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Book review: Thirty Indian Legends of Canada

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Thirty Indian Legends of Canada by Margaret Bemister. Illustrations by Douglas Tait. Vancouver, British Columbia: Douglas & McIntyre. 1997. 160 pages.

In her preface to Thirty Indian Legends of Canada, dated September 15, 1912, from Winnipeg, Margaret Bemister notes that many of these stories are printed for the first time, while others are “adapted from well-known authorities.” She mentions one tribal name on her list of sources (“the Okanagan chief, Antowyne”). Other than this single reference and some names (Chippewa, Cree, Iroquois, Osage, Ottawa) and geographical places (Assiniboine River, Manatoline Islands, Lake Huron, Missouri River, Niagara Falls) sprinkled among the stories, there is little to help the lay reader understand where they originated, how, and why. Canada covers a lot of land from east to west and north to south, and embraces many cultures, but that diversity is sometimes lost in this collection.

Not surprisingly, animals and plants—or what appear to be animals and plants—figure strongly in many of the tales. It may be a dormouse, which was “once very large;” butterflies that carry messages from whispering grass (not suburban lawn grass, but tall grass deeply rooted in prairie soil); bears, squirrels, birds, and three animals that evoke the northern wilderness—beaver, lynx, and wolverine. As you would expect, manitous and magicians appear and sometimes disappear.

More notably, a few stories feature giants and fairies. Most of us can picture a giant or fairy as portrayed in western literature, but what were these entities to Canada’s first peoples? One can only imagine from descriptions such as “He saw all around him queer, little fairies, each one with a tiny war club. They peeped from out the bark of the trees, from amidst the grass, and even from out his pouch” and “At the call of Weeng his sleep fairies had come forth, and now with their clubs were knocking their enemies on the head.” Clearly these aren’t the ephemeral winged sprites that a Victorian girl may have doodled in the garden. The problem here may be time and translation. How do you convey ancient, alien concepts in a language that was never meant to express them?

While there are villages and large families (for example, the ten brothers of “The Giant Bear” and the ten daughters and husbands of “The Fairies’ Cliff”), some stories have a lonely, isolated feel. In “The Daughters of the Star,” hunter Waupee (the White Hawk) lives in a deep forest and one day reaches a wide prairie, where “no trace of footsteps was to be seen.” In “The White Feather,” an old man and his grandson are so isolated on an island that the boy “had never heard any one but his grandfather speak.” “The Lone Lightning” evokes shades of the Grimm Brothers’ Hansel and Gretel; a “lonely little boy” is raised by his uncle, who intends to stuff him with bear meat and fat, then kill him. His sad, lonely fate “may be seen in the northern sky on autumn nights.”

Some stories tell of beginnings, like “The Five Water-spirits,” whose play gives rise to Niagara Falls, where in the “sunny spray you may see their sandals and their wings.” “The Stone Canoe” addresses grief, the afterlife, and the idea that you cannot stay in the “Land of Souls” until your work is done and your life is meant to end.

I wish I knew more about these stories, how they arose, and if they were influenced by outside cultures (ponies make an appearance, as does a cabin built and abandoned by white men). Without context, phrases like “laughing like girls on a holiday” (“The Five Water-Spirits”) sound oddly English. What would that simile mean to the people who told it and heard it told? Thirty Indian Legends of Canada left me feeling isolated and lonely and wanting more—more legends and more knowledge of the peoples who brought them to life.

6 July 2017
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: On the Rez

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On the Rez by Ian Frazier. Highly recommended.

If you are looking for structure and pat solutions to contemporary Native American problems, you won’t find them in On the Rez by Ian Frazier. Like the reservation life and stories it reveals, On the Rez is rambling and spontaneous.

Frazier uses his sometimes problematic friendship with Le War Lance, a Sioux from Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota whom he meets in New York City, to explore Pine Ridge life today along with past and present injustices. Le seems to have no home, no permanent job, no wife, and no children. He does have family on the reservation — as well as a bottomless taste for inexpensive beer. Frazier recounts their many days spent together, whether it’s watching TV while drinking beer, driving around the reservation looking for people, or facing a propane leak and potential explosion — and death. Frazier is genuinely fond of Le, but not of his drinking, and he repeatedly says how much easier it is to be around Le and his brother Floyd John once Floyd John undergoes rehab and gives up drinking. Alcoholism, diabetes, fatal car accidents, and more are part of day-to-day life on Pine Ridge.

Frazier also devotes several chapters to the life of SuAnne Big Crow, an Indian high school basketball star who led Pine Ridge’s Lady Thorpes basketball team to a state championship and traveled to Europe and Australia as part of an Indian all-star team before her death in a car accident. SuAnne serves as a uniting force between Indians and their often-prejudiced white neighbors, between the lingering Red Cloud and Crazy Horse factions, and between American Indian Movement (AIM) traditionalists and “goon” progressives on the reservation. Through her athletic feats, fame, and sheer force of personality, she becomes bigger than life.

Between describing the day-to-day adventures he has with Le, Floyd John, and their family and friends and SuAnne’s career and influence, Frazier turns to history in a broad sense to put life on the rez in perspective. He discusses the rivalry between Red Cloud and Crazy Horse (which lives today); the conflict between AIM, led by Dennis Banks and Russell Means, and then-tribal chief Dick Wilson and his “goons” (which Wilson turned into “Guardians of the Oglala Nation”); and the U.S. government’s still-unresolved theft of the Black Hills from the Sioux. He covers topics as wide ranging as Iroquois history and Mohawks as high-rise construction workers to the storied past of famous Indian bars. He covers the rise of Indian casinos and their current status in legislative limbo.

While many Americans comfort themselves for the wrongs perpetrated against Indians — from physical violence and culture destruction to land theft — with the idea that the white man rescued the Indian from primitivism and stagnation, Frazier points out Native contributions to Europeans, such as a host of agricultural riches (failing to mention the medicinal wonders being mined in South America by ethnobotanists such as Dr. Mark Plotkin).

More importantly, Indians passed on to settlers seeking escape from European political, religious, and economic tyranny their “all-around skepticism about who and who was not great” along with some basic principles of democracy. Today, however, Frazier says, “The freedom that inhered in Powhatan, that Red Cloud carried with him from the plains to Washington as easily as air — freedom to be and to say, regardless of disapproval — has become a luxury most of us can’t afford.” The Indian influence could not prevent the reinvention of Europe — “early American was European culture reset in an Indian frame.” Frazier quotes Thomas Jefferson: “It will be said, that great societies cannot exist without government. The savages, therefore, break them into small ones.” Where Frazier errs is in being too broad — while the free-ranging Sioux of the plains valued individual freedom, less nomadic groups such as Powhatan’s and the tribes of the Iroquois confederacy placed more emphasis on leadership. Powhatan’s freedom was that of a leader, while Red Cloud’s was that of a Sioux.

Today, there is Le War Lance, representing Trickster — cunning, dishonest, unpredictable, selfish, manipulative — a freedom-loving survivor. There is, or was until her death, the Indian hero SuAnne Big Crow, to whom nearly every inner-city and suburban teenager and adult alike can look — sports legend, academic star, role model for peers, and point of unity among a disparate people, even today through “Happytown, USA” — the SuAnne Big Crow Health and Recreation Center founded in her memory by her mother, Chick Big Crow.

Then there are the rest of the Sioux — struggling with poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, disease, and a host of social ills that cannot be fixed through this program or that legislation. They, like Le, are survivors.

I recommend that you read On the Rez in conjunction with American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings by Zitkala-Sa and edited with an introduction and notes by Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris. Zitkala-Sa was a turn-of-the-century Sioux educator, musician, writer, and activist who addressed many of the same issues Frazier raises — nearly 100 years ago.

13 September 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Way to Rainy Mountain

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The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday; illustrated by Al Momaday. Highly recommended.

Rainy Mountain, a “single knoll [that] rises out of the plain in Oklahoma,” is an old landmark for the Kiowa people. It is a land of bitter cold, searing heat, summer drought, and “great green and yellow grasshoppers.” It is a land of loneliness, where the Kiowa were drawn after a long journey from the northwest through many types of lands.

The Way to Rainy Mountain is about the journey — in myth, in drawings by Momaday’s father Al, in reminiscences, and in historical snippets. All reveal aspects of Kiowa culture, life, philosophy, outlook, spirituality, and sense of self — the beauty and the desolation, how the introduction of the horse revolutionized Kiowa life, the story of Tai-me, and the richness of the word and the past. It is a literal journey as well; Momaday, in Yellowstone, writes, “The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see, and they were bent and blind in the wilderness.

This is a small gem of a book, beautifully written, illustrated, and designed. It has moments of insight, beauty, and sadness, as the ending of the Sun Dance, telling as the sun is at the heart of the Kiowa’s soul — a soul that survives in every word and drawing of The Way to Rainy Mountain.

3 March 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: House Made of Dawn

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House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday. Highly recommended.

“There was a house made of dawn,” and N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel begins with his Tano protagonist, Abel, “alone and running,” yet “he seemed almost to be standing still, very little and alone.” He may leave to fight the white man’s war in Europe. He may seek solace in the arms of a white woman or two. He may be sent to prison for a crime that he sees as a necessity. He may end up attempting to work in the industrial world. Yet Abel cannot run from the seemingly boundless, stark land or the traditions with which his spirit is bound. The land, as enigmatic as he is, is there at the beginning and there at the end. It is the constant in his life from and to which he runs. In biblical terms, it is the alpha and omega of his being.

I first learned of House Made of Dawn from an excerpt in American Indian Literature: An Anthology (revised) edited and introduced by Alan R. Velie, in which Abel encounters the “white man,” an albino Native who, although he appears only briefly in the novel, is one of modern literature’s most compelling characters. Without saying a word, he emanates a vague menace with every look and motion. “Above the open mouth, the nearly sightless eyes followed the old man [Abel’s grandfather] out of the cornfield, and the barren lids fluttered helplessly behind the colored glass.” You will never forget the white man. “A man kills such an enemy if he can.” The white man sets the tone for the rest of the novel.

Nor will you forget Abel’s struggles, with his heritage and its expectations, with alcoholism, with his own body, with his own desires, his inability to find his place at home or in the modern white world, and with his emotional and physical pain.

There is the dichotomy of the prevalent Catholic faith, which finds itself oddly interwoven with Native belief in strange ways, as in the feast of Santiago held in Abel’s town. The conflict comes to a head in Tosamah, Priest of the Sun, who reveals that “In the beginning was the Word” is all that we need to know of the essential Truth. But by adding and dividing and multiplying the Word, the white man subtracts the Truth — the Truth that eludes Abel. Tosamah says of his grandmother, “She had learned that in words and in language, and there only, she could have whole and consummate being.”

House Made of Dawn is much like the life and land it portrays — mysterious and unyielding. There is little action here, but there is a mental and emotional landscape that is, like the backdrop, seared on the minds and hearts of those who experience it. Even the world cannot kill the Word and the rich inner life of a Tano.

26 February 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation

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Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation by John Ehle. Highly recommended.

In Trail of Tears, John Ehle (who is, as far as I can tell, non-Native) sketches the people and events that led to the infamous Trail of Tears, the removal of the Cherokee Nation to “Indian Territory” (primarily Arkansas and Oklahoma) where they would “never” be bothered by whites again. The focus is on the “Treaty Party,” consisting of Ridge, his son John Ridge, and his nephews Elias Boudinot and Stand Watie, along with Moravian, Methodist, and other missionaries sent to convert the Cherokees to Christianity and who are caught up in Cherokee/state/federal politics.

Ehle’s bias is evident in the title; the “rise” of the Cherokees is the effort, not wholly embraced by the Nation, of adapting to European-American culture, language, religion, and even livelihood (e.g., Cherokee hunting is uncivilized, whereas the adoption of American farming is preferable). The story begins with some background and the birth of a Cherokee man named Ridge not too long before the American Revolutionary War. The white impact has already begun to be felt, as one of Ridge’s forebears is white, and he and his family are driven into the wilds by the war.

After the war ends, the new Americans have one craving — land and more land. A gold strike in Georgia adds to the fever. The Cherokee, along with the Choctaw, Creek, and other southern tribes, are perceived as “wasting” land that their white counterparts should be entitled to. From this point on, it is clear that the Juggernaut of American expansionism and greed will displace the Native peoples. The question is only how and when.

Meanwhile, Ridge, who will not convert to Christianity but who wholeheartedly adopts many white ways for himself and his children, becomes not only a wealthy plantation owner but a leader of the Cherokee Nation. His son becomes an attorney, while Boudinot becomes the first editor of the Cherokee newspaper, The Phoenix. Both young men marry white New Englanders they meet while at school. Ridge and his family and allies are the first to see the writing on the wall — that the Cherokees will be removed; it is a matter of whether it is “voluntarily” on their own terms in their own time or involuntarily.

The principal chief of the Cherokee, a Cherokee-Scot named John Ross, is portrayed as a man in a state of denial. It is never clear how he thought the Cherokee could overcome the overwhelming tide of white intrusion without bloodshed and without losing. He and his followers blame the Ridge faction for selling the Cherokee out when they sign the Treaty of 1835 that puts the seal on the removal. They feel that they can continue to “negotiate,” not realising that Andrew Jackson has set the tone and the terms — and that the federal government under his leadership has loaded the die. Ehle is no John Ross fan; when the inevitable finally happens and the Cherokee are removed, Ross sends them via the lengthy, dangerous, time-consuming land route, resulting in hundreds if not thousands of deaths (the number remains unknown), while Ross and his family use the quicker, less treacherous water routes.

There are several dichotomies in this history — the Upper Towns vs. the Lower Towns; the full-bloods vs. those with white ancestors/family; the uneducated (mostly full-bloods, according to Ehle) vs. the educated (John Ridge, Boudinot); the federal government vs. state government (a dichotomy that would be resolved violently through the Civil War). A forest/mountain vs. town dichotomy is also evident. In any case, anything that speaks of the way the Cherokee used to be is seen as “primitive,” while Cherokee adoption of white ways is lauded by their neighbors. In fact, this is seen as the heart of the problem; the Cherokee people are pliable, are willing to adapt, are willing to live like the whites — and in the end are treated no better than their Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole counterparts. Ehle includes much contemporary commentary on this particular irony.

This book has been said to be controversial because it shows the wealthier Cherokees, like Ridge, John Ridge, and John Ross, as owning African slaves. The Cherokees tried to marry their own ways with that of the European-Americans; they had always had slaves, usually captives from other tribes. But it is clear that the majority of Cherokees were poor, did not own plantations, and did not exploit slaves.

Trail of Tears is an excellent snapshot of a particular situation and will be eye opening to those who are not familiar with the story of the southern tribes and their interactions with the burgeoning American population. Ehle includes a wealth of primary sources, such as letters, journal excerpts, military orders, and the like, that serve to enrich the story. This history lesson is told in a story/fiction format enhanced by contemporary writings that keep it interesting, lively, and personal. Ehle’s biases are clear but do not detract from this book as a history of a moment in time when the fate of a nation was decided. This is an excellent supplement to any broader history of the Trail of Tears.

29 April 2001
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Zitkala-Sa: American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings

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Zitkala-Sa: American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings edited with an introduction and notes by Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris. Highly recommended.

Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), a South Dakota Sioux (through her mother; her father was white) born in 1876, the year of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, was an educator, musician, writer, and activist. She served as the secretary and treasurer of the Society of American Indians (SAI) and as editor of SAI’s American Indian Magazine.

This collection of Zitkala-Sa’s work includes background information about the author; a chronology of contemporary events; selections from “Old Indian Legends” (retellings of oral story traditions); “American Indian Stories”; selections from American Indian Magazine; and some of her poetry, pamphlets, essays, and speeches.

“Old Indian Legends” introduces Sioux traditions, including Iktomi (a trickster who often takes the form of a spider), Iya the glutton (able to consume whole villages), and the characters of the Sioux world — coyotes, ducks, the terrifying Red Eagle and the stranger who slays it, turtles, toads, mice, bears, badgers, and more. While at first these traditions and stories may strike the outsider as different and alien, to some extent they can evoke some European fairy tale traditions (which also may seem alien to modern sensibilities). Some of the most charming, like “Dance in a Buffalo Skull,” are written in human terms but have no human characters. “Dance,” with its “two balls of fire” growing “larger and brighter” and building of suspense, is an excellent short horror story as well.

The editors note that Zitkala-Sa “makes significant changes to the traditional tales in order to address key political and social issues . . . specifically, land infringement, challenges to tribal sovereignty, and the effects of missionary boarding schools on Yankton or Sioux culture more generally.” Careful in her use of her second language, English, Zitkala-Sa makes a telling transposition in her preface to “Old Indian Legends”; the Indian is the “little black-haired aborigine,” while the European-American is the “blue-eyed little patriot.” Can the people who subjugate and destroy the original natives of the land be anything more than “little” patriots? How great can their patriotism be? The answer is implicit, but Zitkala-Sa believed the old Indian legends belong as much to him simply because of “our near kinship with the rest of humanity” and because “After all, he [the Indian] seems at heart much like other peoples.”

Several of “American Indian Stories” (which established Zitkala-Sa’s literary reputation) are mostly autobiographical. Some describe her representative experience at a Quaker boarding school in Wabash, Indiana. In these, Zitkala-Sa masterfully makes the reader feel how shocking and horrifying our comfortable culture was to children who grew up in a different — but comfortable — culture, beginning with the cutting of her hair. There are the “loud, metallic voice” of the bell and the “annoying clatter of shoes on bare floors.” There is always a “clash of harsh noises” — but mostly there is the “murmuring of an unknown tongue.” Zitkala-Sa and others are lured to the school by the promise of “red apples” — a clear reference to Genesis. She refers to her own culture for her revenge on the devil.

The most poignant tale, one that is frequently anthologized, is “The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman,” in which a woman must obtain rights she never would have needed but for white man’s law through the trickery of two Indian men who have learned dishonesty in the white men’s schools. “A Warrior’s Daughter,” also often anthologized, tells of an Indian woman who takes action and therefore fate into her own hands — Zitkala-Sa’s prescription for women and for her people.

“Selections from American Indian Magazine” and “Poetry, Pamphlets, Essays, and Speeches” are largely exhortations and expositions of Zitkala-Sa’s viewpoint. In “The Red Man’s America,” she satirizes “My Country, ’tis of Thee” to reflect the Indian’s disenfranchisement — a favourite theme. Although her advocacy of Indian citizenship was not shared by all Indians (for example, the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy), Zitkala-Sa felt that, without that right in their own country, Indians would continue to languish unnecessarily as wards of the state, without power or basic rights in a democratic land. Other topics include warnings against the use of peyote; the bravery of Indian soldiers during WWI as well as the place that bravery should have earned the Indian in American society and the brotherhood of man; the need for Indians to become educated and to learn English (her own painful school experience notwithstanding); and the Black Hills claim and similar injustices, such as theft of Ute grazing land, the laws against Indian dance, and the lost treaties of the California Indians. To Zitkala-Sa, Indians were not on an even playing field with whites and, until they took action to educate themselves, secure their rights, and obtain the power of legislative and legal representation, they would continue to be helpless to manage their future.

I recommend that you read Zitkala-Sa together with On the Rez, Ian Frazier’s description of today’s life on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Together, they tell a tragic tale of the past 130 years that does not bode well for the “brotherhood of man.”

22 September 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf