Jennifer Fox Bennett is an Odawa/Ojibwe Indian who does poetry and environmental engineering. Odawa is sometimes spelt Ottawa and Ojibwe sometimes Ojibwa. Though the natives left their names to much of North America they got little back. I rapped with Jennifer at her house in Oakland near the shores of Lake Merritt about the English royal family, life on the reserve, asshole hippies, racism, Canada's dirty secrets, environmental engineering, Ivy League educations, family, teaching and literature.
JFB: Who am I? Oh gosh. Well, I have a pen name -- Jennifer Fox Bennett isn't my legal name but I decided to use it as my pen name because I thought it said a lot about me and where I come from. "Fox" is my mother's family name. I'm Ojibwe and Odawa. We're matrilineal, you're defined through your mother's family. After doing more research, however, I found out that if I wanted to be really true to this I needed to call myself "Animikwaan." I'm thinking about changing my legal name to that.
My matrilineal line is actually part French. My grandmother's grandmother was a Parisian orphan and she ended up marrying a chief at the time -- Isaac Animikwaan. I need to do more research because "Animikwaan" is a really big name -- it’s a powerful name. A lot of people on the reserve -- you say "reserve" in Canada and "reservation" in the US -- have really gorgeous names. There're many people who have names related to the different times of the day like "Wabegijig" and "Wakegijig" -- really common names. Gijig means "day" and the prefixes refer to what time. When I told my mother I was going to change my name she said I should take her father's mother's name. She had this really beautiful name "Negonigijig" which means "The Light in the Sky Before the Day Begins" or the dawn twilight. I'm settling for Animikwaan which means, when translated figuratively, "The Sound of the Thunder Beings" or Thunder Birds. It refers to the sound of the wings flapping of the Thunder Birds, part of Ojibwe cosmology. They're two major spirit beings in the Ojibwe cosmology: Thunder Birds and the Underwater Panther, sometimes referred to as the Underwater Serpent. I think Panther is really old school -- what the southern people believed in, while the northern people used Serpent. I thought it was fitting having a name that means "thunder," being a spoken word person. It also makes me happy to come from a good and powerful name.
So what do I do? I have a day job and I have a night job. Some people say I should declare myself a writer who moonlights as an engineer [laughs]. But I tell most people that I'm an engineer who moonlights as a writer. Until very recently, I was unsure of my skill as a writer. My formal schooling was in environmental engineering and that's what I do. I think I'm a pretty good engineer. It's taken me a long time to discover that. I became an engineer because my guidance counselor suggested it. I was good at math and science so I said "okay." After two years of engineering at Cornell I enrolled to get an American Indian Studies concentration, which involved upper level liberal arts classes that emphasized Native lit, history, and political science. I found that I really, really enjoyed them and I asked myself: "Where the hell have I been? Why didn't I take this stuff when I first got here?" I felt like they were more my true calling than engineering.
Literature has always inspired me. I've always been reading. During tumultuous periods when I was younger, reading saved my life. It opened my eyes to the human condition at a young age and helped me get through the things I needed to get through then. It still does today. I write, mostly poetry, but I've been trying to do more short fiction because I feel I've heard a lot of really amazing stories and what saved me was reading other people's stories. I'd like to be a good dibaajima or "story teller."
It's hard to cultivate my writing in my spare time with a 40-hour-a-week intellectually intensive job. It’s hard to come home and find motivation.
In many ways, writing was a matter of hooking up with the right people. That's one of the great things about San Francisco. This place is full of writers and is really supportive of them. I don't think that there are too many cities out there that are like that. I don't know if I would have gotten better if I hadn't moved here and made friends with local writers.
S: Talk a little bit about your heritage. You said you were Ojibwe and Odawa from Canada right?
JFB: I'm Ojibwe and Odawa. I'm Ojibwe on my father's side. My father is from northern Wisconsin on the south shore of Lake Superior and my mother is Odawa, a tribe that is similar to the Ojibwe, on the eastern shore of the Great Lakes. She's from northern Lake Huron in Canada. My father’s lineage is half-Canadian. So I'm actually mostly Canadian although I was born in Michigan.
The thing is an international boundary splits the Ojibwe and Odawa territory right in half. There’re on both sides of the Great Lakes. Most of the Odawas are in Canada. I think there're Odawa pockets in Michigan and a small pocket in Oklahoma. But I didn't grow up on the rez. I grew up in Florida since I was adopted into a white family as a baby.
S: What were the circumstances behind that?
JFB: My adoption was something personal with my biological mother. Until 1978, the year I was born, however, it had been both the American and Canadian government policies to encourage the adoption of Indian children into white families. This was part of an unspoken assimilationist agenda to get rid of the "Indian problem." Adoption became really popular in the 50’s and 60’s. There was a really rampant adoption of Indian children into white families at that time. In 1978, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act that made it more difficult to adopt Native children out of their culture and communities. I feel that while so many people know a lot about some of the awful things that have happened to Native people because of government policies but I don't think many people know about this. Kids were taken away from their own families in large numbers to be raised completely removed from their culture and traditions. It's an issue that hasn't been given a voice until recently when we all came of age. I'm at the tail end of this generation. There's a lot of 20-something and 30-something Indians out there completely alienated from their communities because of it. A lot of their stories go untold because people don't talk about it. That's why I kept "Bennett", my adoptive father's name, in my pen name -- because that's a part of my story.
Now that Indian adoptions have become more difficult there are a lot of people who are adopting non-white children out of more destitute places, taking advantage of other countries. In the developing world there's a lack of bureaucratic roadblocks to adopting kids: Korea, China, Guatemala. It's like a fad among the affluent to adopt brown kids.
So I grew up in a white family in Florida and became estranged from them when I went to college and became educated about who I was and where I came from. Like a lot of these Indian kids who grew up not knowing who their tribe or families were -- I know what its like not to know where you came from or who you are. I was the only Ojibwe in a state of something like 25 million people. Whenever I looked into the mirror the question was all over my face. As an adult you have resources to try and figure things out, but as a kid you're powerless to do much of anything. That question was a very alienating thing to deal with every day.
When I went to Cornell, I found myself in an institution filled with all of these amazing, militant, brilliant, ingenious people of color. It was an environment that got me politicized about race and racial politics in the United States. I discovered class politics, too, because I had never been around the upper classes before. The way the upper echelons were just blew my mind. There were people who had such an amazing sense of entitlement engrained in them from the time they were kids. I was shocked by how much these folks took for granted. On Spring Break these kids would be "I'm going to Guatemala or Nepal" to show off to their friends how worldly they were.
I should tell you how the Africana program at Cornell got started. Every ethnic program there had to get off the ground by near violent means. The Latino Living Center came to be because Latino students took over the administration building and planted their asses in the offices. They completely stopped the administration of the university for almost a week. The Africana Studies conflict began in 1969 with a literal armed takeover of university buildings. The Africana Studies had been set on fire after several weeks of cross burnings on the front lawn. The students held a sit-in to demand that it be re-built. Although they were practicing non-violence, some frat boys assaulted them and threatened their lives. So the students appealed to the Black Panther Party for help and the Panthers gave them guns. The students then took over the student union for a week or two and came out on Parent's Weekend. There's this great Time photograph of these African American kids coming out of the student union building with a big sign above the door that read: "Welcome Parents." In the photo they’re wearing bandoliers of bullets with guns in their hands and walking through a line of white photographers from the press that were following the story. It's an amazing photograph with an amazing story behind it. That’s the history of the kinds of intellectuals I was surrounded by. I'm so grateful that it was my introduction to a political consciousness -- I became armed intellectually. I learned so much about non-mainstream history and radical racial politics. The privilege of going to an Ivy League university and having access to this amazing wealth of knowledge is something I don’t want to take for granted. When I left Cornell, it became clear to me that not many people are able to acquire this kind of in-depth background and education in social issues.
My experience with all these radical intellectuals of color at Cornell made me feel that it was important to spread the knowledge that was given to me. It's important for me to incorporate cultural and historical contexts into what I write. At the same time, I don't want to be a fuckin' KPFA poster child. I'm not going to write about Iraq and people I've never met or places I’ve never been, I want to write about the things I do know and that are close to me. I want to be true as an artist and keep my work personal.
In political science, the word most often used to describe Native peoples is "marginalized." That's how Native peoples in the US and Canada have been dealt with: they've been marginalized -- pushed out and hidden -- stuck on these little fucking reservations in the middle of nowhere.
S: You were in an all-Indian dorm in your first year at Cornell weren't you?
JFB: It wasn't all Indian. It was a Native "program house", or dorm but they wanted to bring in other people from other ethnic and cultural backgrounds to keep it a nice mish mash. It was about fifty percent Native. "Akwe:kon" was the name of the dorm, a Mohawk phrase for "all of us."
Akwe:kon was where I first met rez people. I had met Indians before but a lot of them were off-rez Indians. The rez Indians made me aware of how important tribal identity is. People throw around the term Indian, but you're not just Indian, you come from a tribe. There were something like five hundred different nations in North America. These groups didn't fit into the European definition of "statehood" but we were nations politically, culturally, linguistically, even bureaucratically. The only things that we lacked historically were staked out boundaries of land. People moved around. The American Indian Program at Cornell helped to inspire me to go through the really complicated process of finding out who I was and where I was from and who my tribe is.
S: How did you hook up with your biological family?
JFB: [laughs] Oh that would take an hour to tell, it's such a long story. The Catholic adoption agency that had adopted me out was a roadblock. After they made a half-assed search, I ended up having to do everything. I knew I had to find out what tribe I was from so I began the process when I was 19. I filed a petition with the City of Lansing, Michigan, where I was born, to find my family. They gave me a mediator from the Catholic adoption agency to do the searching and she did nothing. On the application I asked to be registered with either my father’s or mother's tribe because I thought this would be a sneaky way of finding out who the fuck I was. I felt if I straight-up asked they wouldn't tell me. When I was 13, my adoptive mother asked but they wouldn't tell. They said "Oh we don't know." The mediator told me they looked for my dad but they didn't know what tribe he was from so they couldn't find him. That search was abandoned after a week. Then they said they knew that my grandmother was still on the reserve but the mediator still wouldn't tell me what tribe I belonged to. I thought to myself, "Why are you such an asshole? Why can't you understand how important a question this might be for someone? The very basis of someone's sense of identity is who their parents are and where they come from. My God, what's wrong with you?" They were supposed to search for six months but only searched for two and at the end of all that they said that they had sent a letter to my grandmother but received no reply. At the end of this process, they sent an application to the Canadian government with my mom's Band. "You'll hear from them in nine to twelve months," they told me. So twelve months passed and I came home one day to find this letter from the Canadian government saying: "Congratulations. You're a member of the Wikwemikong Band in Wikwemikong, Ontario; here's your tribal number, here's a brochure about your benefits." The information brochure was ridiculous; as if that was the only thing I was interested in! This was so whack after so much effort! "Now you're an Indian! What kinds of benefits can you get?" No, no, no.
This happened the day after my birthday, April, 18th. I went into the American Indian Program at Cornell the next day. I was a senior at the time. The AIP was really small since there was such a small group of Indians there. I think there were about eighty out of a student body of 12,000 people. Forty people were just checking the box and you never heard from them. About twenty were active on a regular basis. All the professors and administrators knew my story and knew who I was. That's Jennifer, the Adopted Girl. The AIP staff encouraged me to go home to my reserve as quickly as possible and I did really want to go see the place my family was from. I wanted to see this land.
About six weeks later my friend and I went on a road trip when school ended. We went up there not knowing anybody and I randomly ran into my family. Someone recognized who I was and contacted my aunt and grandma who were living there and put them in touch with the people we were staying with. Hours before we were about to leave, my family found me. I've managed to go back every six months since then. When I graduated from Cornell I decided to live on the reserve, for about nine months before I had to leave.
I got a civil engineering job on the reserve with a firm that worked only in Native communities. The firm felt the government was too slow to address all the problems facing the rez. Not very long ago, lack of civil and economic infrastructure, poverty, unemployment and rural isolation meant that Native communities had a lot more in common with the developing world than with the industrialized countries that had colonized and surrounded them. So this firm specifically went out to do something about federal government neglect.
The federal governments of Canada and the US had signed treaties with the various tribes to provide provisions in exchange for land as part of the condition of surrender. Each tribe typically waged its own war at the frontier; there were a few alliances but when treaties were signed, most were signed with an individual tribe. With the Plains tribes, for instance, who lived on huge tracts of land with the buffalo, they surrendered most of it in exchange for clothes, shelter and the food that they were giving up. The hunt had been their whole life essentially. By giving up their natural resources and livelihood, they were going to need resources and education supplied to them. There was a period of time, especially in the West, when the federal government didn't provide these treaty rights and straight-up starved the people they said they would feed but never did. In my tribe, every year as part of the general treaty the government made with the whole tribe, not my individual Band, every individual is supposed to get two dollars. Granted the treaty was in the 1850's and although two dollars was a lot back then, the treaty made no provision for interest. Everyone is also supposed to get other things like cups, spoons and blankets. The two dollars is only handed out one day a year and you have to go to the Band office to pick it up. You'd be surprised at how many people make the effort to go and get it. There is a line out the door. It's for the sheer general principle.
S: I guess the impression I've had of Native/European relations in Canada is that it's been a better deal than US/Native relations. I don't know that much about Canadian history but Canada seems more socialistic and liberal in general. You don't hear much about Canadian social issues stateside.
JFB: So many of my white liberal friends think that Canada is this liberal paradise. They have socialized healthcare…
S: They did give the world William Shatner.
JFB: And Bryan whatshisname?
S: Bryan Adams.
JFB: Yeah and Celine Dion.
S: Don't forget Rush.
JFB: Yeah. But people think that Canada is this great socialist utopia. In some ways it definitely can talk smack about the way it takes care of its own people compared to the US.
S: You don't hear about things like Wounded Knee in the context of Canadian history.
JFB: Well Oka happened when? Nineteen eighty-nine? Ninety-one?
S: I haven't heard about that.
JFB: Yeah see. Canada doesn't want people to know about its bad relations with Native peoples. That's the big propaganda coup they pull off. Interestingly enough Canada was chastised in this UN report that was published about five years ago. Canada was criticized for its complete and utter neglect and treatment of its Native people as well as the neglect of the provisions of its own treaties.
S: What's Oka?
JFB: It was an armed land conflict between a band of Mohawks and the Canadian government. It was right outside of Montréal and was fought over these lands that were contested by the Mohawk people. A golf course was going to be built there. It escalated to where the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) ended up having a standoff with the Mohawks. The Mounties are the Canadian equivalent of the FBI.
S: Red jackets? Montana peak hats?
JFB: The RCMP was first created to police the Natives population far from the capital.
S: They were created by the Crown then?
JFB: Yeah. That's another thing. Canada is still considered a part of the British Commonwealth and the Queen is still on the money. It's weird. There's still a lot of what they call loyalism among the white anglophone population, nostalgic loyalism towards the British Crown. I think there was a movement to take the Queen off the coins but there was a big uproar. People didn't want it to happen.
What's really interesting is a large chunk of Canada is still technically "Crown Land" -- it belongs to the Queen. It's not public land and while it is government land it's called "Crown Land" and it's not owned by people either publicly or privately.
S: You don't think the British royal family are people?
JFB: No they are not. They are definitely not people. They're like poodles or something.
It is an inept way to try to explain the racial tensions between whites and Native people in Canada, but the closest thing I can compare it to is the experience of African Americans in the States. There is this very visible, heavy-handed, hardcore racism. It's really nasty. I have an unpleasant experience every time I go home to visit my family. It's gotten to the point where I try to make my trip from the airport to the reserve as quickly as possible with as little interaction with Canadian society as possible. It’s also part of the reason I left. I couldn't stomach it anymore.
When I went to southern Ontario, the people there pretended I didn’t exist, like I was invisible. If I went into a store to try on shoes people didn't want to wait on me or else people wouldn't talk to me or they would stare at me when I walked down the street. People assumed I was stupid, had no education and the IQ of a rock. Up north it was even more intense. People just figured I was one of what Ronald Reagan called "welfare mothers."
My reserve is on the largest fresh water islands in the world. When I was living there I went to one of the wealthier white towns because it had the only natural food store on the island. I remember I went to this one bookstore and the clerk intentionally did not put my change in my hand when I bought something because she didn't want to touch me. I had never been treated that way before. When people found out where I went to school they would ask "So how did a Wiki Indian make it all the way down to Cornell?" I got asked that by an engineer from the power company at a subdivision tract I worked on who had come to do some electrical work. He was shocked that an engineer was: (a) a woman, (b) a young woman ,(c) Native, and (d) had an Ivy League education. He implied that Wiki Indians were incapable of such a feat. How could an Indian be smart? How could they be capable of pulling that off scholastically? I really dislike going home until I'm on the reserve because of all this bullshit.
When I hear a white person dismiss black or Chicano complaints about racism in the States as if it didn't exist, I really get pissed you know, if we had a choice between putting up with racism or not putting up with it, we'd obviously not put up with it. It's not a pleasant experience. We don't willingly go into places where we have to put up with that kind of contempt which is why I left home and came to this great Mecca of American liberalism. Granted there's a lot of hokey mysticism left over from Dances with Wolves that I have to put up with from Berkeley hippies but this is more of a mindless kind of racism than outright hatred. I've felt overt hatred from white Canadians and brown Canadians from different ethnic backgrounds.
When it comes to people from other ethnic minorities hating Indians in Canada I think it comes from a lot of socio-economic factors. Indians in Canada, as in the States, are, believe it or not, on the lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder in terms of proportional economic wealth compared to other racial groups in either society. It feels like my negative experiences with other ethnic groups is based on this ground. You know, "What's wrong with you people? Get a job and work like the rest of us. Be productive." Like an insinuation of superiority complex. I don't know what to call it.
S: Fear? Could you read one of your poems?
JFB: Sure. I'll read you one about Dudley George who is an Ojibwe, or was. He was killed by the Ontario Provincial Police over a land claims dispute. This one reserve on Lake Huron used to have land that went right up to the lake because the Ojibwe are water people, lake and river people. We're fishermen and canoe people. The water is our life. The people up north are also hunters and live off of moose and deer but the main resource for food was the water. This one reserve went all the way up to Lake Huron and the Canadian Federal Government decided they wanted the lake front to build an army base during World War II. So they took it over. After the war it wasn't used anymore so the government gave it to the Province of Ontario which turned it into Ipperwash Park and charged everyone $3 for admittance including the Indians whose land it used to be and really still is.
Some families from the Stony Point Reserve decided they would stage a non-violent protest in the park. They waited until the park was closed for the summer, Labor Day Weekend, and moved in there with their families. They camped out and were roasting hot dogs and marsh mellows every night and the OPP decided to harass them because they were there illegally, the park being technically closed. The OPP would wait until dark and shine flash lights over at the people and shout shit at them. They even had helicopters circling the place every day.
Apparently Dudley George, who was a really funny guy, would take the opportunity to moon them. They'd flash a searchlight and he'd flash his ass. Some people think that's why he was singled out. One night the OPP moved in on the encampment, crossing the line they had previously stayed behind and began to harass people more actively. A couple of the policemen kicked a dog. I think it was Dudley's dog so Dudley went ape-shit and jumped on them and they jumped on him and that's when all hell broke loose. The OPP started beating up all the adults and the mothers started screaming to the teen agers, "Get all the kids together and get the hell out of here!" They had this old school bus so one of the teen agers gathered up all the little kids together and put them on the school bus and started up the engine. The bus backfired and it apparently sounded like a gunshot. Then the OPP pulled out their guns and started shooting. One of the shots hit Dudley. A couple of hours later he ended up dying. Dudley was the only Aboriginal Canadian to be killed in the twentieth century over a land claims dispute. I don't think any lives were lost in Oka. I'm not sure about that. I’d have to check for you.
There's a sixty-minute long documentary about this that I saw at the San Francisco Native American Film Festival called Incident at Ipperwash. It really bothered me. This is my lake, my people. Manitoulin Island, the island my reserve is on, used to be all reserve back in the day, but it was broken up and sold to white people who wanted to start farms. I've found the heaviest racism comes from people on the island. Straight-up people not wanting to talk to me. There's times when I've wanted to stage a protest and take over some empty farm land you know, just take it back -- the Odawa have lived on Manitoulin for 9500 years.
I'll tell you one other thing, too; one great irony. You have to drive through this one little town on the island called Manitowaning to get to my reserve. The name in our language is "Mindowaning." The name of the island -- Manitoulin -- is an evolution from our word for the island Mindonipsing, "spirit island." In Odawa cosmology the Great Spirit lives there in the summertime. When the Spirit comes back to live there that's when when the island comes to life. It's like an Eden. So beautiful. It’s embittering to think that racism corrupts such a sacred place.
The Same
(For Dudley George an Anishinaabe)
I could peel away your farms
With my teeth
To have fried fish on the lakeside with my family
And not pay three times my uninterested concession
Taxed by your appetite
Blood, land, paper
It all tastes the same to you
I could pluck out your fence posts
With my fingers
To walk down-wind of a deer into headlights
And not be shot twelve times in the back with a .22
Filed as "resisting arrest":
Spit, beer, tears
It all feels the same to me
I could excise your GMC and Skidoo
with my bone cutter
To hear mink fighting in the full moon over my Minnow traps
And not be driven mad by the void of song birds
Listed as mentally unfit
ADD, OCD, MDD
It all looks the same to you
I could de-gut your perfect little house
With my filet knife
To scan an unmarred tree line of sleeping islands
And not be reminded that the bank rejected my business
loans again
Built on a graveyard
Blood, land, life
It all sounds the same to me
I want to explain what I meant by "driven mad by the void of song birds." Historically, the people in my tribe we were pretty isolated for most of the year. Not in the summertime when we'd gather together in fish camps but in the wintertime when we'd separate into small family hunting groups. The winters are long up there. When we were setting up trap lines or hunting we'd be very alone. You had to be reminded of the life around you. The trees are there but the trees are silent. The birds let you know that you're not alone and if you couldn't hear them, you'd go crazy. That's one of those cultural things a lot of people outside don't know about.
This other poem is one of my personal favorites. I wrote this for a friend of mine who is Kiowa. His reservation used to be in Oklahoma but was one of the first that were torn up by the Dawes Allotment Act of the late 1800's. Native people were traditionally a highly-community oriented society. There are great ideals of equality and democracy among traditional Native governments and societies. The Dawes Allotment Act wanted to privatize reservation land that had been communally owned and force native people to take 140 acres and form nuclear family units that broke up extended family networks. It also forced Natives to become farmers as a whole regardless of whether or not they were from farming tribes. For tribes that were agrarian it was completely stupid to try and get them to adapt European farming techniques because some of the East Coast tribes, like the Iroquois, had already engineered some really amazing farming techniques. They had these de-mechanized methods of agriculture that enabled low-maintenance methods of farming. European methods where you sow rows of crops to be cultivated is a lot of work. You had to be on it every single day. The people of the northeast had a method of agriculture called mound farming. What they did was take a big pile of soil, about three feet across and then stick the seeds of beans, squash and corn in it with a fish in the middle. The fish would be the fertilizer. They put these mounds everywhere and just let them go. The squash would grow out and it was a natural weed killer, the corn stalks would grow and the beans would wrap around them and protect the corn against the wind. In the Iroquois language this method was called The Three Sisters because these plants would work together. There was no weeding, no sowing, it would all kind of grow and its own and that was it. Except the occasional pest.
So my Kiowa friend's reservation was torn apart by the Dawes Allotment Act. I put Oklahoma in the title of the poem because Oklahoma is a generic metaphor. "Oklahoma" is a Choctaw word but the Choctaw's don't belong in Oklahoma, they were one of the Trail of Tears people that were sent on a death march from Alabama to Oklahoma by the government during one of the worst winters of the nineteenth century. Oklahoma literally means "red people" so it's kind of tongue and cheek. "The Great Alliance of Red People.
"The poem's called "The Great Alliance of Oklahoma."
The Great Alliance of Oklahoma
(for M. Anquoe)
me and you
the odawa and kiowa
like a great nebular collusion of blood
we'll load the trunk of our beloved duct taped steed
whose diligent machinery, deoxyribose nucleic acid and differential equations
are mapped like constellations and held with mythological fishing string
we'll give her a name like "quaint" who wears her grill like a sneer
and drives on asphalt pity all the way downtown with the hazards on
i'll pack my shotgun heart and razor tongue
and you?
You can take your marble bag full of pocket size aztec figurines
you and me
the kiowa and the Odawa
we'll storm City Hall with a brown paper bag flag
dry as the blood washed through the soil so many years ago
and coup the dead grass that waves us through
we'll set fire the department of records
and watch the ashes of all the deeds in the whole fucking county flare up
and flicker away into the abhorrence of stars
and when we do, our laughter will float to the thunderheads
rise like smoke and dandelion dust
and broadcast our caffeinated dreams
like a great apocalyptic
alliance of tears.
S: Have you ever done any teaching or read your stuff for high school kids?
JFB: Well I was involved in a Native literature program in a high school English class back east and I wanted to kick the English teacher because she started the kids on Black Elk Speaks.
S: That's a default text.
JFB: But for kids who haven't heard of Indian culture, don't know anything about Indian culture…
S: They might have an idea from movies and maybe that was her way of deconstructing that. Where would you start?
JFB: I would start with Sherman Alexie. Even in my adoptive white family I have cousins who have never left rural Maine who ask "So do Indians still live in teepees?"
S: Right.
JFB: So starting with Black Elk Speaks, is starting with a book that reinforces those kinds of stereotypes of Indians having not left history and having no modern existence. What I love so much about Sherman Alexie is that he combines rez culture and the experience of urban Indian culture. He combines all these things and follows the fragmentation of the culture from the reservation system.
I feel like you've got to work your way backwards if you're going to teach people about Native culture. The kids would get done with a chapter from Black Elk Speaks and say, "Okay I get that. Indians worshipped trees." -- No. No trees aren't gods. Go back and read some more.
S: What about somebody like N. Scott Momaday? You don't hear much about him anymore like you do Sherman Alexie but I think he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel.
JFB: Yeah. House Made of Dawn. Again his work is kind of dated. That book was published in '68 or '69.
S: Wasn't it set in the forties?
JFB: Yeah. Again work back in time. Louise Erdritch, Love Medicine is one of my favorite books. My absolute favorite book is written by this guy Ray A. Youngbear, called Black Eagle Child. He's a genius. He writes fiction the way I want to write fiction. Prose set in poetic form. Poetry is where I come from.