news this morning, I read about a current Native American protest over a pipeline being built in North Dakota. Protesters are saying that the pipeline is damaging a native burial grounds. Read about it in Time. In most of the Cork O'Connor books, the tension between the Native Americans and the modern culture is palpable.

Cork O'Connor is a thoroughly conflicted man. He has one foot firmly in the modern world and one foot in the ancient traditions of his Ojibwa heritage. He long ago came to believe that his heritage influenced his every movement and everything that happened to him. "It was who he was, something which had been passed down to him and from which he couldn't turn away, something that would always threaten him and those who loved him and were loved by him." In many ways, the race to save John Harris is a spiritual journey as well as a physical journey. Cork must work through his demons and lead from his heart rather than just his head. 

Native spirituality and native practices play a very large role in Manitou Canyon (and I would suppose all the Cork O'Connor books). Krueger's respect for native culture plays heavily in the character development and the plot. Henry, one of Cork's closest friends, is a "mide," a traditional healer and spiritual mentor. His influence permeates the book as do the other spiritual practices of the native peoples in the book. Besides being a thrilling mystery, the reader is imbued with spirituality and spiritual practices.

The very best part of Manitou Canyon is the setting with all its beauty, danger, and elusiveness. Cork knows the Boundary Waters very well, and has navigated its lakes and portages many times. He knows the dangerous weather signs of November and the constant threat of cold, rain, and snow. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reviewer uses this example: " Cork thinks of the 'thousand moments when a man’s breath is taken away by some sudden, unexpected beauty … [then with] no warnings of the dangers — severe storms that blew out of nowhere, high waves that could founder a canoe, falling trees, forest fires.'” The setting and its weather is as much a part of the thriller as is the thriller itself.

This is the 15th book in the Cork O'Connor series. I read the first few of them years ago, but had not read one for several years. I love reading about Duluth, the North Shore, and the Boundary Waters because this is my home turf. One of my favorite North Shore books is The Long Shining Water by Dannielle Sosin. Another mystery series based in the north woods of Minnesota is Vidar Sundstol's Minnesota Trilogy. I read the satisfying first book of that series, The Land of Dreams. 

Finally, I want to mention that my niece, Cory Dack, spent the summer guiding youth voyages in the Boundary Waters. She told me that she has seen marvelous growth in the teenagers who venture on those journeys and that she finds her soul there as well. Manitou Canyon explores those waters and those soul experiences in ways that are just as satisfying as the mystery the book exposes. 

The New Trail of Tears: How Washington is Destroying American Indians

by Naomi Schaefer Riley

Encounter Books     2016

214 pages     Nonfiction

The Shortlist

One of my childhood memories occurred at our family cabin in Bemidji, Minnesota. My father and I were out fishing, near one of the inlets of Big Turtle Lake. I saw some people in canoes doing something along the edges of the stream. My father took me closer so that I could see natives harvesting the wild rice that grew there. They pulled the stalks over the edge of the canoe and then whacked the stalks with sticks, loosening the seeds, which then fell into the bottom of the canoe. It was a fascinating operation, and my dad told me that Indians were the only people who could legally harvest wild rice in Minnesota. 

I grew up in areas where Chippewa and Ojibwa Indian reservations were prevalent; Native Americans were the "minorities" in Minnesota—they were part of our everyday life. The people on the reservations were poor and powerless. There are approximately 3 million Native Americans living in reservations, and all these years after my childhood, they are still poor and powerless.

Many people think that the lives of Native Americans improved with the advent of casinos and the money that came from working in the casinos. Riley's thesis is that the government has a paternalistic attitude toward native peoples and that paternalistic attitude is what has kept them in poverty with inferior educational and medical opportunities. I do have to mention that Riley is very conservative and her book reflects her conservative bias. 

I received The New Trail of Tears from the publicist, and while I didn't read the book all the way through, I found what I did read to be enlightening. I would recommend it to students of sociology and those interested in social justice issues. It is to be published this week.

Riley is married to Jason Riley, the author of Please Stop Helping Us, which I reviewed a year or so ago. His thesis about African Americans in American society is quite similar in tone to the thesis of The New Trail of Tears.

I would also recommend books by Sherman Alexie because he explores some of these same difficult themes in fiction—poverty, alcoholism, and identity. My favorite is the Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Then I love the Minnesota Native American author Louise Erdrich. I read and reviewed The Round House, a novel that deals with violence against Native American women very effectively. She has a new novel LaRose, which I plan to read yet this summer.

Finally, I have been watching Longmire, a Netflix series based on the books by Craig Johnson. It features a Wyoming sheriff whose district includes a reservation. Although it is primarily a mystery solving series, it includes the interplay between the white population of the county, the people who live on the "Rez", and the owners of the casino that is being established. It is very good.

The summary of The New Trail of Tears:

If you want to know why American Indians have the highest rates of poverty of any racial group, why suicide is the leading cause of death among Indian men, why native women are two and a half times more likely to be raped than the national average and why gang violence affects American Indian youth more than any other group, do not look to history. There is no doubt that white settlers devastated Indian communities in the 19th, and early 20th centuries. But it is our policies today—denying Indians ownership of their land, refusing them access to the free market and failing to provide the police and legal protections due to them as American citizens—that have turned reservations into small third-world countries in the middle of the richest and freest nation on earth.
The tragedy of our Indian policies demands reexamination immediately—not only because they make the lives of millions of American citizens harder and more dangerous—but also because they represent a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong with modern liberalism. They are the result of decades of politicians and bureaucrats showering a victimized people with money and cultural sensitivity instead of what they truly need—the education, the legal protections and the autonomy to improve their own situation.
If we are really ready to have a conversation about American Indians, it is time to stop bickering about the names of football teams and institute real reforms that will bring to an end this ongoing national shame.

Naomi Riley's website. 
Here is a recent opinion column she wrote for the New York Post about tribal sovereignty.

The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

Harper     2012

317 pages     Fiction.

This is a book about the rape of Joe's mother and the way thirteen-year-old Joe helps his father find the rapist and bring him to justice. At its heart, it is a very sad story.

But before you put the thought of reading The Round House aside because you "don't want to read a sad book," let me say that this book is subtly profound, that it deals with difficult topics compellingly, and that the protagonist and narrator, Joe, is a 13-year-old detective "par excellence." The book has it all--a page-turning plot, some extremely humorous moments, and a moral dilemma that causes the reader to ponder the meaning of justice long after the book is done.

Many of Erdrich's books are set on an Ojibwa reservation in North Dakota. Erdrich, herself, is Ojibwa. This is territory that most of us know little about, and Erdrich teaches us about life on the reservation without didacticism. The NPR reviewer says the Erdrich has "created for us the keenly made story of a peculiar history, in an out of the way part of our continent, that touches on the hearts and souls of us all." The theme of this particular book is violence against Native American women and the rule of law on the reservation and how it collides with federal and state law. The plot is interwoven with fascinating characters, scenes of daily reservation life, a pow wow, and an old grandpa telling Ojibwa legends. Teenage boys snack on fry bread, grandmas tell bawdy stories, and a loving family deals with personal tragedy.

Joe is a vivid character as are his buddies and their families. When his mother, Geraldine, is raped, Joe is forced to grow up in unanticipated ways. Bazil, Joe's father, is a tribal judge, and he includes Joe in his detective work. By telling Joe about the rape, he puts a layer of maturity on the boy, which Joe then passes on to his friends, particularly Cappy his best friend. The boys bike madly all over the reservation as they solve the crime--mostly behind the backs of their parents. Some of their sleuthing is humorous; some is extremely dangerous. Their concept of justice is immature, like their years, but the ramifications of the justice they exact follows Joe into adulthood. (He is narrating the story as an adult--a tribal judge like his father.)

The novel's subplots are as fascinating as the detective story. It is evident by the way Erdrich weaves the stories together that we are putty in the hands of a master storyteller. Sometimes, I had to stop reading just to come up for air--it was so intense that I couldn't read any further. Erdrich won the National Book Award in 2012 for The Round House, and it is well deserved. The illustration in the New York Times review very aptly conveys the intensity of the novel.

Familial love is one of the themes of The Round House.  Bazil loves Geraldine and is extremely patient with her suffering following the rape. By his loving example, he shows Joe how a woman should be treated, rather than the way his mother was treated. Bazil is similar in many ways to Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, and the reader has the same warm feeling toward him that we have to Atticus. He is a just man caught in a very unjust situation. 

I liked the way the reviewer in the Washington Times began his piece about The Round House. "Novelists who can create vivid, plausible, living characters are rare, but novelists who also can create a believable world and a compelling story for those characters are blessed. Louise Erdrich is blessed."

Erdrich says in an interview that she wrote the last paragraph of the book after she had written about half of the book. After she wrote the last paragraph, she put her head in her hands and wept. I did the same. 

The family always stopped for ice cream on their way home from a trip, but on the last trip in The Round House they did not stop. "We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going." The "sweep of sorrow" that assails the reader's heart in this poignant coming of age story goes on long after the book is finished. Indeed, the very last sentence of the book, "We just kept going," is a small affirmation that life goes on, people survive tragedy, and hope is ever present in the human soul.

The NPR review, which by the way gives a good summary of the book: http://www.npr.org/2012/10/16/162959731/round-house-is-one-of-erdrichs-best

The review in the Washington Times: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/nov/15/book-review-the-round-house/?page=all

The review in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/books/review/the-round-house-by-louise-erdrich.html?_r=0