Everything You Know About Indians Is WrongPaul Chaat Smith193 pages,hardcover: $21.95.University of Minnesota Press, 2009. We approach the millennium as a people leading often fantastic and surreal lives. The Pequot, a tribe that’s all but extinct, run the most profitable casino in the country, and tribal members become millionaires. But guess who’s still the poorest […]
Annie Dawid
Posted inMay 26, 2008: On Cancer’s Trail
Cowgirl meets lawsuit
Jackalope Dreams, Mary Clearman Blew’s fifth book and first novel, depicts the head-on collision of the Old West and the New. There are cattle, and meth labs; ranches lost to real estate developers and young people gone to cities; the end of cowboying as a lifelong verb and the rise of cowboy tourism. Corey Henry, […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2008: Unnatural Preservation
Die with me
“Indians must either fall in with the march of civilization and progress,” wrote Major James McLaughlin, military director of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, in 1889, “or be crushed by the passage of the multitude.” More than a century later, three writers uncomfortably assess that prediction, and find that Native Americans have indeed fallen into […]
Posted inMay 28, 2007: Problems In Paradise
A poet’s novel of the San Luis Valley
Entering Colorado poet Aaron Abeyta’s first novel, Rise, Do Not Be Afraid, is like visiting a world that no longer exists — if it ever did. Santa Rita, the mythical Western town that forms the subject of this short, dense novel, is a place reminiscent of Eden, both before and after the Fall. One is […]
Posted inApril 2, 2007: Disposable Workers of the Oil and Gas Fields
Thomas McGuane’s lonely freaks
One of our most distinctive short story writers, Flannery O’Connor, famously opined, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” Her subject was the metaphysical and geographical American South, its spirit inextricable from its landscape and history. […]
Posted inAugust 21, 2006: The Lure of the Lawn
Loss and renewal in the Northwest
“These stories of loss are about farming and forestry in the Pacific Northwest,” writes Steven Radosevich in this compact collection of essays. “They come along with me out of my vineyard.” Radosevich, hunter, fisherman, grape grower and professor of forest science at Oregon State University, writes simple, painful prose about the diminishing natural wealth of […]
Posted inJune 26, 2006: The Tamarisk Hunter
Waiting for the tide
In The Highest Tide, Jim Lynch’s debut novel, 13-year-old Miles O’Malley — Squid Boy to his friends — discovers freaks of marine biology while beach-combing near his home. He also encounters sex, death, divorce, and the bizarre world of media stardom along the way. A boy genius who’s abnormally short for his age, Miles gets […]
Posted inMarch 20, 2006: Town Shopping
With liberty, justice, and locally produced food for all
“Injustice is part of every meal we eat,” writes Jenny Kurzweil in Fields that Dream: A Journey to the Roots of Our Food. In each chapter, Kurzweil tells the story of an organic farmer, fieldworker or marketer based in the Pacific Northwest, illustrating how injustice might be diminished by purchasing food from local and socially […]