Native American Literature (Literature)

NATIVE MESSENGERS OF GOD IN CANADA?:
A TEST CASE FOR BAHA’I UNIVERSALISM (1996)

*** Christopher Buck, “Native Messengers of God in Canada?: A Test Case for Baha’i Universalism.” Baha’i Studies Review 6 (1996): 97–133.

*** Award for Excellence in Baha’i Studies. Association for Baha’i Studies, 1994.

EPILOGUE

Thereupon Tekanawitaˀ [Deganawida, the Peacemaker] stood up in the center of the gathering place, and then he said, “First I will answer what it means to say, ‘Now it is arriving, the Good Message.’ This indeed, is what it means: When it stops, the slaughter of your own people who live here on earth, then everywhere peace will come about, by day and also by night, and it will come about that as one travels around, everyone will be related. …

Now again, secondly, I say, ‘Now it is arriving, the power,’ and this means that the different nations, all the nations, will become just a single one, and the Great Law will come into being, so that now all will be related to each other, and there will come to be just a single family, and in the future, in days to come, this family will continue on.

Now in turn, the other, my third saying, ‘Now it is arriving, the Peace,’ this means that everyone will become related, men and also women, and also the young people and the children, and when all are relatives, every nation, then there will be peace as they roam about by day and also by night. …

Then there will be truthfulness, and they will uphold hope and charity, so that it is peace that will unite all the people, indeed, it will be as though they have but one mind, and they are a single person with only one body and one head and one life, which means that there will be unity.” …

When they are functioning, the Good Message and also the Power and the Peace, moreover, these will be the principal things everybody will live by; these will be the great values among the people.”

– Chief John Arthur Gibson, Concerning the League: The Iroquois League as Dictated in Onondaga, newly elicited, edited and translated by Hanni Woodbury in Collaboration with Reg Henry and Harry Webster on the Basis of A.A. Goldenweiser’s Manuscript. Memoir 9 (Winnipeg: Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics, 1992): 36–41. 

ABSTRACT

Academic and popular interest has lent prestige to native spirituality and has brought it into prominence. The United Nations proclamation of 1993 as the International Year of Indigenous People gave native peoples international recognition. A corresponding interest in native culture has “valorised” (brought respect to) native spirituality.

The National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Canada took a position of advocacy on behalf of First Nations Canadians in its formal submission to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in the fall of 1993. The strong native presence in Canadian Bahá’í community life raises the question of the place of native spirituality within a Bahá’í worldview.

Homefront “pioneers” have extended Bahá’í universalism to a recognition of the richness and authenticity of native cultural values. Such recognition has been supported by local Bahá’í policy, as attested in teaching pamphlets addressed to native peoples, in which the concept of First World messengers of God has been validated. Although theoretically acknowledged, explicit recognition of native messengers of God has yet to be formalised in Bahá’í doctrine.

This study discusses the possibilities of incorporating the principle of “Messengers of God to Indigenous Peoples” within formal Bahá’í doctrine, reflecting a development that has already taken place in popular Bahá’í belief in the North American context. A hitherto under-studied Persian text of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá establishes the principle in such a way that its explicit enunciation is now possible.

The problem of historical attestation remains. The prophetic credentials of Iroquois culture hero and statesman Deganawida are critically examined as a test case. The legend of Deganawida has a kernel of historicity overlaid by hagiography, with admitted Christian influence. Nonetheless, if the Bahá’í principle of “Progressive Revelation” can assimilate the Amerindian spiritual legacy as distinct from and developmentally asynchronous with Irano-Semitic and Sino-Indic religious histories, then it might be possible to accord Deganawida a provisional status with Bahá’í prophetology, and still affirm Bahá’u’lláh’s unific role in world history, as oral cultures take their place alongside the more familiar “literate” traditions.

https://www.academia.edu/36294314/_Native_Messengers_of_God_in_Canada_1996_

There is a threat to our water in northeast Montana. The Keystone XL Pipeline crosses the Missouri River, which is where we get our water from.  There is also a possibility of losing control of our water supply to privatization because of a gigantic loan for a casino project.

This essay probes the limitations of current transnational perspectives in American studies by drawing attention to an often disregarded internal transnationalism. Via a reading of Anna Lee Walters’s novel Ghost Singer , based on performance scholar Diana Taylor’s concepts of the archive and the repertoire, the analysis negotiates Western and Native American epistemologies regarding concepts of perception, haunting, and temporality that entail challenging implications for transnational scholarship.

This essay interprets Daniel David Moses’s challenging experimental drama Kyotopolis, one of Moses’s “city plays” written at the end of the 20th century, in the light of Marshall McLuhan’s media theories of the Global Village that were developed in volumes such as The Gutenberg Galaxy. I show that First Nations Canadians have rapidly moved from their tribal societies to the Global Village of the World Wide Web. With the help of modern technology, whether it be in the fields of telecommunication or space technology, the remote reserves, where traditionally they had been cut off from contemporary developments, have now become part of the “Global Indian Village.”

Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves presents a post-apocalyptic world in which Canada's government hunts the native populations to extract their ability to dream. As outlined in Tuck and Yang's "Decolonization is not a metaphor," settler colonization seeks to obtain land above all else. However, Dimaline reimagines imperialism when the land has corrupted beyond value. This reorganization of Canadian priorities to native genetics facilitates a reconnection with the land.

If belief drives behavior, what did first nations peoples believe? Though a material approach attempts to bridge the gap, other disciplines such as philology may be of assistance and compatible with a strict material diagnostic. This paper marries material evidence and current theory with immaterial evidence from other disciplines for a working model to understand the most basic questions as to why there were people in America before Columbus.

Feminist and Indigenous philosophies of science have much to dialogue about regarding the relationship between science and consent. Some Indigenous scientific traditions emphasize consent as a significant characteristic of empirical inquiry. Consent means that responsibilities are acted out in ways that are accountable to the animacy of diverse beings and entities of the world. Responsibility and consent are significant to the role of science in governance systems, or its governance value. Consent is not a restriction or regulation on science, nor is consent a characteristic that merely increases the objectivity of empirical inquiry. By focusing on Indigenous accounts of knowledge and science, the essay builds concepts for understanding science and consent.

Louis Owens: Writing Land and Legacy explores the wide-ranging oeuvre of this seminal author, examining Owens’s work and his importance in literature and Native studies. Of Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish American descent, Owens’s work includes mysteries, novels, literary scholarship, and autobiographical essays. Louis Owens offers a critical introduction and thirteen essays arranged into three sections: “Owens and the World,” “Owens and California,” and “The Novels.” The essays present an excellent assessment of Owens’s literary legacy, noting his contributions to American literature, ethnic literature, and Native American literature and highlighting his contributions to a variety of theories and genres. The collection concludes with a coda of personal poetic reflections on Owens by Diane Glancy and Kimberly Blaeser. Libraries, students, scholars, and the general public interested in Native American literature and the landscape of contemporary US literature will welcome this reflective volume that analyzes a vast range of Louis Owens’s imaginative fictions, personal accounts, and critical work.

Sherman Alexie’s 2007 young adult fiction, The Absolutely True Diary of a PartTime Indian, depicts the life of a young Spokane Indian boy named Arnold
Spirit Jr., and the writer tries to show how this young protagonist deals with
his identity issues both on the reservation and at a white school. Off the poor
reservation where limitations make him a loser, he needs to balance his Indian
identity and agency with the white American identity he has come into contact
with. The final answer, outcome, or resolution of his long search and struggle
is to become a nomad (an old-time Indian way of life) or to become Nomad
(an alternative superhero identity of Captain America). Following Junior’s
track, Alexie implies that there should be a new form of identity for the young
generation because obviously there is none, for them, available now. Giving
them a reachable, accessible form of identity and the heroic figure would lead
young readers like Junior to dreams of being someone important.

World-Making Stories is a collection of Maidu creation stories that will help readers
appreciate California’s rich cultural tapestry. At the beginning of the twentieth century,
renowned storyteller Hanc’ibyjim (Tom Young) performed Maidu and Atsugewi
stories for anthropologist Ronald B. Dixon, who published these stories in 1912. The
resulting Maidu Texts presented the stories in numbered block texts that, while
serving as a source of linguistic decoding, also reflect the state of anthropological
linguistics of the era by not conveying a sense of rhetorical or poetic composition.
Sixty years later, noted linguist William Shipley engaged the texts as oral literature
and composed a free verse literary translation, which he paired with the artwork
of Daniel Stolpe and published in a limited-edition four-volume set that circulated
primarily to libraries and private collectors.
Here M. Eleanor Nevins and the Weje-ebis Majdy (Keep Speaking Maidu)
Language Revitalization Project Team illuminate these important tales in a new
way by restoring Maidu elements omitted by William Shipley and by bending the
translation to more closely correspond in poetic form to the Maidu original. The
beautifully told stories by Hanc’ibyjim are accompanied by Dan Stolpe’s intricate
illustrations and by personal and pedagogical essays from scholars and Maidu
leaders working to revitalize the language. The resulting World-Making Stories is a
necessity for language revitalization programs and an excellent model of indigenous
community-university collaboration.

The article examines the representation of Native American urban identity in Theodore Van Alst's Sacred Smokes (2018) and Tommy Orange's There There (2018). Drawing upon Stuart Hall's and James Clifford's theories of identity and diaspora and Robert Young's distinction between the "organic" and the "diasporizing" modes of hybridity, it analyzes hybrid strategies through which these texts define their characters' complex diasporic experience and extend the literary tradition of "survivance." The paper argues that by exploring the concepts of history, community, and home and by emphasizing the narrative, imaginative, and relational aspects of their characters' traveling identities, Van Alst's and Orange's texts remain strongly rooted in Native cultural perspective, in particular the "synecdochic" sense of self and the literary trope of "homing." It also maintains that these characters' precarious diasporic situation, albeit confining, allows them the freedom to (re)imagine themselves and thereby transcend their unstable deterritorialized and transcultural position and the realities of dispersal and alienation by inventing new modes of self-coherence and cultural continuity.

In Caleb’s Crossing, Geraldine Brooks takes a frequently overlooked episode in American history as inspiration for her fictionalized version of the remarkable true story of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, the first Native American to attend and graduate from Harvard College.

The Ojibwe view all of life as the “Spiritual World” and have been speaking this simple truth, through out all of their plights, to any one who would and will listen and hear the truth of their words, not as words, but as a reality. They ask, “Where did you come from if not from your Mother (earth)?” And yet rarely are they heard. Time and again, they have been moved from place to place, with the claims of papers (treaties) stating that land can be owned and that they must move on. Meanwhile, they watch as those papers (treaties) eat up and destroy the only home that all have been gifted to live on from the Mother … earth.

Previous studies of The Life of Black Hawk have questioned the text's biographical value and its composite production because it is filtered through a US-employed translator and US newspaper editor. This essay demonstrates how Life's internal reliance on Sauk and Mesquakie oral history makes it always already an indigenous composite production. As such, I argue that Life is an archive of Sauk and Mesquakie responses to land dispossession and removal, containing competing indigenous perspectives on and responses to violent US settler colonialism. Turning to the ways that twentieth-century Sauk and Mesquakie peoples use the text as evidence of land rights during the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) hearings, I show how the court's inability to recognize Life as credible legal evidence highlights competing epistemologies, one in which evidence of a relationship to land/territory (rather than ownership) is communicated through collective oral histories; and the other, whereby land rights is based on written documentation and contract law (land as private property). For Sauk and Mesquakie peoples, Black Hawk's text is evidence of their claims for belonging to the land; whereas for the colonialist State, embodied in the ICC, Black Hawks text is inauthentic as an evidentiary basis for proving rights to land/territory.

In this first extensive study of contemporary Hawaiian literature, Brandy Nalāni McDougall examines a vibrant selection of fiction, poetry, and drama by emerging and established Hawaiian authors, including Haunani-Kay Trask, John Dominis Holt, Imaikalani Kalahele, and Victoria Nālani Kneubuhl. At the center of the analysis is a hallmark of Hawaiian aes-thetics—kaona, the intellectual practice of hiding and finding meaning that encompasses the allegorical, the symbolic, the allusive, and the figurative. With a poet's attention to detail, McDougall interprets examples of kaona, guiding readers through ōlelo no'eau (proverbs), mo'olelo (literature and histories), and mo'okū'auhau (genealogies) alongside their contemporary literary descendants, unveiling complex layers of Hawaiian identity, culture, history, politics, and ecology. Throughout, McDougall asserts that " kaona connectivity " not only carries bright possibilities for connecting the present to the past, but it may also ignite a decolonial future. Ultimately, Finding Meaning affirms the tremendous power of Indigenous stories and genealogies to give activism and decolonization movements lasting meaning.

*Forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press in May 2016

This is a draft of my editor's foreword for Maurice Kenny's memoir _Angry Rain_, which was published by SUNY Press in 2018.The manuscript was complete upon Kenny's death in April 2016 and I performed the editorial work needed to get it into production thereafter. It was a labor of love in many different senses of the word and I am immensely pleased that the book found its way into print after a long journey.

Coyote U: Stories and Teachings From the Secwepemc Education Institute is a unique collection of writing from the Secwepemc (Shuswap) Territory of British Columbia. This anthology is the product of a highly successful Aboriginal Educational Program created by the partnership of the Secwepemc Cultural Education Institute and Simon Fraser University (1989–2010). The text demonstrates that a Native- administered post secondary institution can pioneer new ways of combining Native and Non-Native educational philosophy to produce a literary collection of outstanding quality. The student works consist of poetry, personal essays, interviews, and short stories that speak to current issues of identity, the legacy of residential schools, and the power of traditional teachings of Shuswap elders. Recommended reading for Native Studies courses that focus on Native Education, and Native literature courses at the post secondary level.

The collective soul of the Native American society in North America was taken by the colonization efforts of white, western, European government forces. This was done through systematic destruction and relocation from the Natives of their homelands and destruction of their way of life by killing of the buffalo and taking of the wild lands which they survived on - the capture of their homelands and relocation to reservations. But more was taken than their homelands; they lost their sense of society, culture, history, their pride, their familial unity, and their entire way of life. This event which spans the 19th Century and continues into the early 20th Century began a process named by W.E.B. DuBois as “Double Consciousness”. This was in effect the onset of a split personality for the Native American. They were now identified not through their own eyes but through the lens of white people.  Their culture and inner society was no longer intact. The wound they suffered from colonialism proved too great and could not be repaired.
From this point forward we can examine the plight of the Native American society and individual through the lens of postcolonial theory. What they were left with from the horrific death of their society was to pick up the pieces and try to figure out what it means to be a Native American in this new situation they had been forced into.  Their choice was now  to either retreat to the Rez with their contemporary Indians, or fight to be part of the white world and hope for acceptance there. They developed a “Double Consciousness”; one that groups of oppressed “others” all around the world must share to participate in white, western society. For example, Frederick Douglass had one foot in the door of the white academic world, but in reality was still a black man with none of the rights or protections afforded his white contemporaries. Leslie Marmon Silko, was also accepted into the white academic world but was routinely stopped and searched by border patrol on the highway because of racial profiling.
In Sherman Alexie’s epistolary novel, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian”, the main character Junior begins the story with a grievously wounded Indian soul; one he shares with his family and all the drunks, bullies, and outcasts on the Rez. Due to his confrontation with Mr. P, he has a revelation: If he stays on the rez, he will die. In this paper I will examine how Junior’s world has been created by postcolonial forces; an Indian with a broken soul living on an island in the middle of a western white sea.
To survive he creates a “Double Consciousness”, a term coined by W.E.B. Dubois, in which half of the person named Alfred Spirit attends the white school in Rearden and tries to be accepted into the white world and the other half of his being exists as Junior Spirit, a disabled, impoverished teenage Indian in Wellpinit.
For most of the story he is hated by the Rez for deserting them and left out of the popular white world of his classmates. He continues to fight in the face of extreme adversity; despite the poverty, multiple deaths around him, and hopelessness in his family and lack of support he keeps going.
He is finally accepted by the attractive Penelope when he comforts her after finding her to be bulimic and throwing up in the bathroom. He pities her, and she was needing that pity. She felt alone and misunderstood as does Junior. He scores another level of acceptance when she asks him if he is poor and it is discovered that he has no money on the night of the dance. This is when he is let in 100% by the white teens. Roger and Penelope pity him, and take him under their wing. He also wins the friendship of Gordy, the white nerd at Reardon, who despite resisting Junior, finally agrees to teach him how to read and in turn, learn.
In summary, Alfred/Junior Spirit is a fighter and warrior, but also a vulnerable, poor, handicapped Indian with no hope for a future. He lives the reality of this split life until he finds his own footing in the middle of it all and begins to repair pieces of his own broken soul. I think of the enormity of the choice he had to make - to abandon his own people, his family, his relatives, his best friend, to try to save his own soul - it could be said he was at a place where he had nothing left to lose, so he made the only choice he could. But in reality he did have much to lose: his best friend, his sister, Eugene, and his grandmother. In return for this commitment he gets made fun of, walks twenty-two miles in a snowstorm, survives stitches and a concussion and an entire auditorium of his people booing him at his basketball game. Those were pretty high stakes. His life wasn’t great on the Rez, but at least he had the support of his own kind. Once he went to Rearden, he had neither support from the Indian world nor the white world but he earned the respect from both in the end. From there he will find a place in the world - with a foot in the door in the white world, and one in his Indian world.  The person he becomes is his own reinvented self, no longer a stereotype of an Indian or an outsider at a white school. He has cultivated his own person; a brave warrior with a chance of surviving in this harsh world.
In this paper I will also examine the example of Roger as the model white student athlete Junior would like to emulate, and the loyalty he has for his lifelong best friend Rowdy, his alter ego, the stereotypical violent Indian; the end of story leaves us with the question of whether Rowdy will he be continue the cycle of violence and alcoholism or will he follow Junior to Rearden and try to create a “Double Consciousness” in order to survive.

Many Americans, and a few Canadians, have realized that our criticism of America is often not without a good deal of irony. Thomas King is such a person. King has shown a great interest in American-Canadian relations; as an American married to a Canadian, and who has written and taught in Canada for almost twenty years – to the extent that he is regarded, by Canadians, as a major Canadian author – his interest and insight is not surprising. As the son of a Cherokee father and a Greek/German mother, it is perhaps also not surprising that King should be similarly concerned with Native/non-Native relations. I will thus consider this triad in King’s writings – American, Canadian, Native – in the light of a particular question of self-righteousness. This question, crudely put, is as follows: Can Natives condemn non-Natives without calling up the same irony as when Canadians condemn Americans?

The Grolier Codex is discussed in the context of the archaeoastronomy of the ancient Americas on pages 98-99 of the March 1990 National Geographic Magazine article "America's Ancient Skywatchers" by John B. Carlson. One of four known ancient Maya books, the Grolier Codex depicts different manifestations of the planet Venus; the column of glyphs on the left of each panel records days in a 104-year Venus almanac. These plaster-coated bark-paper pages, carbon-dated to the 13th century, represent only half of the 20-page original. A numbered photographic arrangement of the Grolier Codex depictes the author's discovery that Codex pages 10 and 11 are actually two parts of the same "page 10".  Carlson clarifies the identities of Venus deities depicted in the Grolier Codex from a comparison of images from the Cacaxtla murals and links the images of the Grolier Codex with ancient Maya astronomically timed ritual warfare and sacrifice. (Grolier Codex photographs: Enrico Ferorelli; Other photos: Bob Sacha)

This article has been posted on Academia.edu as part of the Grolier Codex Project of the Center for Archaeoastronomy under the directorship of John B. Carlson, Ph.D.  The Grolier Codex Project seeks to further advance the study of the Maya Grolier Codex.

This article examines Indigenous oral traditions as methodologies for decolonization by extending Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s (2012) settler moves to innocence to include “colonial parallelism.” This article also looks at how western attempts at colonial parallelism have resulted in Coyote First Person being compared to and identified with “trickster” characters and argues that drawing this colonial parallelism of Coyote First Person as part of a universal trickster archetype renders Coyote First Person as a metaphor and erases how Coyote First Person actually builds and supports Indigenous ideas about the world and unsettles western ideas about the world. Ultimately this article asks readers to consider that, as we engage with Coyote First Person as a philosopher and philosophy of decolonization discourse, we should consider how the (re)naming of Coyote, rather than Coyote First Person or the given Indigenous language name, speaks to our theoretical standpoint.

Despite being known by Minnesotans as a “second civil war,” and as a campaign of ethnic cleansing by Dakota, the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War remains an understudied event in the history of U.S. imperialism. Through readings of Dakota prisoners’ letters, this essay examines how Dakota experienced and resisted state power in the concentration camps that were created following the war. By focusing on the slippages between English and Dakota languages, languages which of course mediated the mass conversions of Dakota prisoners, I argue that we may see more clearly what I call the “transgressive adoptions” of White culture by imprisoned Dakota. Transgression appears under the guise of compliance or “assimilation” (converting to Christianity, learning to write and read, practicing vocational trades), where the adoption of forms of Whiteness did not mean relinquishing Dakota values, but instead merely afforded some of Whiteness’s privileges. These transgressions importantly cleared space for forms of solidarity and resistance that were unintelligible to non-Dakota, but were latent in norms and practices of the tiyospaye, or Dakota/Lakota extended family.  Writing letters to family imprisoned elsewhere, some Dakota prisoners were able to maintain, and even extended the reach of, kinship relationalities and so reclaimed an important basis for remembering, decolonizing, and remaking a wounded Dakota peoplehood.

Tribes around the United States and Canada are working to bring back some of these lost languages through a revitalization process that began in the 1960s. It has restored pride in the children to learn their Native tongue and culture without shame or threat. It would seem that a whole people went into hibernation, until the long winter of fear and attack on their culture began to end and they are now opening up to the spring time that lay before them, where they can plant their seeds of language, story telling, ceremonies and practices once again, in an environment that is no longer afraid of their ways, but genuinely interested.

The Grolier Codex (Codice Maya de Mexico, CMM) is discussed in the context of the archaeoastronomy of the ancient Americas on pages 98-99 of the March 1990 National Geographic Magazine article "America's Ancient Skywatchers" by John B. Carlson. One of four known ancient Maya books, the Grolier Codex depicts different manifestations of the planet Venus; the column of glyphs on the left of each panel records days in a 104-year Venus almanac. These plaster-coated bark-paper pages, carbon-dated to the 13th century, represent only half of the 20-page original. A numbered photographic arrangement of the Grolier Codex depictes the author's discovery that Codex pages 10 and 11 are actually two parts of the same "page 10".  Carlson clarifies the identities of Venus deities depicted in the Grolier Codex from a comparison of images from the Cacaxtla murals and links the images of the Grolier Codex with ancient Maya astronomically timed ritual warfare and sacrifice. (Grolier Codex photographs: Enrico Ferorelli; Other photos: Bob Sacha)

This article has been posted on Academia.edu as part of the Grolier Codex Project of the Center for Archaeoastronomy under the directorship of John B. Carlson, Ph.D.  The Grolier Codex Project seeks to further advance the study of the Maya Grolier Codex.

In this article I investigate Navajo poet Laura Tohe’s uses of metapragmatic terms in three literary works found in her book No Parole Today. Tohe’s book focuses on the boarding school experience and is especially concerned with issues of language use. I argue that Tohe uses metadiscourses that both dramatize language use but also create affectively potent relations
between speakers and the languages they use. These metadiscourses are implicit metadiscourses. Rather than explicitly stating that Navajo should be the language of social intimacy for Navajos, Tohe dramatizes such relationships. Such implicit metadiscourses gain added import when understood within the larger social fields of the Navajo Nation and current ideologies about the Navajo language.

In "I Can Carry on from Here: The Relocation of American Indians to Los Angeles," author Ned Blackhawk discusses the trials faced by Native Americans encouraged to relocate from rural reservations into the industrialized landscapes of a metropolitan city. Throughout House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday, tensions over assimilation and the conflict of tribal versus "Americanized" expectations shape the way in which the audience views Abel, the titular character.

Recently at a University of California Riverside presentation, Chag Lowry, author of the new Native American graphic fiction, Soldiers Unknown (2019), talked in depth about his three years long journey to create his newest piece (Lowry, 2020). While having previously published other works, Soldiers Unknown is Lowry’s first graphic fiction.  Working together with artist Rahsan Ekedal, Lowry brought to life his life-long dream of a Native American graphic fiction that focuses on the journey and struggle of Native American veterans. Lowry’s and Ekedal’s work focuses on the great sacrifices that these soldiers experienced as a result of serving in World War I.  While Lowry recognizes that all veterans suffer during times of war and service, his work focuses on the loss that Native soldiers face and the struggles they have coming home, physically and mentally. In the case of Charley, the main character, Lowry and Ekedal explore how choosing to serve costs more than just his family and friends, but his own spiritual potential.  Before the war, Charley was on the path to be a tribal healer, a path he loses as a result of the trauma he endures. Yet, as the war permanently alters Charley and his cousins, making the return home a healing journey in its own, the consistent presence of healing imagery suggests to the power of Yurok medicine to prevail despite death and brutality. Even more so, the power of Yurok healing’s appearance in the battle fields of World War I and its persistence generations beyond the time of war creates a message of hope that argues that true Yurok healing cannot be destroyed even by great suffering.  In fact, Lowry’s and Ekedal’s piece argues that it is with Yurok healing that Yurok soldiers can not only survive but find their way home.

California is the golden state: a land of Malibu suntans, Hollywood, Disneyland, and of recent, the Silicon Valley kingdom where Apple, Yahoo, and Facebook reign supreme. The draw of the Pacific Coast, the fertile San Joaquin valley, and the numerous frothy rivers that flow from Sierra Nevada ice-caps, have long summoned settlers seeking wealth and sunshine. Yet swept beneath tiny granules of California sand and contemporary cloverleaf highways of asphalt lies a covert past of massacre, rape, and domination that led to one of the most devastating Genocides witnessed by man (Madley 449; Lobo, Talbot, & Morris 140). Decades of exploitation, discrimination, and de-humanization are part of a little-known, suppressed California history which led to the near-destruction of the Indigenous California population. It was a near-destruction so complete that Native Californians still struggle to reconfigure the devastation and fragmentation of their Indigenous Californian heritage. Deborah Miranda and Wendy Rose, two descendants of California Indigenous tribes, have embarked on a quest to re-build, re-claim and re-define their (Native) place in the world. It is a quest that defies the very structure of colonialization. Both are generations removed from California-of-old, and its once-vibrant Indigenous culture filled with spirit and life; yet both wield a power through pen, through poetry and prose. Moreover, both Rose and Miranda provide an Indigenous perspective to California’s recorded history that challenges the implied premise of “savages” and “bad Indians,” inspiring all-around understanding and inciting change. Through their poetry, their literature, and their reflections of the past, in Bad Indians and Bone Dance, Deborah Miranda and Wendy Rose respectively re-write and re-create California’s fragmented indigenous past, one fragment at a time.