In November of last year, seeing how many novels by Native American authors had piled up on my wish lists, I decided to spend the entire month reading only those. It was an interesting experience, giving me the chance to see patterns that might otherwise have slipped past me, but I said at the end that I was unlikely to repeat the experiment — in part because it meant saving up those authors for a concentrated binge, rather than just reading them whenever.
And indeed, since then I’ve been reading them whenever. But as November drew close this year, I realized my wish lists also contained quite a lot of nonfiction about Native American subjects. Given that I’ve been craving nonfiction a bit, I decided it was reasonable to binge that instead.
It’s wound up a smaller binge than I originally envisioned, because I maaaaay have also been lured in by Baldur’s Gate 3 this month. >_> But still, it’s given me the impetus to read some things that have been languishing for a while, and that’s good. Let’s get to it!
Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles, Beth Pickens. Rather obviously not part of this month’s theme; it’s just that the audiobook hold came in right at the start of the month. It also comes with an asterisk, in that I skimmed parts of this — yes, even though it was an audiobook. I skipped ahead in sections where what she was saying was either very familiar or not really applicable to me, and I bypassed a good portion of one chapter entirely. Still, I’m reporting on it because it may be of use to others.
This is not, as I’d hoped, a book about “creative hurdles” in the sense of things like burnout. Instead Pickens, who is a job counselor working specifically artists, is addressing people — especially people with some variety of marginalized identity — who are facing difficulties of other varieties. She talks about how to make time for your art, how to approach the question of money, imposter syndrome, arting about personally traumatic subjects, engaging with your artistic community, and so forth. Being Jewish, she speaks approvingly of having some kind of Sabbath day where you don’t do work (even if it’s hard to get time for your art in the first place), and I also liked her suggestion of choosing one day each month that is allocated for personal administration, i.e. this is when you do things like schedule doctor’s appointments. The most valuable bit in here for me was probably the part where she talks about why artists have trouble being as productive as they want during retreats and residencies, and what techniques you can use to ease yourself more effectively into those situations.
So, yeah: ultimately not what I thought it would be, and not as much use to me as I’d hoped, but possibly exactly what others may need!
Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World, Miguel León-Portilla. There’s not a ton of actual poetry in here because we don’t have a ton of surviving indigenous documents from the pre-contact and peri-contact periods. But this is still a reasonably substantial book because León-Portilla is interested in giving you more than just the bare bones: after an introduction in which he talks about things like what our documentary sources are and how sure we can be that the poems attributed to specific individuals are actually their work, each subsequent chapter gives you as detailed a biographical sketch as possible about the poet and an analysis of their work, before delivering the poem(s), first in Nahuatl, then in English. The poets are grouped regionally, too, e.g. those from Texcoco and its environs, then Tenochtitlan, etc. There’s only one female poet because of the vagaries of what’s survived that has specific attribution (as opposed to “by a woman from Tlaxcala”), but León-Portilla is clear that there are plenty of references to women as poets, even if their work doesn’t survive.
The poems themselves . . . well. I won’t say I find most of them amazing, but there are a lot of obstacles in the way of that. Poetry of any kind is hard to translate in ways that preserve its effect; it gets harder when the surviving manuscripts don’t actually give you line breaks or any discussion of Nahuatl poetic aesthetics, such that the translator also has to guess at how to approach them even in the original. Lots of stuff in here feels like a non sequitur from the previous line, though León-Portilla’s prefatory notes do what they can to smooth out the context, e.g. glossing who a particular named individual is or the fact that people from a certain town were reputed to be drunkards. But the main effect you get from this, whether you like the poetry or not, is a sense that the Mexica and their neighbors were not simply All About War (let alone All About Human Sacrifice): they valued poetry, they had melancholy things to say about how transitory everything in this world is, their rulers (many of the poems are attributable to rulers) sometimes wished they could just be left to enjoy the aesthetic life instead.
Central American Mythology: Captivating Myths of Gods, Goddesses and Legendary Creatures of Ancient Mexico and Central America, Matt Clayton. I almost decided not to buy this book when I saw how short it was: only forty-three pages, and it turns out to be forty-three pages of not very small font and margins, either. But I went ahead and got it anyway because crucially, “Central American mythology” here does not mean “Aztec and Mayan mythology.” He has separate books for those groups — one per; they’re not even lumped together — while this is about other Central American peoples, ones in Panama and Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and a few from Mexico that are not the usual Triple Alliance-adjacent suspects. I would still love something meatier than forty-three pages, but as with the Peruvian book I read last month, however slight this is, it’s more than I had before.
Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache, Keith H. Basso. We read the titular article (of four) from this book back when I was in graduate school, and the most succinct praise I can give it is to say I still remembered it nigh on twenty years later, with enough warmth that I sought the book itself out. (In fact, this title was Reason Number One I decided to focus on non-fiction regarding Native American topics this month.)
It’s a little tough to be concise in summarizing what Basso is getting at here, because it’s something very different from what many of us are used to. The Western Apache of Cibecue and its environs have a very high density of place-names, some of which are descriptive of the landscape itself, others of which commemorate specific events (my favorite of the latter is, and I’m not making this up, “Shades of Shit”). Furthermore, these place-names all have one or more associated narratives, which do things to record tribal history and cultural values. And this all feeds into how the Western Apache think about history and the landscape around them, and how they leverage those things for use in daily life, offering oblique reproof to someone who’s behaving badly by telling a particular (place-associated) story or congratulating them on having finally returned from a place that evokes their errors. Furthermore, because all of these things are linked with specific locations, any time the individual passes by there they’ll be reminded of the lesson, or they can visualize it and the story in their mind’s eye, and all of this leads to the Apache talking about places as spots from which you can “drink” wisdom like water, or saying things about a particular mountain “stalking” them, i.e. serving as a constant prod to behave well.
Me, I find this fascinating, especially since one of the things Basso discusses in passing is how disconnected from place the modern world tends to make many of us. I’m curious what things are like in Cibecue now, since this book is several decades old — though Basso mentions at the end that the fieldwork behind it was conducted decades before the book was finished, and he notes the evolution of this tradition over time, e.g. the coining of new place-names and the adaptation of usage to things like newer housing developments. It’s a welcome reminder that culture doesn’t have to stay fossilized in past forms for the heart of it to survive. Parts of this book get moderately academic in tone, but if you can digest those or are willing to skim past them, I think the parts that document how this practice is conducted (and how Basso came to understand it) are very readable for a non-anthropological audience.
Cahokia and the North American Worlds, Sarah E. Baires. Another extremely short book, but unlike the mythology one above, this one is densely academic: its sixty-two pages are followed by a full twenty-five pages of bibliography. It is, in fact, just a longish academic article published under separate cover — and when I realized what I had picked up, I honestly probably should have bailed. It’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t have even read in graduate school unless I were writing a paper on the subject, especially since I wouldn’t call this particularly well-written on the level of prose and aesthetics. (It fared quite poorly on the heels of reading Basso’s book.)
But, well, I’m bloody-minded, and I persevered. So it was kind of a blast from my own archaeology-studying past, coupled with “huh, so that’s where academic jargon has gone in the last fifteen years.” Despite not liking it very much, I may hang onto it on the vague notion that it would be useful for the alternate history I will probably never write. At less than a hundred pages even with the bibliography, it isn’t like it takes up much real estate on the bookshelf.
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, William Cronon. This is, at its heart, the ecological study the title implies: a look at how the flora and fauna and natural phenomena like flooding changed during the period of colonization in New England. But (in part because precise documentation is thin), in order to get at those aspects, Cronon has to look far more broadly, at things ranging from the political effects of disease on Native American communities to the concepts of property used by the different societies — I particularly liked his note on the latter that to say the Indians had no concept of private property as the English did is to misrepresent English notions of property almost as badly as Indian ones.
It does make for something of a bleak read, though. Because even if you took the racism out of the picture, the Christian assumption that humans were meant to “improve” and master the land and if you didn’t do that in ways the English recognized it then you clearly had no ownership, even the greed that drove them to despoil the region at a truly astonishing rate . . . it would be really, really tough to make even the benevolent establishment of an English colony be non-destructive to what was there before. Not only the diseases they brought, but the invasive species that rode along in the fodder for their livestock and emerged in their dung, the lack of defenses by local plants to the kind of intensive grazing brought on by cattle instead of deer, the ways in which trying to make the landscape support the English agricultural/pastoral lifestyle meant transforming said landscape in ways that had knock-on effects: all of these and more were inevitably going to change things, and thereby change the lives of the indigenous people whose lives were built around what had been before.
But also the racism and the religious ethnocentrism and the greed. I’m never going to look at clapboard architecture again without remembering that style of architecture is born out of the flagrantly wasteful use of New England forests, as if they would never run out.
The Warden, Daniel M. Ford. Took a break from the nonfiction for this one, because it was sent to me for blurbing and the deadline was December 1st.
This is a very D&D-ish fantasy without quite feeling like an RPG. There are elves and dwarves and gnomes and orcs; there are wizards trained in sub-schools like Abjuration and Evocation and Necromancy. There are not spell slots (thank god; the one Forgotten Realms novel I read that had a wizard protagonist had to lurch painfully around how to discuss that in an in-world fashion), but spells do exist in numerical rders, the higher the order the harder the spell, and casting too many orders of spells in one day is very tiring. So: a distinct D&D flavor.
But it’s livened up by a good sense of humor and more attempt than I see in most novels of this type to pay attention to realism and logistics. The heroine, Aelis, despite being from a wealthy noble family, upon graduation from her wizard school to a godforsaken rural village on the edge of the lands the central kingdoms are attempting to reclaim after losing them to an orcish invasion a generation ago. I like the way the history behind that is doled out here — no infodumps; just bits and pieces of information coming up when the characters would naturally think about or discuss them — and I wonder if the series will eventually give information on why the orcs invaded, since that kind of thing is usually driven by disaster or other invaders back wherever used to be home. Given that orcs are conspicuously treated as not being the bestial savages of traditional D&D fiction and Ford is clearly interested in asking those kinds of questions, I suspect the answer is yes.
We’ll probably also find out whether (as I expect) the deeper underlayer behind the problems Aelis encounters is tied with a certain enemy closer to home . . . but that absolutely does not get answered in this book, which ends with far more of an honest-to-god cliffhanger than I’m used to seeing nowadays. I’m not going to say “don’t buy this until the next one is out” because I know that’s a good way to kill a series and sometimes a career, but do be aware you will close the covers on the exact opposite of a note of resolution.
Dream Drawings: Configurations of a Timeless Kind, N. Scott Momaday. At this point I was traveling, which put a dent in my ability to read the non-fiction I’d gathered for this month (most of which seems not to be available in ebook from my library, and I’d already paid for print copies). But my library system has a lot of Momaday’s works, and I liked the one I’d read last year (The Way to Rainy Mountain), so I used this to partially fill the gap.
It’s officially a poetry collection, though the lineated poems in here are overwhelmingly outnumbered by the prose poems, quite a few of which dance around in the fuzzy zone between that genre and flash fiction. All are very short — no more than a page, even in ebook being read on my phone — and often quite meditative. They also range all over in terms of content, with Momaday being just as apt to write about Billy the Kid or Beowulf or Bucephalus as, say, the last Sun Dance performed by his people, the Kiowa. I didn’t love all of them, but I’m seriously considering buying a copy of this for my shelf.
Laǩhóta: An Indigenous History, Rani-Henrik Andersson and David C. Posthumus. My knowledge of Native American communities is like 95% ethnographic and 5% historical, and that might be a generous estimate. So a book like this, which takes a particular group and focuses on significant people, events, and movements over a span of time, is very helpful.
Mind you, the first section of this is still pretty ethnographic, as it spends three chapters on describing traditional Laǩhóta life prior to forced settlement on the reservations. The next six chapters, though, which make up the bulk of the book, cover the history from initial contacts with white men through to the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. The final four chapters then shift back to a more theme-organized focus to talk about twentieth- and twenty-first-century history, covering topics like relations with the federal government, language, spirituality, and more.
As you might expect, this does not always make for a cheery experience in reading. While I very much appreciate the authors’ attention to the concerns, desires, and agency of Laǩhóta individuals, rather than solely depicting them as the passive victims of white aggression — which includes acknowledging the extent to which the Laǩhóta themselves acted as expansionist aggressors against their neighbors such as the Crow and the Arikara — still, the trajectory here is distinctly downward for a good long while, before picking up again circa the 1960s with a re-embrace of tribal identity and traditions. I am rarely as interested in anybody’s twentieth- and twenty-first history as I am in older stuff, but the insight into the various and sometimes conflicting dynamics between movements was quite valuable.
The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems, N. Scott Momaday. Another poetry collection because I could get it in ebook. This is the inverse of the previous one, in that it is mostly lineated poetry with the occasional bit of prose interspersed; it is also substantially longer — though still, because poetry, not all that long of a book. Oddly, the slowest part for me to get through was the cycle of one hundred haiku (or senryu or zappai or whatever; I’m not interested in getting hung up on precise terminology) about midway through the book, because however short they were individually, zooming through them all together felt like it would be doing them a disservice. I didn’t notice any overlap between this and the other collection, though, so if you decide you like or are interested in Momaday’s poetry, you can pick up both of these without concern for repetition.
