2016 books: 1-5

[the_siobhan]

Wait, this is my first books post of 2016? It's March.



    

In The Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Matthiessen An account of the American Indian Movement (AIM) of the 1970s and the events that led to Leonard Peltier's conviction on a double murder charge. The book is a thick one, packed with incredible amounts of detail about the evidence and events. The book makes the case that Peltier was railroaded into jail by an FBI that was trying to break AIM as a movement at a time when the energy and mining industries were really interested in what lay beneath the remaining Native reservations.

One of the interesting things about this book is that the paperback version was delayed for nine years because of libel lawsuits from one of the FBI agents and the former South Dakota governor. Matthiessen makes the argument in his epilogue that the agent's lawsuit was probably funded by the FBI itself since an agent's income wouldn't normally support the kind of legal muscle that was brought against the book. Both cases were eventually dismissed, but it had an impact on American sales and the case is now probably better known in Europe than at home. One of my favourite bits of trivia is finding out that Russian citizens participated in a letter-writing campaign protesting the case and urging an inquest. How messed up is your judicial system when Russians are saying, "Dude, not cool."

Apparently there have been multiple documentaries made about the case. The only film I've seen was the very loosely fictionalized movie Thunderheart.


    

Drum Beat: Anger and Renewal in Indian Country edited by Boyce Richardson The inside cover says I bought this is 1991, the same year I picked up the Peltier book. Apparently that was the year I decided to educate myself on Native issues. The book is about land claim disputes in Canada as of the mid-80's. Each chapter is about a different tribe, but the storys are depressingly similar. White people move in, swear up and down to the people already living there that they won't interfere in their business, then immediately start cutting down all the trees and moving their own folks in. Then they sell hunting and fishing licences to their own people and arresting the locals for acting like they still live there. Treaty disputes sit in the courts for decades, centuries in some cases.

Most of these cases were in the news when I was in University, so I'm familiar with the protests but not necessarily the outcomes. I looked them all up to find out what happened. I wasn't terribly shocked to find out that most of the claims are still not settled.

    

Native peoples and cultures of Canada: An anthropological overview by Alan D McMillan I have no idea where I got this book, but it may have something to do with all the complaining I did over the years about how Canadian history in school starts when Europeans get to an area. I swear most Canadians actually do think that the place was empty before Jacques Cartier arrived. McMillan is an anthropologist and archaeologist who specializes in the pre-colonial cultures of Canadian First Nation tribes, especially ones from the west coast. He wrote this as a text book for a class he was teaching because there weren't any available. So it wasn't just me. The book is very thorough, explaining how and why different groups are classified and listing the various theories about origins and history. He includes oral reports and outlines the impact of European contact and the fur trade right up to the treaty disputes going on at the time the book was published.

There's a lot of material and I'd be lying if I said I absorbed all of it. One of the things I found really interesting is not all indigenous people are related - there were several waves of immigration across the Bering Strait. So while some of the tribes that settled along the west coast came to North America at least 10,000 years ago, the modern Inuit have only been here for about 3000.

    

Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto by Vine Deloria Jr This was first published in 1969 with some later revisions. It's basically a series of essays about the different aspects of Indian interactions with the church, the federal and state governments and the dreaded anthropologists. (He makes no bones about the fact that he hates anthropologists.) The text is pretty dated, - there is one chapter about how Native American goals differ from that of the Civil Rights Movement and he mentions the Vietnam War several times. And I can also say that some of his claims about how much better things are in Canada are not entirely accurate. Still, it's an interesting read.

    

North Spirit: Sojourns among the Cree and Ojibway by Paulette Jiles Jiles calls this book "a work of creative non-fiction". It describes her arrival as an idealistic, somewhat naive young woman who takes on a job with one of the CBC's remote northern radio stations during the more optimisitc and better funded 70s. She arrives at an Ojibway/Cree village equipped only with her romantic ideals and inadequate winter gear. Jiles is a primarily a poet and her prose is lyrical and beautiful whether she is describing the people, the 40 degree below zero winters, or the raging summer forest fires. You can also tell how much regard and affection she has for her hosts; no doubt the reason she ends up staying for seven years. She doesn't leave out the bad stuff - loss and death and the inevitable frustration of dealing with urban bueracrats. (DIA staff: "What kind of services do you need? Villagers: "A bakery. And lessons on snowmobile repair." DIA Staff: "We're giving you typing lessons for the girls.") But overall, this book is a love song.