Results by title
732 books match the query 'Indigenous' and 61 start with s
Stealing Indian Women
Native Slavery in the Illinois CountryCarl J. Ekberg
University of Illinois Press, 2009
Based almost entirely on original source documents from the United States, France, and Spain, Carl J. Ekberg’s Stealing Indian Women provides an innovative overview of Indian slavery in the Mississippi Valley. His detailed study of a fascinating and convoluted criminal case involving various slave women and a métis (mixed-blood) woodsman named Céladon illuminates race and gender relations, Creole culture, and the lives of Indian slaves--particularly women--in ways never before possible.
[more]
Stealing the Gila
The Pima Agricultural Economy and Water Deprivation, 1848-1921David H. DeJong
University of Arizona Press, 2009
By 1850 the Pima Indians of central Arizona had developed a strong and sustainable agricultural economy based on irrigation. As David H. DeJong demonstrates, the Pima were an economic force in the mid-nineteenth century middle Gila River valley, producing food and fiber crops for western military expeditions and immigrants. Moreover, crops from their fields provided an additional source of food for the Mexican military presidio in Tucson, as well as the U.S. mining districts centered near Prescott. For a brief period of about three decades, the Pima were on an equal economic footing with their non-Indian neighbors.
This economic vitality did not last, however. As immigrants settled upstream from the Pima villages, they deprived the Indians of the water they needed to sustain their economy. DeJong traces federal, territorial, and state policies that ignored Pima water rights even though some policies appeared to encourage Indian agriculture. This is a particularly egregious example of a common story in the West: the flagrant local rejection of Supreme Court rulings that protected Indian water rights. With plentiful maps, tables, and illustrations, DeJong demonstrates that maintaining the spreading farms and growing towns of the increasingly white population led Congress and other government agencies to willfully deny Pimas their water rights.
Had their rights been protected, DeJong argues, Pimas would have had an economy rivaling the local and national economies of the time. Instead of succeeding, the Pima were reduced to cycles of poverty, their lives destroyed by greed and disrespect for the law, as well as legal decisions made for personal gain.
This economic vitality did not last, however. As immigrants settled upstream from the Pima villages, they deprived the Indians of the water they needed to sustain their economy. DeJong traces federal, territorial, and state policies that ignored Pima water rights even though some policies appeared to encourage Indian agriculture. This is a particularly egregious example of a common story in the West: the flagrant local rejection of Supreme Court rulings that protected Indian water rights. With plentiful maps, tables, and illustrations, DeJong demonstrates that maintaining the spreading farms and growing towns of the increasingly white population led Congress and other government agencies to willfully deny Pimas their water rights.
Had their rights been protected, DeJong argues, Pimas would have had an economy rivaling the local and national economies of the time. Instead of succeeding, the Pima were reduced to cycles of poverty, their lives destroyed by greed and disrespect for the law, as well as legal decisions made for personal gain.
[more]
Stone Tool Traditions in the Contact Era
Edited by Charles Richard Cobb
University of Alabama Press, 2003
Explores the impact of European colonization on Native American and Pacific Islander technology and culture
This is the first comprehensive analysis of the partial replacement of flaked stone and ground stone traditions by metal tools in the Americas during the Contact Era. It examines the functional, symbolic, and economic consequences of that replacement on the lifeways of native populations, even as lithic technologies persisted well after the landing of Columbus. Ranging across North America and to Hawai'i, the studies show that, even with wide access to metal objects, Native Americans continued to produce certain stone tool types—perhaps because they were still the best implements for a task or because they represented a deep commitment to a traditional practice.Chapters are ordered in terms of relative degree of European contact, beginning with groups that experienced brief episodes of interaction, such as the Wichita-French meeting on the Arkansas River, and ending with societies that were heavily influenced by colonization, such as the Potawatomi of Illinois. Because the anthology draws comparisons between the persistence of stone tools and the continuity of other indigenous crafts, it presents holistic models that can be used to explain the larger consequences of the Contact Era.
Marvin T. Smith, of Valdosta State University has stated that, “after reading this volume, no archaeologist will ever see the replacement of lithic technology by metal tools as a simple matter of replacement of technologically inferior stone tools with their superior metal counterparts. This is cutting-edge scholarship in the area of contact period studies.”
[more]
Stories Through Theories/ Theories Through Stories
North American Indian Writing, Storytelling, and CritiqueGordon D. Henry Jr.
Michigan State University Press, 2009
Stories Through Theories/Theories Through Stories explores the uneasy relations—often contentious, sometimes complicit—between American Indian Literature and literary theory. Some of the essays in this book open American Indian narratives to theoretical critique based on "western depth models." Others work from a very different direction, finding critique in storytelling and processes of narrative production, thereby exposing dimensions of literary theory that grow from the indigenous ground of Native stories themselves.
This collection of essays—sometimes playfully but always insistently—changes our readings of Native works and challenges our roles as intellectual guides until we step deeper into the ambiguous territories where writer, listener, reader, and critic intersect.
Taken together, these essays provide compelling evidence for looking at primary Native cultures, authors, and histories as enrichments of Native literature.
[more]
Stories for a Lost Child
Carter Meland
Michigan State University Press, 2017
The summer before going into high school, Fiona receives a mysterious box in the mail, one that she hopes will answer her questions about her Anishinaabe Indian heritage. It contains stories written by the grandfather she never knew, an Anishinaabe man her mother refuses to talk about. As she reads his stories about blackbirds and bigfoot, as well as tales about Indians in space and homeless Native men camping by the river in Minneapolis, Fiona finds other questions arising—questions about her grandfather and the experiences that shaped his stories, questions about her mother’s silence regarding the grandfather she never knew. Fiona’s desire to know more and her mother’s reluctance to share stir up bitter feelings of anger and disappointment that slowly transform as she reads the stories into a warmer understanding of the difficulties of family, love, and the weight of the past.
[more]
Stories from the Land
A Navajo Reader about Monument ValleyRobert S. McPherson
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Stories from the Land: A Navajo Reader about Monument Valley provides a traditional Navajo view of this iconic landscape and its people. Couched in the oral tradition of the elders, the reader is invited to view their history and culture through the eyes of those born at the turn of the twentieth century before massive inroads from the dominant culture began to erode the old ways. Each chapter follows a chronological sequence beginning with the creation of the world (specifically Monument Valley), teachings about the Anasazi, then later the Long Walk Period and incarceration at Fort Sumner. Subsequent chapters discuss traditional life and values, trading posts and their ties to the community, the devastation of livestock reduction, the film industry during the John Wayne/John Ford years, Anglo induced cultural change, uranium mining, and reaction to the current explosion of tourism. All of this as seen through the eyes of the Navajo people of Monument Valley and filtered through their unique cultural perspective. For the reader interested in authentic Navajo teachings, these people’s ties to the land, and a very different view of the world and how it functions, Stories from the Land offers fascinating insight that is fast disappearing from our world.
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Stories of Our Living Ephemera
Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907Emily Legg
Utah State University Press, 2023
Stories of Our Living Ephemera recovers the history of the Cherokee National Seminaries from scattered archives and colonized research practices by critically weaving together pedagogy and archival artifacts with Cherokee traditional stories and Indigenous worldviews. This unique text adds these voices to writing studies history and presents these stories as models of active rhetorical practices of assimilation resistance in colonized spaces.
Emily Legg turns to the Cherokee medicine wheel and cardinal directions as a Cherokee rhetorical discipline of knowledge making in the archives, an embodied and material practice that steers knowledge through the four cardinal directions around all relations. Going beyond historiography, Legg delineates educational practices that are intertwined with multiple strands of traditional Cherokee stories that privilege Indigenous and matriarchal theoretical lenses. Stories of Our Living Ephemera synthesizes the connections between contemporary and nineteenth-century academic experiences to articulate the ways that colonial institutions and research can be Indigenized by centering Native American sovereignty.
By undoing the erasure of Cherokee literacy and educational practices, Stories of Our Living Ephemera celebrates the importance of storytelling, especially for those who are learning about Indigenous histories and rhetorics. This book is of cultural importance and value to academics interested in composition and pedagogy, the Cherokee Nation, and a general audience seeking to learn about Indigenous rhetorical devices and Cherokee history.
Emily Legg turns to the Cherokee medicine wheel and cardinal directions as a Cherokee rhetorical discipline of knowledge making in the archives, an embodied and material practice that steers knowledge through the four cardinal directions around all relations. Going beyond historiography, Legg delineates educational practices that are intertwined with multiple strands of traditional Cherokee stories that privilege Indigenous and matriarchal theoretical lenses. Stories of Our Living Ephemera synthesizes the connections between contemporary and nineteenth-century academic experiences to articulate the ways that colonial institutions and research can be Indigenized by centering Native American sovereignty.
By undoing the erasure of Cherokee literacy and educational practices, Stories of Our Living Ephemera celebrates the importance of storytelling, especially for those who are learning about Indigenous histories and rhetorics. This book is of cultural importance and value to academics interested in composition and pedagogy, the Cherokee Nation, and a general audience seeking to learn about Indigenous rhetorical devices and Cherokee history.
[more]
Strong Hearts and Healing Hands
Southern California Indians and Field Nurses, 1920–1950Clifford E. Trafzer
University of Arizona Press, 2021
In 1924, the United States began a bold program in public health. The Indian Service of the United States hired its first nurses to work among Indians living on reservations. This corps of white women were dedicated to improving Indian health. In 1928, the first field nurses arrived in the Mission Indian Agency of Southern California. These nurses visited homes and schools, providing public health and sanitation information regarding disease causation and prevention.
Over time, field nurses and Native people formed a positive working relationship that resulted in the decline of mortality from infectious diseases. Many Native Americans accepted and used Western medicine to fight pathogens, while also continuing Indigenous medicine ways. Nurses helped control tuberculosis, measles, influenza, pneumonia, and a host of gastrointestinal sicknesses. In partnership with the community, nurses quarantined people with contagious diseases, tested for infections, and tracked patients and contacts. Indians turned to nurses and learned about disease prevention. With strong hearts, Indians eagerly participated in the tuberculosis campaign of 1939–40 to x-ray tribal members living on twenty-nine reservations. Through their cooperative efforts, Indians and health-care providers decreased deaths, cases, and misery among the tribes of Southern California.
Over time, field nurses and Native people formed a positive working relationship that resulted in the decline of mortality from infectious diseases. Many Native Americans accepted and used Western medicine to fight pathogens, while also continuing Indigenous medicine ways. Nurses helped control tuberculosis, measles, influenza, pneumonia, and a host of gastrointestinal sicknesses. In partnership with the community, nurses quarantined people with contagious diseases, tested for infections, and tracked patients and contacts. Indians turned to nurses and learned about disease prevention. With strong hearts, Indians eagerly participated in the tuberculosis campaign of 1939–40 to x-ray tribal members living on twenty-nine reservations. Through their cooperative efforts, Indians and health-care providers decreased deaths, cases, and misery among the tribes of Southern California.
[more]
Survival Food
North Woods Stories by a Menominee CookThomas Pecore Weso
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2023
An intimate and engaging Native food memoir
In these coming-of-age tales set on the Menominee Indian Reservation of the 1980s and 1990s, Thomas Pecore Weso explores the interrelated nature of meals and memories. As he puts it, “I cannot separate foods from the moments in my life when I first tasted them.” Weso’s stories recall the foods that influenced his youth in northern Wisconsin: subsistence meals from hunted, fished, and gathered sources; the culinary traditions of the German, Polish, and Swedish settler descendants in the area; and the commodity foods distributed by the government—like canned pork, dried beans, and powdered eggs—that made up the bulk of his family’s pantry. His mom called this “survival food.”
These stories from the author’s teen and tween years—some serious, some laugh-out-loud funny—will take readers from Catholic schoolyards to Native foot trails to North Woods bowling alleys, while providing Weso’s perspective on the political currents of the era. The book also contains dozens of recipes, from turtle soup and gray squirrel stew to twice-baked cheesy potatoes. This follow-up to Weso’s Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir is a hybrid of modern foodways, Indigenous history, and creative nonfiction from a singular storyteller.
2024 Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Achievement Award
2024 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence
Silver winner of the 2023 Midwest Book Award for Cookbooks/Crafts/Hobbies
Thomas Pecore Weso’s Survival Food was selected by the Wisconsin Center for the Book as the Wisconsin entry in the “Great Reads from Great Places” program of the Library of Congress.
“This book is not only about survival food, but about the singular beauty, creativity, and fortitude that comes out of that survival.”
—Chef Sean Sherman, author, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen
“Survival Food is interesting because it’s one part cookbook, three parts memoir, one part history, and one part multidisciplinary exploration of its setting, northern Wisconsin."
—James Norton, The Cookbook Test
“Nothing brings people together like good food and good stories. There’s an abundance of both in Thomas Pecore Weso’s latest memoir. As Weso attests, food can bring back happy, loving memories of times that were far from happy. Even a tray of funeral sandwiches brings a kind of comfort. This is a wonderful, honest portrait of northeastern Wisconsin, enlightening even to those of us who call this area home.”
—Jared Santek, Founder & Artistic Director, Write On Door County
“Survival Food provides ample nourishment for the mind and body. . . . The stories, told with humor and affection, are complemented by recipes ranging from mouth-watering instructions for cooking wild asparagus to ever-so-interesting advice for preparing bear stew.”
—Lucille Lang Day, author of Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place and coeditor of Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California
“His grandmother cooked according to Native traditions; his mother, ‘a nontraditional college student during my teens,’ resorted to instant meals. His grandfather was town constable and days spent with him brought Weso to the meatloaf, sausage and sauerkraut of German and Polish neighbors. Uncle Buddy’s flash car brings buckwheat pancakes to Weso’s mind, and he lived for a time near Cheese Box Curve—so called after a truck hauling dairy products overturned. Weso includes a few recipes, but mostly, Survival Food is an entertaining look back at life in Wisconsin’s rural north.”
—David Luhrssen, Shepherd Express
“Survival Food: North Woods Stories by a Menominee Cook by Thomas Pecore Weso is a posthumous sequel to his celebrated collection of family stories, Good Seeds: A Menominee Food Memoir. . . . Rich with captivating tales that include driving a convertible on logging roads, agreeing on terms before throwing eggs at passing cars, and his grandmother’s brief stay in a jailhouse she’d later purchase, Weso’s entries offer readers catharsis—demonstrating how to laugh, boast, debate, eat, mourn, and heal.”
—Ryan Winn, College of Menominee Nation, Tribal College Journal
In these coming-of-age tales set on the Menominee Indian Reservation of the 1980s and 1990s, Thomas Pecore Weso explores the interrelated nature of meals and memories. As he puts it, “I cannot separate foods from the moments in my life when I first tasted them.” Weso’s stories recall the foods that influenced his youth in northern Wisconsin: subsistence meals from hunted, fished, and gathered sources; the culinary traditions of the German, Polish, and Swedish settler descendants in the area; and the commodity foods distributed by the government—like canned pork, dried beans, and powdered eggs—that made up the bulk of his family’s pantry. His mom called this “survival food.”
These stories from the author’s teen and tween years—some serious, some laugh-out-loud funny—will take readers from Catholic schoolyards to Native foot trails to North Woods bowling alleys, while providing Weso’s perspective on the political currents of the era. The book also contains dozens of recipes, from turtle soup and gray squirrel stew to twice-baked cheesy potatoes. This follow-up to Weso’s Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir is a hybrid of modern foodways, Indigenous history, and creative nonfiction from a singular storyteller.
2024 Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Achievement Award
2024 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence
Silver winner of the 2023 Midwest Book Award for Cookbooks/Crafts/Hobbies
Thomas Pecore Weso’s Survival Food was selected by the Wisconsin Center for the Book as the Wisconsin entry in the “Great Reads from Great Places” program of the Library of Congress.
“This book is not only about survival food, but about the singular beauty, creativity, and fortitude that comes out of that survival.”
—Chef Sean Sherman, author, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen
“Survival Food is interesting because it’s one part cookbook, three parts memoir, one part history, and one part multidisciplinary exploration of its setting, northern Wisconsin."
—James Norton, The Cookbook Test
“Nothing brings people together like good food and good stories. There’s an abundance of both in Thomas Pecore Weso’s latest memoir. As Weso attests, food can bring back happy, loving memories of times that were far from happy. Even a tray of funeral sandwiches brings a kind of comfort. This is a wonderful, honest portrait of northeastern Wisconsin, enlightening even to those of us who call this area home.”
—Jared Santek, Founder & Artistic Director, Write On Door County
“Survival Food provides ample nourishment for the mind and body. . . . The stories, told with humor and affection, are complemented by recipes ranging from mouth-watering instructions for cooking wild asparagus to ever-so-interesting advice for preparing bear stew.”
—Lucille Lang Day, author of Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place and coeditor of Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California
“His grandmother cooked according to Native traditions; his mother, ‘a nontraditional college student during my teens,’ resorted to instant meals. His grandfather was town constable and days spent with him brought Weso to the meatloaf, sausage and sauerkraut of German and Polish neighbors. Uncle Buddy’s flash car brings buckwheat pancakes to Weso’s mind, and he lived for a time near Cheese Box Curve—so called after a truck hauling dairy products overturned. Weso includes a few recipes, but mostly, Survival Food is an entertaining look back at life in Wisconsin’s rural north.”
—David Luhrssen, Shepherd Express
“Survival Food: North Woods Stories by a Menominee Cook by Thomas Pecore Weso is a posthumous sequel to his celebrated collection of family stories, Good Seeds: A Menominee Food Memoir. . . . Rich with captivating tales that include driving a convertible on logging roads, agreeing on terms before throwing eggs at passing cars, and his grandmother’s brief stay in a jailhouse she’d later purchase, Weso’s entries offer readers catharsis—demonstrating how to laugh, boast, debate, eat, mourn, and heal.”
—Ryan Winn, College of Menominee Nation, Tribal College Journal
[more]
Survival Food
North Woods Stories by a Menominee CookThomas Pecore Weso
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2025
An intimate and engaging Native food memoir
In these coming-of-age tales set on the Menominee Indian Reservation of the 1980s and 1990s, Thomas Pecore Weso explores the interrelated nature of meals and memories. As he puts it, “I cannot separate foods from the moments in my life when I first tasted them.” Weso’s stories recall the foods that influenced his youth in northern Wisconsin: subsistence meals from hunted, fished, and gathered sources; the culinary traditions of the German, Polish, and Swedish settler descendants in the area; and the commodity foods distributed by the government—like canned pork, dried beans, and powdered eggs—that made up the bulk of his family’s pantry. His mom called this “survival food.”
These stories from the author’s teen and tween years—some serious, some laugh-out-loud funny—will take readers from Catholic schoolyards to Native foot trails to North Woods bowling alleys, while providing Weso’s perspective on the political currents of the era. The book also contains dozens of recipes, from turtle soup and gray squirrel stew to twice-baked cheesy potatoes. This follow-up to Weso’s Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir is a hybrid of modern foodways, Indigenous history, and creative nonfiction from a singular storyteller.
2024 Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Achievement Award
2024 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence
Silver winner of the 2023 Midwest Book Award for Cookbooks/Crafts/Hobbies
Thomas Pecore Weso’s Survival Food was selected by the Wisconsin Center for the Book as the Wisconsin entry in the “Great Reads from Great Places” program of the Library of Congress.
“This book is not only about survival food, but about the singular beauty, creativity, and fortitude that comes out of that survival.”
—Chef Sean Sherman, author, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen
“Survival Food is interesting because it’s one part cookbook, three parts memoir, one part history, and one part multidisciplinary exploration of its setting, northern Wisconsin."
—James Norton, The Cookbook Test
“Nothing brings people together like good food and good stories. There’s an abundance of both in Thomas Pecore Weso’s latest memoir. As Weso attests, food can bring back happy, loving memories of times that were far from happy. Even a tray of funeral sandwiches brings a kind of comfort. This is a wonderful, honest portrait of northeastern Wisconsin, enlightening even to those of us who call this area home.”
—Jared Santek, Founder & Artistic Director, Write On Door County
“Survival Food provides ample nourishment for the mind and body. . . . The stories, told with humor and affection, are complemented by recipes ranging from mouth-watering instructions for cooking wild asparagus to ever-so-interesting advice for preparing bear stew.”
—Lucille Lang Day, author of Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place and coeditor of Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California
“His grandmother cooked according to Native traditions; his mother, ‘a nontraditional college student during my teens,’ resorted to instant meals. His grandfather was town constable and days spent with him brought Weso to the meatloaf, sausage and sauerkraut of German and Polish neighbors. Uncle Buddy’s flash car brings buckwheat pancakes to Weso’s mind, and he lived for a time near Cheese Box Curve—so called after a truck hauling dairy products overturned. Weso includes a few recipes, but mostly, Survival Food is an entertaining look back at life in Wisconsin’s rural north.”
—David Luhrssen, Shepherd Express
“Survival Food: North Woods Stories by a Menominee Cook by Thomas Pecore Weso is a posthumous sequel to his celebrated collection of family stories, Good Seeds: A Menominee Food Memoir. . . . Rich with captivating tales that include driving a convertible on logging roads, agreeing on terms before throwing eggs at passing cars, and his grandmother’s brief stay in a jailhouse she’d later purchase, Weso’s entries offer readers catharsis—demonstrating how to laugh, boast, debate, eat, mourn, and heal.”
—Ryan Winn, College of Menominee Nation, Tribal College Journal
In these coming-of-age tales set on the Menominee Indian Reservation of the 1980s and 1990s, Thomas Pecore Weso explores the interrelated nature of meals and memories. As he puts it, “I cannot separate foods from the moments in my life when I first tasted them.” Weso’s stories recall the foods that influenced his youth in northern Wisconsin: subsistence meals from hunted, fished, and gathered sources; the culinary traditions of the German, Polish, and Swedish settler descendants in the area; and the commodity foods distributed by the government—like canned pork, dried beans, and powdered eggs—that made up the bulk of his family’s pantry. His mom called this “survival food.”
These stories from the author’s teen and tween years—some serious, some laugh-out-loud funny—will take readers from Catholic schoolyards to Native foot trails to North Woods bowling alleys, while providing Weso’s perspective on the political currents of the era. The book also contains dozens of recipes, from turtle soup and gray squirrel stew to twice-baked cheesy potatoes. This follow-up to Weso’s Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir is a hybrid of modern foodways, Indigenous history, and creative nonfiction from a singular storyteller.
2024 Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Achievement Award
2024 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence
Silver winner of the 2023 Midwest Book Award for Cookbooks/Crafts/Hobbies
Thomas Pecore Weso’s Survival Food was selected by the Wisconsin Center for the Book as the Wisconsin entry in the “Great Reads from Great Places” program of the Library of Congress.
“This book is not only about survival food, but about the singular beauty, creativity, and fortitude that comes out of that survival.”
—Chef Sean Sherman, author, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen
“Survival Food is interesting because it’s one part cookbook, three parts memoir, one part history, and one part multidisciplinary exploration of its setting, northern Wisconsin."
—James Norton, The Cookbook Test
“Nothing brings people together like good food and good stories. There’s an abundance of both in Thomas Pecore Weso’s latest memoir. As Weso attests, food can bring back happy, loving memories of times that were far from happy. Even a tray of funeral sandwiches brings a kind of comfort. This is a wonderful, honest portrait of northeastern Wisconsin, enlightening even to those of us who call this area home.”
—Jared Santek, Founder & Artistic Director, Write On Door County
“Survival Food provides ample nourishment for the mind and body. . . . The stories, told with humor and affection, are complemented by recipes ranging from mouth-watering instructions for cooking wild asparagus to ever-so-interesting advice for preparing bear stew.”
—Lucille Lang Day, author of Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place and coeditor of Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California
“His grandmother cooked according to Native traditions; his mother, ‘a nontraditional college student during my teens,’ resorted to instant meals. His grandfather was town constable and days spent with him brought Weso to the meatloaf, sausage and sauerkraut of German and Polish neighbors. Uncle Buddy’s flash car brings buckwheat pancakes to Weso’s mind, and he lived for a time near Cheese Box Curve—so called after a truck hauling dairy products overturned. Weso includes a few recipes, but mostly, Survival Food is an entertaining look back at life in Wisconsin’s rural north.”
—David Luhrssen, Shepherd Express
“Survival Food: North Woods Stories by a Menominee Cook by Thomas Pecore Weso is a posthumous sequel to his celebrated collection of family stories, Good Seeds: A Menominee Food Memoir. . . . Rich with captivating tales that include driving a convertible on logging roads, agreeing on terms before throwing eggs at passing cars, and his grandmother’s brief stay in a jailhouse she’d later purchase, Weso’s entries offer readers catharsis—demonstrating how to laugh, boast, debate, eat, mourn, and heal.”
—Ryan Winn, College of Menominee Nation, Tribal College Journal
[more]
Sáanii Dahataal/The Women Are Singing
Poems and StoriesLuci Tapahonso
University of Arizona Press, 1993
In this cycle of poetry and stories, Navajo writer Luci Tapahonso shares memories of her home in Shiprock, New Mexico, and of the places and people there. Through these celebrations of birth, partings, and reunions, this gifted writer displays both her love of the Navajo world and her resonant use of language. Blending memoir and fiction in the storytelling style common to many Indian traditions, Tapahonso's writing shows that life and death are intertwined, and that the Navajo people live with the knowledge that identity is formed by knowing about the people to whom one belongs. The use of both English and Navajo in her work creates an interplay that may also give readers a new way of understanding their connectedness to their own inner lives and to other people.
Luci Tapahonso shows how the details of everyday life—whether the tragedy of losing a loved one or the joy of raising children, or simply drinking coffee with her uncle—bear evidence of cultural endurance and continuity. Through her work, readers may come to better appreciate the different perceptions that come from women's lives.
Luci Tapahonso shows how the details of everyday life—whether the tragedy of losing a loved one or the joy of raising children, or simply drinking coffee with her uncle—bear evidence of cultural endurance and continuity. Through her work, readers may come to better appreciate the different perceptions that come from women's lives.
[more]