"I was an Indian, but no more. Now I'm something different altogether."
Joe Little, along with hundreds of other Native American children, was ta"I was an Indian, but no more. Now I'm something different altogether."
Joe Little, along with hundreds of other Native American children, was taken from his family and placed in a “school” with the intent of transforming him into a young man capable of navigating the white world. These “educators” did not strive to make these children equals but merely people who were politely subservient. They were made into hybrid blends of their birth culture and the white culture they were taught to emulate. These Native children did not give up their heritage easily, and brutal means were used to force them to conform. They emerged from these schools as people who could never be completely comfortable in either world.
A Native woman occasionally came by Publishers Book Outlet in the Thomas Mall where I worked in the late 1980s. One evening she told me a story about her mother attending a school in Northern Phoenix…on…yes of course… Indian School Road. She told me her mother would walk into the city from her home in the desert. On the way, there were white people's clothes hanging on a line where the Native American students would change from their native clothing into clothes suitable for attending school. Still to this day, I’m haunted by the image of those clothes flapping in the wind, surrounded by cacti and sand, waiting for the children to assume their costumes as they journey from one world into another.
With this book, McLellan is giving us a peek into that world, and he frames his story against the greater backdrop of the American West. As he has accomplished with all the books in this series, he tries to tell the true story of the American West. For every nasty piece of shit that existed in the West (and there were plenty), I’d like to believe there existed a person with integrity and compassion. McLellan’s cast of characters reflect the complete spectrum of those human beings, from the despicable ones who took advantage of every weakness, the broken ones who tried their best, and the kind ones who held out a helping hand when all hope was lost.
I came across McLellan chopping wood on his homestead in the mountains of Northern California.The air was redolent with the scent of pine trees, chainsaw oil, and sawdust. I cleared off the snow from a stump and drank some coffee from his thermos while I badgered him with questions as he continued to split wood.
Jeffrey D. Keeten: Your westerns have focused around the fate of Native Americans. Through your plots, you have revealed the real history of the numerous and systematic ways that genocide was perpetrated against Native Americans. I noticed with this latest book, Joe Little and the Indian School, that you have grouped them under the series title The Americans. You could almost call it The True Americans. Do you intend to keep adding books to this series or are you intending for it to be a trilogy? And can you tell us a little about what you are working on now?
Michael A. McLellan: There will certainly be five, and possibly a sixth book in The Americans series. All three will be centered around characters who were introduced in previous works. I do my best to avoid spoilers, but I think I'm safe saying that the next installment, titled, The Diary of Molly Good (set for release in late March or early April) will reveal much of what transpired during the ten missing years in Everett Ward's memoir, and characters from The Scout of Wounded Knee, and Joe Little and the Indian School will be returning. It might bear noting here that all three of the previously published titles can be read in any order.
JDK:You created this loathsome character Reverend Samuel Alton Reeves. I think it is appropriate that you used all three of his names, just like we do with all modern serial killers. He's one of those odious people who, if I had a Time Machine, I might just set a course for SW Kansas in the late 19th century to deliver Reeves some frontier justice. Was he based on a specific person or was he a composite of several different people? There seemed to be no shortage of models in real life.
MAM:I suppose I see Reverend Reeves as a type. It seems that sadistic people, pedophiles, etc... are oft times very good at positioning themselves in places where they have power over those they wish to prey upon. Sadly, the world is full of them.
JDK:I wanted to share a quote from your book that sums up the more "compassionate" view of how to deal with the red savages, a view that leads to Indian Schools. This is a scene where Reverend Reeves is recruiting an enforcer to his cause. "You kill Indians, Mister Phillips. To avenge your family. God understands vengeance. He can be vengeful Himself. But is killing a handful--or even a hundred--Indians going to slake your need for it? What if I told you that by helping me, we will in essence be eliminating the savages entirely. Every last one of them. Elimination by assimilation, Mister Phillips. If we accomplish that, there will be no more Indians, only another race of lesser men, much like the negros." We see this happening on a wide scale today in the way people are being demonized and diminished by people who may disagree with them politically. It makes it easier to initiate acts of violence against a group of people if you make your enemies into some form of subhumans. Once white men landed on the shores of North America the fate of Native Americans was sealed, but were there any sensible, more truly compassionate solutions that were not implemented?
MAM: Colonialism is always ugly. I think I'm going to fall back on Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake (Sitting Bull) for this one, because ultimately his words sum it up in one sentence. “If America had been twice the size it is, there still would not have been enough." Once it was too late, I think there were plenty of well-meaning whites—some very powerful—who made attempts to mitigate the damage, but the great greed machine was already in motion and there was no stopping it.
JDK: I was pleasantly surprised that you set this book in Kansas, more precisely SW Kansas where the law was slow to take hold. There were Indian Schools all over the US, was there is something particularly compelling about setting the bulk of your action in that region, otherwise known as the home of Jeffrey D. Keeten? :-)
MAM: Kansas was central to the Indian territories, so was a logical choice. And I think you of all people would agree, if any place personified the wild west, it was Kansas.
JDK: As a funny side note to this question, Kansans believe they live in the Midwest because Kansas is in the middle of the US, but as I often explain, Kansas is actually part of The West. The Midwest ends with Iowa. I frankly prefer to be part of the West, though I would sometimes appreciate the added rainfall of the Midwest for my gardening endeavors.
JDK: You had a guest star who shows up late in the book. The legendary Bass Reeves, who I've been so pleased to see is getting more recognition these days with books, movies, and a TV series on Paramount. I read that he had over three thousand arrests which boggles the mind. He certainly should be as famous as Wyatt Earp or Wild Bill Hickock. I had the distinct impression from the ending that we will be seeing more of Reeves in future McLellan books. Any truth to my idle speculation?
MAM: There were so many intriguing people in the nineteenth century who weren't white and are finally being recognized, written about, and portrayed in film. Jim Beckwourth, who makes a brief appearance in The Scout of Wounded Knee was a fascinating man, and Bass Reeves is indeed returning in the forthcoming book....more
”I was startled awake several mornings later by what I first mistook as thunder. I jumped up, jerking my head around blindly in the purple glow of the”I was startled awake several mornings later by what I first mistook as thunder. I jumped up, jerking my head around blindly in the purple glow of the pre-dawn. The ground shook under my feet and the roar of the thunder continued to grow louder until it was near deafening. It occurred to me then what it was.…
Buffalo.
I tied up my bedroll and packed up the nervous mare as quickly as I could. As I removed her tether from the rock I’d tied it to, the sound hit it’s crescendo and began slowly receding into the west. I mounted the mare and rode in the direction of the sound, pushing the old girl harder than I should have. I came up over a rise, and then another, and there before me was the most exciting sight of my life; the entire prairie below, as far as I could see from east to west and north, was a cloud of rolling dust and the shifting mass of thousands of stampeding buffalo.
I sat atop the mare and watched the herd pass as the sun rose over the eastern horizon. When they were finally gone, the silence left behind was stark and somehow lonely.
The animals’ backtrail of obliterated prairie marched off into the distance almost due east. I followed it for a time, fascinated by the contrast between the undisturbed grass and the buffalos’ path of destruction.”
A few years ago I read a book by a guy named John Williams titled Butcher's Crossing. Williams is a great man of letters who is unknown to most of the reading public, but I was happy to see that the Library of America has recently collected his three brilliant novels together for posterity. Collected Novels: Butcher’s Crossing / Stoner / Augustus There were several points while reading this novel where I thought about Butcher’s Crossing, and the moment quoted above is one of them.
No small comparison.
Take heed my friends.
This novel is told from the perspective of a memoir, and frankly, if McLellan had told me he found its yellowing pages in a steamer trunk in the spiderwebbed, dusty attic of an abandoned Victorian home in California…I’d have believed him.
When Michael asked me to sum up my thoughts about the novel, this is what I wrote to him: This impeccably researched western casts a long shadow over the mythology of the West. The settling of the West was a collision of ideology bound by greed, treachery, and death. McLellan blends real and imaginary characters into a testimonial of what really happened as the West was "won" by some and lost by most. Spanning decades, we see a boy become a man as he tries to understand what is worth fighting for, what is worth dying for, and who is worth trusting. Straddling two cultures, at home in neither, it becomes impossible for him to find peace amongst the turmoil of a nation consumed with Manifest Destiny.
As I was reading the novel, there were several points where I forgot I was reading a novel and really believed I was reading the memoir of some old coot who had managed to survive the “taming” of the West. I used the term impeccably researched, and that's because McLellan not only gets the major historical events right, but he also gets the everyday things like food, clothing, and gear correct. As you worm your way into this novel, you will eventually reach this point where you are…there. It will rub off on you. You will go to bed, and you will smell like horse sweat, woodsmoke, and chicory coffee.
This is one of those cases where fiction is more authentic than “real” history.
We’ve seen American history in recent years being pushed and shoved back and forth between cancel culture and those who wish to whitewash events. In the process, we just keep making what we teach our children less and less interesting (those who care can sense the bullshite). Whites are tired of being blamed for the sins of their ancestors. People of color are tired of being pawns in the political wars of white elitists. We keep kicking the can down the road for our misdeeds, and what would have been easier to make right in the past has now become a stain that has sunk bone deep. By just getting history right, McLellan is unwillingly making a political statement.
The truth will set you free? More like the truth will set your house/teepee/cabin on fire.
Everett Ward survives four years of one of the bloodiest wars ever fought in history. He started work on a Texas cattle ranch and fell in love with a pretty kitchen maid called Rebecca, but her real name was Wačhiwi. Where Everett was color blind, the people who owned Rebecca were not. His attempt to be honorable was seen as foolhardy and naïve. This sets off a decade-long battle between Everett and deep-seated racism, not just with a cattle rancher in Texas, but with the generally accepted views of most white westerners. As he navigates his way through the Indian Wars, the buffalo slaughter, and the ruthlessness of those in power, he meets people like Custer, Wyatt Earp, Pawnee Killer, and Sitting Bull. He inadvertently becomes a small player in the biggest moments of the final days of the settling of the West. He witnesses the numerous moments of treachery in the guise of peace that destroyed the last chances for Native Americans to live with some semblance of honor. Everett gives us the truth of what really happened.
Through all of this, Everett is just trying to get back to Wačhiwi. The world might be on fire, but through the smoke it is love that he is looking for.
I want to thank Michael McLellan for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.
“In the past year, he had transformed from a failing student and potential dropout to a star shooting guard on a dominant team. People now put him on “In the past year, he had transformed from a failing student and potential dropout to a star shooting guard on a dominant team. People now put him on posters and talked about him in barbershops.”
Sports can be transformative. It can give a young man or woman a purpose that lifts them above a stressful homelife, despondency, and whatever other challenges they are experiencing in life. When they walk on that 4, 520 feet of floor, they are transformed into not gods, but something larger than human.
“Sometimes I have to remind myself they’re just seventeen.” --John Malatare
There has always been a push and pull between teachers and coaches. Using sports as a carrot to inspire a young man or woman to care about their studies does work. I saw it work with a teammate. I watched an indifferent student become a dedicated student who would sometimes beg off from doing things with his friends because he had a paper due. Teachers are right to be wary though. The other side of the coin is a coach coming to see a teacher, asking for leniency so his star starting forward can play Friday night. In Europe, sports teams are separate from schools, but in the United States, sports have always been a defining part of our schools. How well the sports team does is a point of pride, even for those who never played.
When I discovered I could put an orange ball through a hoop, I went from being the weirdo who read too many books, undateable, to someone who girls were actually chasing after. On Friday night, I was one person and someone else the rest of the week, but I was defined by points, rebounds, and blocked shots. When I walked into high school gyms, I saw huge posters on the walls of athletes, but when I walked through the school hallways, I didn't see any posters for the brightest students. I know that we wouldn’t do gifted students any favors lauding their efforts because there is so much pressure from other students to make them conform to being...average, but I think we do need to find a way to promote the benefits of learning as much as we promote the successes of athletes.
So what Abe Streep is doing with this book is dropping the reader into the middle of a Native American Flathead Reservation high school basketball team season. The Arlee Warriors had miraculously managed to win a state championship the year before and are trying to do something few teams ever do: win back to back championships. The author does go back in time, giving us some of the thrills and chills from the year before, but also gives us the background of the players. Who are they off the court? Suicide is a big concern on the reservation, and very few people on the rez have not been touched personally by suicide. The coach of the Arlee Warriors decides to produce a series of suicide prevention videos with the team and...they...went.. viral.
As I was thinking about writing this review, I started contemplating how many people I know who have committed suicide. I stopped myself after I started running out of fingers, but I do want to mention one. Remember the indifferent student that basketball turned into a good student?...yeah...he didn’t make it. He did a stint in the army and made it to his fifties, but there wasn’t a 4,520 square foot arena for him to step foot on again.
Most basketball players never win a championship. Some even play all the way to the pros and never manage to snag a championship. When the best young players in college leave early, they also leave behind the best chance in their life to finally win a trophy. Most high school teams rely on that one star athlete to carry them to a marquee season, but the thing is, he almost always runs into a team that figures out a way to neutralize him, and the rest of the team, accustomed to feeding him the ball, struggle to score. The Arlee Warriors, though, have that lightning in a bottle scenario. Yeah, they have a star player, but they have four other players who are way better than average. Shut down the star and the rest of them will burn you up.
Most of the boys are tied to one another by blood. They are cousins, and that is an advantage few sports programs in the country experience.
Streep watched a lot of tape of the Arlee Warriors, but everyone kept telling him you got to go to a game. Video can’t capture the electricity. I can tell you there is nothing like a live basketball game. In the 1990s, I had a chance to see a few Phoenix Suns games with Barkley, Ainge, Johnson, and Thunder Dan Majerle. They were in the hunt for a championship, and every game was like attending a Mad Max Thunderdome event. The city of Phoenix would become a ghost town when a Suns game started. I also had a chance to see Wayne Gretsky skate live. I noticed a guy gliding on the ice before the game, the other players seeming to lumber in comparison. I knew it had to be him before I even looked at his number. I’d seen him skate on TV before, but it wasn’t until I watched him live that I knew why he was called The Great One. I also saw Michael Jordan play, and he had razzled and dazzled me many times on TV, but it wasn’t until I saw him in person that I fully grasped just how amazing he was, even when he didn’t have the ball.
So yeah, the video camera misses the nuances. It flattens the action and takes some of the heart and soul out of the game. There are all those things happening that the camera doesn’t capture. When Streep watched his first Arlee Warriors game, he knew he’d stumbled upon something special.
He felt lifted.
This book is about a lot more than basketball. It is about a community at risk. It is about Native American athletes routinely being overlooked by Division 1 schools, even in their home state. It is about the struggles that schools are facing to balance education and sports. It is about a group of boys whom you are going to learn to care about and wonder for days, months, and years if they are doing alright.
I want to thank Celadon for providing me with an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.
Below is a link to their suicide prevention video. To me, what makes this video work so well is that the boys are obviously not professional actors.
”A towering figure in the realm of mystery fiction like Tony Hillerman is worthy of a biography of monumental proportions, a
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Tony Hillerman
”A towering figure in the realm of mystery fiction like Tony Hillerman is worthy of a biography of monumental proportions, a book that can encompass the grace, talent, and humanity of not only the man but his incredible body of work. James McGrath Morris’s Tony Hillerman: A Life is that book--one of the most thoughtful, detailed, and captivating biographies I’ve read in a very long time.”---Craig Johnson
When I was contacted about reading this book, not only was I excited about the prospect of learning more about Tony Hillerman, but I was also looking forward to revisiting my own memories of reading his books and reliving the pleasurable conversations I was fortunate enough to have with him.
I first met Tony on the campus of Phoenix College. The school administration had emptied all the classrooms and had asked us to file down to the auditorium for a presentation by this writer of Native American fiction. I’d recently found a copy of The Dark Wind and had blown through the novel in one evening. I had scoured a couple of local used bookstores looking for more copies of his works with no luck. After his presentation, Hillerman took questions, and when no one raised their hands, I raised mine. This went on for a while, me asking questions and him answering me, until the students around me started to groan every time my arm went up. After the presentation, one of the teachers found me and asked me to come down and meet Tony. I chatted with him for a while and then walked him out to his car. He dug around in the back seat and gave me a paperback of Dance Hall of the Dead. I was too stunned by this unexpected gift to even think to ask him to sign it.
I came to the realization, as I was reading this book, that Tony Hillerman was the first writer I’d ever met in my life.
Hillerman grew up poor in a reservation area in Oklahoma, so he had an affinity for the very people he was writing about. ”Like him, most Navajos are raised in rural poverty, undereducated, religious, and friendly people who place a high value on telling stories.” Hillerman was a journalist before he became a writer of novels. He had a great perspective on the differences between writing “facts” and creating fiction. ”’Fiction demanded more creativity resting on material either made up or from one’s memory. The facts are crafted in your imagination,’ Hillerman said. ‘They are glossy, persuasive, rich in symbolism, redolent of universal meaning, glittery, sordid, perfect, polished facts--the stuff of art.’”
I remember Tony sharing a story with us at one of the signing events I attended, and Morris relates it in this book as well. Tony told us with a grin that, when he first submitted The Blessing Way for publication, the agent told him...this would be pretty good if you’d just get rid of all the Native American stuff. This, of course, broke up the room into laughter because we were all sitting there at this event and buying his books because of all “that Native American stuff.”
I was pleasantly surprised, but certainly not shocked, that Hillerman was influenced by Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler, and Graham Greene, writers who number among my favorites to read. When I was working in a bookstore in Tucson, we sold his books to a wide range of readers from cozy mystery readers to university professors. I remember one in particular from Michigan who came in and bought every single copy of every Hillerman book we had. The professor had bought a Hillerman book to read between conferences and was so taken with the native culture depicted in the book that he wanted to give copies away to all of his friends back home. Hillerman might have started out being a regional writer, but when his books started hitting the New York Best Seller list, it became impossible to keep him tucked under a genre label. He was more than just a guilty pleasure for most readers, and anyone from a PhD to a grocery clerk could enjoy his writing.
If you are a fan of Tony Hillerman’s works, then your pleasure in what you’ve read will be enhanced by getting to know the man better. I know from personal experience what a great man he was and how deserving he was of all the success he earned. If you haven’t read any of Tony Hillerman’s books, I envy you because you have a magic carpet ride waiting to take you deep in Navajo Country. I’d suggest reading a few of his books before reading this biography, but do put this biography on your TBR list. The man behind the books is as interesting as the tales he conjured from his imagination.
I want to thank Jennifer Richards and the University of Oklahoma press for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.
”Journeying is ideally a move toward reeducation, but it’s also a try at escape from our insistent homebound selves, from boredom or from too much to ”Journeying is ideally a move toward reeducation, but it’s also a try at escape from our insistent homebound selves, from boredom or from too much to do, not enough quietude, from the mortal coil of who we’ve lately been.
’Where were you last night?’
‘Out.’
‘What were you running from?’
Mechanical civilization, I want to say, and its sources of discontent, the Stuck on the Wheel of Repetition Disorder, or Temporary Blindness, or what might be called the Yearning for Other points of View and Variety Anxiety.”
I recently read Louise Erdrich’s Books and Islands, which is part of the National Geographic Directions series, and in the back of the book, there is a list of the other books in the series. I noticed William Kittredge writing about the Southwest and mused to myself...I haven’t read Kittredge since I left Tucson. He’s part of a group of writers who all seemed to gravitate to the states with, to the untrained eye, lots of miles of nothing. I met a lot of these guys and gals while living in Tucson. As they showed up in the pages of this book, I was able to flip through my rolodex of memories to when I first met them. I didn’t know them. Kittredge knew them, but I did have the pleasure of gravitating in their sphere for short periods of time.
There was Edward Abbey, who tried to pick up my girlfriend while I tried to focus him on signing the stack of books I’d brought with me. I could almost see a horse-trade percolating behind the old scalawag’s eyes and half expected him to offer to sign my books but he was leaving with the blonde. There was Charles Bowden, who every time I ran into him seemed to have booze oozing from his pores. He was one of the few chosen to bury Abbey in the desert and took the location to his grave. There was the grizzly bear man Doug Peacock, who always seemed as untamed as the bears he loved. There was the lovely Leslie Marmon Silko, who usually had Larry McMurtry with her. There was Thomas McGuane and Jim Harrison, who loved Montana more than the Southwest, but who were just the Northern version of these Southwest writers. He does mention William Eastlake, and I’ve wracked my memories, but I don’t remember ever meeting him.
About four years ago, the wife and I took off for a trip through New Mexico. It was the first Christmas that we didn’t have any family obligations. The kids were out of the house, and my parents were enjoying the hospitality of my brother. The worst snowstorms I’ve ever been in have been in New Mexico, and this was no exception. When we could no longer see the road, we pulled off in Gallup and ended up having a wonderful, leisurely lunch. It’s so much more relaxing to watch it snow through the plate glass window of a restaurant than through an icy windshield. We had a fun time buzzing around New Mexico, recapturing some of that youthful, unfettered exuberance that becomes strangled by mortgages, children, and careers.
I do like to just go sometimes. ”Any sweet striking thing could happen.”
So Kittredge floats around the Southwest, usually with his wife, Annik Smith, in search of experiences, but also hoping to find some wisdom. He meets with Native Americans, many of them ancient, steeped in a lifetime of experiences that helped to hone their views of life. ”I couldn’t stop thinking about the man. He was deliberately seeking isolation. If I went, what would I find? Maybe silence, eternities, and myself among them, with no voices to listen to but the ones in my head. Was that a good idea? Maybe I’d emerge half-crazed and singing, ‘Why don’t you love me like you used to do’ in a loud way, having turned into one of those people who play the radio or CDs and talk on their cell phones and laugh constantly so as to fill the air with something besides what they’re thinking.”
I do sometimes drive my wife crazy when we are on a trip because she loves to blast the radio and I love to listen to the soft whirring sound of rubber on pavement. It’s relaxing to me to luxuriate in silence or as near to silence as we can get in this noisy world. Kansas is a good place for silence, and maybe that and those endless horizons is why I decided to come back here to live. We live in the southwest part of Kansas, and when I stumble upon cactus growing in the pastures, I’m reminded that we aren’t that far removed from the desert here. ”The world is alive to us if we can love it.” I might add...no matter where you live.
”[Doug Peacock] said something to the effect that we can’t remake the whole world in our own image or we won’t have a damned thing but a world made in our own image, and that would be unworkably simple and partways dead. He said humans have to learn humility, and make allowance for otherness. We can kill everything which threatens us, we can defoliate all the jungles, but then we’d be alone. We can’t kill every cat who might come to live in our night. Firepower won’t save us. Humility might.” It would be my guess that Kittredge was trying to remember something Peacock said after the table in front of them was already littered with dead soldiers to be joined by another squad or division of bottles before the night ended. Then there is the waking up the next morning, trying to remember the wisdom shared through the haze of a hangover. I’ve been thinking about humility a lot lately. The political climate has been so distorted by hubris and bluster that it makes me wonder if we can ever get past our own feelings of exceptionalism to find humility again.
This book brought up a lot of fine memories for me. I love the Southwest and worry about the growth of our desert communities that are totally reliant on water coming from elsewhere. I owe a lot to Tucson. I really found myself there. I met my wife there. I discovered how much larger the universe was there. I grew into more of the man I envisioned myself to be there. The desert is a magical place for me, but yours might be mountains or oceans or a cascade of fall trees. Do everything you can to be where you are supposed to be.
”My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me. Books, islands, islands, books. Lake of the Woods in Ontario ”My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me. Books, islands, islands, books. Lake of the Woods in Ontario and Minnesota has 14,000 islands. Some of them are painted islands, the rocks bearing signs ranging from a few hundred to more than a thousand years old. So these islands, which I’m longing to read, are books in themselves.”
Louise Erdrich decides to take her eighteen month old daughter off to the land of her ancestors...Ojibwe Country. She needs to shake off this surprise pregnancy and introduce her newest daughter to her father and the land that spawned her. Tobasonakwut is the father of her daughter, Kiizhikok. He is a seerer, a seeker, a healer of his people. He is busy going wherever he is needed. It is difficult for Erdrich to contact him, but she knows that it isn’t for her to find him. He will find them.
”His people were the lake, and the lake was them. At one time, everyone who lived near the lake was essentially made of the lake. And the people lived off fish, animals, the lake’s water and water plants for medicine; they were literally cell by cell composed of the lake and the lake’s islands.”
She is 48 years old and the mother of a baby. It’s terrifying and exhilarating.
Erdrich has a bookstore in Minneapolis, one she opened with her daughters to do something together that they all enjoy. Books line the walls of their homes, lay in piles wherever there is a flat space, and when a quilt is thrown over the top of a square stack of books, they form a table. Books are as infused into their lives as the need for eating and breathing. While on this trip, Erdrich becomes enthralled with a book called Austerlitz by Sebald, and she talks about reading it deep in the night to take her far, far away from the cheap motel and to somewhere all of her insecurities will become smoke. ”Books. Why? For just such a situation. Marooned in this uneasy night, shaken by the periodic shudder of passing semi trucks, every sentence grips me. My brain holds onto each trailing line as though grasping a black rope in a threatening fog. I finish half a page, then read it over again, then read the next half of the page and then the entire page, twice. Not many books can be read with such intimacy, nor are there many so beautifully composed that the writing alone brings comfort.”
Last night I woke in the middle of the night and began to read Austerlitz. Sometimes we read the right book at the right time, and certainly this book was exactly what Erdrich needed. I respect the obsessiveness and warmth with which she writes about the reading experience. It didn’t take me long to discover why she was reading and rereading pages. The paragraphs are composed of long, sinuous, complex, and lush sentences. Readers are not used to encountering sentences like these. Few read James Joyce or William Faulkner anymore, and most give up on those books practically before they begin to read them. An editor will read Sebald, and she will itch to break these sentences up into smaller bites, which will make them easier to read, but will turn a feast into a series of snacks. It took me a while to adjust, but I didn’t feel agitation, just excitement. Here is a challenge for my mind. How long can I hold a thought before the threads start to unravel?
More about Sebald when I finish the book.
Ojibwe Country sprawls across Minnesota and into Ottawa. Erdrich meets up with Tobasonakwut on the Canadian side of the border, and he shows her the rock paintings of their ancestors. The artists used sturgeon oil to preserve their paintings, and that is how paintings that are 400-1000 years old are still vibrant with color. She visits an island of eleven thousand books and finds a book that has her muttering “my precious, oh my precious” like Gollum in Lord of the Rings. In that moment, she understands the need for collectors to possess.
She has an encounter with the Border Patrol that leaves her and I shaken. ”What have they done to me?” I heard myself saying out loud, “Tell them who you are; tell them to google who you are.”
Can you prove this baby is yours?
What?
Our country has become a nightmare.
This book is a National Geographic Directions book. I’ve read the Jan Morris book about Wales, and there are many more that look interesting. In the back of the book, there is a list of the writers who are participating, and most of them will be names you recognize. They are short books, but so far, they are proving to be powerful books. Who better to travel with than literary writers with special connections to the places they will take you?
”It’s a good day to die. I will fight no more forever. The only good Indian is a dead Indian. Kill the Indian, save the man. Bury the hatchet. Off the r
”It’s a good day to die. I will fight no more forever. The only good Indian is a dead Indian. Kill the Indian, save the man. Bury the hatchet. Off the reservation. Indian go home. No Indians or dogs allowed.”
Ricky is dead. Stomped to death in a bar parking lot in North Dakota. ”INDIAN MAN KILLED IN DISPUTE OUTSIDE BAR.” One of those headlines in a newspaper buried beneath the fold or maybe on page 7B or 14C because there is nothing shocking about it or particularly compelling to readers. Ahh, another one, someone might say. Ricky was somewhere he shouldn’t have been, but then there are few places off the Rez that are ever safe for a man with a tint to his skin. ”The air in there was gritty and yellow, almost crunched between Ricky’s teeth when he’d accidentally opened his mouth.”The air might be toxic, but so were the glares.
But in the end, it isn’t the stomping boots of white men but the hooves that kill him.
Interesting that.
Ricky’s friend Lewis is living off the reservation with a ”Custer Haired Woman.” Is she with him because he is exotic? Even better, an exotic with a job? He likes to bury himself in fantasy books with worlds populated with elves, mermaids, werewolves, and men and women with swinging swords. Those things he sees in the periphery of his vision, are they just a manifestation of his own fertile imagination? He is beset by dreams, terrible dreams, dreams of retribution, and he is the guilty one. His faithful dog is found stomped to death. He duct tapes an elk shape into his living room carpet.
His white woman starts to have doubts about his sanity. She’d be insane not to. What at first was vague shapes has become full fledged apparitions. Is this about ignoring his cultural identity? Or is this about that haunting moment in time from his youth that never felt right? That night when Ricky, Gabe Cross Guns, Cassiday, and he disrespected their culture and acted like crazed white men?
Yeah, that feels right. This feels like revenge, spirit revenge. Something has crawled out of the old ways, and there is a reckoning to be had.
Gabe and Cassiday are the ones who stayed on the rez. Gabe has a daughter named Denorah, who was supposed to be named Deborah, but the drunken scrawl of her father on the birth certificate gave her a unique name and, frankly, she is a girl who deserves an unusual name. She is a basketball sensation. Gabe has fucked up pretty much everything in his life and marvels at the fact that a few minutes of passion produced something so wonderful.
These men only remember bits and pieces of what their grandfathers tried to pass down to them. When Gabe chants, he doesn’t know the words; he only knows how it is supposed to sound. They have broken from tradition, and what little they understand of their collective past is such a parody of the real thing that any vision they conjure will be nearly impossible to interpret. What they see in their visions isn’t a guide to wisdom, but a spawner of fear. Their elders are dead, and if they don’t figure out what is going on, they will soon follow them. This vengeful spirit will not stop with them, not while there is a calf alive, even if she is a whirling, swirling basketball phenom.
INDIAN MASSACRE ON THE REZ, NO SUSPECTS.
Hmm... tragic... someone might think as their eyes skim over the headline while they are raising their fresh roasted coffee to their lips. They might shake their head... those Indians they just won’t assimilate.
This is the first Stephen Graham Jones I’ve read, and I must say, I was impressed. The sense of dread the characters feel combined with the almost resigned acceptance of their fates adds elements of horror to this story that left this reader with uneasy dreams. There is nothing easier than knocking off a bunch of half-assed Indians who are caught between two cultures. They don’t have the tools to succeed in either one. They are nearly tribeless with none of the collected wisdom of their ancestry to save them. Nor are they shrouded in the disbelief of the white culture. They are men exposing their necks to death. Do they still have time to run from what they will never understand?
Make no mistake, this might be labelled horror, but it should also be considered for its literary merit as well. I was really taken in with the authenticity. The current and old Native American slang is such a treat...Custer Haired Woman...Two Leggeds. I really enjoyed the mysticism, the manifestations, the old ways encroaching on the present. What is real? What is a vision? What is a lie?
Jones has something to say about police officers. The careful way that Native Americans have to be around cops has such a relevance with recent events, but frankly this issue existed for them long before blacks were ever brought to these shores. 19th century soldiers/21st century cops...same mentality. ”Dealing with cops is like being around a skittish horse: No sudden movements, nothing shiny or loud. Zero jokes.” They know, especially as people of color, that cops are just looking for a reason to hurt them. Don’t give them a reason. Keep your eyes down. Move slowly. Answer succinctly and quickly. Let out the trapped stale air in your lungs when they leave.
I’m definitely going to be reading more Stephen Graham Jones. If any of my friends and followers have recommendations, do please share them.
”The white man only knows desire, Notaxemahasooma. He knows nothing of contentment. His heart is dry and withered, and he seeks to revive it with that”The white man only knows desire, Notaxemahasooma. He knows nothing of contentment. His heart is dry and withered, and he seeks to revive it with that of which has no medicine. He is careless and wasteful, and places himself above and apart from all other things. The white soldiers murder without regard, but themselves are spiritless and go screaming into their own deaths as they were born into life. The white father would take all of our hunting grounds and leave our children with stomachs full of air and hearts full of hate. There can be no peace with such men. We will kill this murderer of The People, but it will not stop the whites. There will be more. Many more.”
The settling of the West involved a lot of unsettling first. American Indians were in the way of westward expansion. The buffalo were in the way of rangeland fencing. The West still needed to be conquered and exploited. Capitalism was just a more acceptable term for greed. There was simply no time to waste on upholding any sense of morality or being bothered by such words as honor or virtuousness. There was money to be made, and whatever was in the way just simple had to be ground down into powder.
Lieutenant John Elliot has just been booted out of West Point. The powerful father of Clara Hanfield, his love interest, has been the instrument of his destruction. A court-martial is preferable, but a firing squad is what her father really wants for John. Instead, he is assigned to a clandestine unit in South Dakota where he joins Colonel Frank Picton. John is temporarily asked to resign his commission because this isn’t an officially sanctioned operation. The powers-that-be want to be able to disavow anything they might do, while at the same time encouraging them to wreck as much havoc as possible.
If this were Vietnam, we’d call this Black Ops, but since it is in the mid-1860s, we just call it Manifest Destiny.
Their task is to give the American Indians what they call a nudge. If they wipe out a few villages, the warriors will have to go on the warpath. If these “rampaging” Indians kill a few whites, then the government will be able to sanction their extermination. Destroying the buffalo also takes away a primary food source for the American Indians. Starve them or kill them, either way they won’t be a problem for much longer.
Henry is an emancipated slave who is trying to find his place in the world. His anger over what has been done to him and those he loves simmers under a steady flame. Ghosts haunt him. His most trusted friend, Standing Elk, is a Cheyenne warrior who often understands Henry better than Henry understands himself. ”For Henry, the hatred which had slowly been fading over the last four years tried to return. He suddenly wished that he was a warrior like the name Notaxemahtasooma implied. He didn’t fully understand the word; it meant Shadow Warrior or possibly Spirit Warrior. He guessed the former as shadow could refer to his skin color. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t a warrior. He wasn’t anyone. He was a man without a place, without a nation.”
John, Clara, Standing Elk, and Henry soon find themselves standing on the wrong side of history, which frequently happens to be on the right side of morality.
I grew up reading a lot of Westerns by Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, Max Brand, Nelson Nye, Elmore Leonard (Yes, before he became the guru of the hardboiled thriller, he was a Western writer), Ernest Haycox, Elmer Kelton, and later Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry. I wasn’t surprised to learn that McLellan read a lot of the same. Even though I don’t read many westerns anymore, I do sometimes get a hankering to return to my reading roots. I will google lists of the best westerns and frequently find a hidden gem on those lists that may be trapped by a genre, but really should just be seen as fine literature.
In the Shadow of the Hanging Tree, to my mind, is historical fiction and, if seen that way, would open up a much larger reading audience for the book. McLellan has a compelling plot that shines a light on an insidious series of events in our history. He has characters that are made of flesh and bone, and when things don’t go well for them, I, as the reader, have that sinking in my belly that can only come from making a real connection with the characters. His villains are treacherous racists, blinded by greed and an unquenching desire to remake the world in their own deceitful images. His heroes are reluctant heroes, who would much rather lead a peaceful life, but find themselves in conflict with the jackboots of history.
The 1860s were a turbulent time with the East still recovering from the devastation of the Civil War, and then there was the systematic plan to wipe out the American Indians out West. It was an opportunistic time to do some household cleaning out West, with those who might care the most still nursing the mental and physical wounds from the bloodiest conflict in American history. This is a story full of grit and greatness, and treachery and duplicity. Saddle up and head West, my friends, and experience the real, unvarnished West.
I intimated to Michael A. McLellan that I might reveal aspects of his dark and disturbing past, which was enough leverage to get him to answer a few questions for me. Now that he has answered the questions I can say that I was completely bluffing. Whatever is dark and disturbing in his past has remained beyond my grasp...for now.
Jeffrey D. Keeten: John William's book Butcher's Crossing focuses on the destruction of the buffalo herds as a concerted effort to eliminate the primary food source of the remaining plains Indians. You touch on this, but the storyline of your novel has a more insidious plot, with the government using some rogue "soldiers" to intentionally stir up trouble with the Indians. If you look back at the history of the United States, we have fought many wars over manufactured pretenses because we had other objectives in mind. In your research, did you find situations where the government was actually employing methods to manipulate an Indian uprising?
Michael A. McLellan: It was certainly in the interest of the wealthy and powerful to eliminate Native Americans to help facilitate a smoother and safer westward expansion for whites. Of course, any evidence pointing to the U.S. government deliberately inciting an uprising would be completely circumstantial. Having said that, there is plenty of hard evidence that they (Native Americans) were repeatedly pushed toward that end, whether it was plotted or not. "Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! ... I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians. ... Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice." This quote is attributed to a U.S. army colonel by the name of John Chivington. Chivington is responsible for ordering and participating in an unprovoked attack on a Cheyenne and Arapaho camp at Big Sandy Creek in November of 1864. Somewhere between 40 and 110 (some claim the number is much higher) Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children were killed in the attack. Earlier that same year Chivington, partnered with then Colorado Territory governor John Evans, ordered punitive attacks on several Cheyenne camps for alleged crimes, such as stealing cattle. No investigations, no trials.
JDK: I recently read a biography of William T. Sherman, whom I've always considered to be one of my favorite heroes of the Civil War, but like with many heroes from history, my impression of him was forever tainted when I discovered that he was instructed to get rid of the "Indian problem" out west, and he employed some pretty insidious methods to accomplish that task. The Robber Barons back East were impatient to exploit the West. Your character John Usher portrays that type of greed. Did the American public have any kind of idea of what was really happening out West? Would they have cared?
MAM: Funny, John Usher was the Secretary of the Interior under President Lincoln during the war. At that time, the Department of the Interior handled Indian Affairs. Later he was general solicitor for the Union Pacific Railway, Eastern Division. Whether he was an honest man or not is not for me to say, but here is a man with huge government influence who after his resignation in 1865 had a genuine financial stake in the westward expansion. As far as the public, some word got back east, a lot by disillusioned soldiers, and there was some limited advocacy. Not enough to make any real difference though. Native Americans were feared and hated for the most part.
JDK: The West was a dangerous place, and lots of people met untimely ends. Many of your characters meet their maker in a variety of different ways. I was starting to think I was reading the George R. R. Martin of the American Western. We romanticize and have so much nostalgia for the West, but really it was a brutal environment, especially during the years that your story covers. When I traveled in Italy a few years ago, people were so excited that I was from Dodge City. They had grown up watching Gunsmoke and were so enthralled with the Old West. I thought your portrayal of the violence of the times was based more on fact than fiction. As you were spinning this story, did you have moments where you caught up with yourself and went...Crap did I really just kill off ______?
MAM: I did have some moments like that. I don't want to do spoilers here, but there was a secondary character I was rather fond of who gets killed near the end of the story. I never planned it though. I don't even do outlines. The story just unfolded how it unfolded, and almost any story told in that time period should have more death in it than we're accustomed to. It's the way it was. Disease, violence. I think the average life expectancy in the midwest in 1870 was somewhere around 42.
JDK: Was the insidious Colonel Frank Picton based on a real person? How about Henry, who was such a tragic figure? "Henry wasn't a soldier, nor a wily tactician. He wasn't anything. He was, he thought, as he surveyed the scrubby prairie, a man without a place, a purpose, or a people." Henry was such a peaceful man, but violence kept insisting on finding him.
MAM: Picton encompassed my vision of men like Chivington, Sheridan, Custer and, as you mentioned, General Sherman. Men of war who, for the most part, probably believed in what they were doing. Things are seldom black and white. As for right or wrong, all we can do is look closely (and honestly) at history and make our own assessments. Henry was a way to tell a different sort of tale from a different sort of protagonist's perspective. Imagining what it would be like to be someone like him was sobering. An ex-slave making his way in a world he had no part in shaping.
JDK: So where did the idea to write this novel come from? Did you read something? Did you visit somewhere? Did you take peyote? What was that lightning rod moment when you knew you had a story that you had to tell?
MAM: I grew up on Louis L'Amour, Elmore Leonard, and Larry McMurtry. Not to mention John Wayne. I've always been fascinated with this period, and I feel there is room for new stories from new voices to be told within it. Stories that might balance the reality of the time and the romanticism we humans love so much a little better than we managed in the past.
JDK: What are you working on now, and when can we expect another novel from you?
MAM: I'm currently working on three novels. One is a contemporary piece about a fourteen-year-old boy who's put into the foster care system after his parents both die tragically. Another is a near-future story about an aging man seeking redemption in a dying world. The third is another historical fiction novel related to In the Shadow of the Hanging Tree. I was hoping to have one out this fall, but life got in the way. At some point here, I will put two of them on the shelf for awhile and concentrate on the one I feel most into at the moment. Realistically, I guess I won't have a release until mid-year 2020.
”Battles didn’t revolutionize America, it was scores of thousands of personal revolutions that transformed the colonists, who then transformed the col”Battles didn’t revolutionize America, it was scores of thousands of personal revolutions that transformed the colonists, who then transformed the colonies.”
Many of those untamable Highland Scots who survived the Battle of Culloden were expelled by the English in the years following that conflict, landing on the shores of America. They added to an already unruly bunch of colonists who had left their European homeland to search for opportunity, but to also escape oppressive laws, persecution, or quite possibly a criminal past. The melting pot of America was a cauldron of dissidents. Is there any wonder they became difficult for England to govern?
”The British government was blind to the vital truth about its most important colonies: for six generations it had been creating a vast and potent pool of disenchanted colonists by pushing across the Atlantic those who complained about religious repression at home, those who had offended an overreaching criminal justice system, and those who sought to carve out an existence unharnessed by the rigid social economic culture of Britain.”
This brings us to Duncan McCallum, who is one of those unruly Scots. He is the chieftain of an expired clan, whose members did not survive the ire of the British Government. He escaped the hangman’s noose by a whisker and was indentured to the colonies for seven years. His indentureship, which is held by his beloved Sarah Ramsey, is about to expire, and his intentions are to finally marry her. Sarah is not your normal English rose. ”She touched the patch of blood on her shift, then with the blood-tipped finger hastily drew two stripes on each cheek. ‘Come meet my blade!’ she taunted her opponent in the Mohawk tongue. ‘Don’t come sneaking in the shadows against my people unless you are ready to bleed!’ she hissed.”
She is not just talking either. She knows where to stick a blade.
Duncan McCallum is living in Boston in 1768 when the ship Arcturus explodes in the harbor, leaving scores of men dead. John Hancock, who has recently made the acquaintance of the inquisitive Duncan McCallum, summons him to the beach to investigate what is more and more looking like deliberate sabotage by French Agents. They are searching for an important secret ledger that is supposed to be handed off to The Sons of Liberty.
Duncan soon has enough of the treacherous waters of Boston, what with the frustrating antics of Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Robert Livingston, and other, soon to be famous, names of American history. He heads north in search of the truth, taking him farther away from Sarah and the sanctuary of their beloved Edentown. Duncan is wrongly accused of treason and murder, which unleashes a small army of bounty hunters, French agents, and the British regulars who are all vying to be the first to clap hands on him.
The noose always seems to want to find Duncan’s neck.
His recklessness makes his friends wonder about his sanity. ”Ishmael...cocks his head at Duncan. ‘My uncle speaks of the great Battle of Culloden, where Highlanders ran foolhardily into rows of English cannon with nothing but swords and wooden shields. Is that what you seek, a proper Scottish suicide?’”
To add more layers to an already convoluted task, there is a British officer named Horatio Beck who is looking for a lost treasure of French gold coins, who seems to think that Duncan has the answers he seeks. There are bronze skinned, wraithful Apostles. There is a mischievous Capuchin monkey and a Jewish tinker searching for his lost wife. There are loyal friends, such as Ishmael and Conawago, who are the last of their Nipmuc tribe. There is the vengeful insanity of Mog, who wants to add Duncan’s hair to his scalp collection. Fortunately, there are also the Rangers and the Green Mountain commander himself, Ethan Allen, who try their level best to keep Duncan alive.
There are also purple inked letters and engraved powder horns that are mysterious clues to unlocking the last few unknown quantities that Duncan needs to discover what is really going on. And what does all of this have to do with the heroic officer Robert Rogers, who is currently incarcerated in Montreal, charged with numerous capital crimes?
If you have been hearing the soundtrack to the movie The Last of the Mohicans while you are reading this review, you are not imagining things. The French and the Indian wars, which are the backdrop for the Natty Bumppo adventures, have been over for several years, but the simmering hostilities from that conflict are still boiling beneath the surface in 1768. This is a fascinating time period in American history when the colonists are trying to define themselves for the first time as Americans. The seeds of revolution are beginning to sprout with the help of the printing press and the inflammatory language gracing the pages of the incendiary broadsheets. We all know where this is going.
”’There is no land like this land,’declared the old Nipmuc, who had seen more of the world than anyone Duncan knew. ‘There is no freedom like this freedom.’”
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