#Indigenous lit

[andrumedus]

There is an ache that begins in the sound of an old blues song. It becomes a house where all the lights have gone out but one. And it burns and burns until there is only the blue smoke of dawn and everyone is sleeping in someone's arms even the flowers even the sound of a thousand silences. And the arms of night in the arms of day. Everyone except me.

Joy Harjo, In Mad Love and War; “Summer Night”

[read-alert]

Happy Indigenous Heritage Month!

All the Dead Things by Bear Lee

To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose

Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America by Matika Wilbur

The Flicker by HE Edgmon

Indian Burial Ground by Nick Medina

And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliot

Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction ed by Grace L Dillon

The Knowing: The Enduring Legacy of Residential Schools by Tanya Talaga

Mirrored Heavens by Rebecca Roanhorse

[have-you-read-this-short-fiction]

[postmodernismruinedme]

"I no longer wish to be called resilient. Call me reckless, impatient, and emotional. Even Indigenous. Call me anything other than survivor. I am so many more things than brave."

- Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe, Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk

[wolfythoughts]

Book Review: The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

A previously incarcerated Indigenous woman loves her job at an independent bookstore focused on Indigenous literature right up until the store’s most annoying customer dies and begins haunting it. Summary:A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day, but she simply won’t leave the…

[reedandstorm]

Oh, How We Laughed* is now available for pre-order!

This anthology showcases short stories, poetry and artwork made by queer and disabled creatives, and strongly features indigenous, neurodivergent and transgender voices. It was edited by Reed and Storm Editing and also features work by head editor Cameron Rutherford.

Funds raised by sales will go to the Collaborative Radical Intersectional Performance Space, Drop In Care Space and Pay The Rent who all support local communities, and to the 15 featured creators.

This anthology is an exhibition of the strong emotions that connect humanity and make us all unique. Our fear, joy, loss, exhilarating highs, depressive lows, and so much more. How we express those emotions might be different, yet we all strive for a laugh.

(*Cried, chuckled, suffered, retreated, enjoyed, blanked, masked, cringed, smiled, consumed, planned, protested, disappeared, felt, ruminated, withdrew, celebrated, raged, meditated, screamed, froze, danced, existed…)

[thegentleintellectual]

“and that’s when I wondered if maybe falling in love looked like a crisis to an observer.”

Excerpt From: Terese Marie Mailhot. “Heart Berries.”

[uwmspeccoll]

It's Feral Friday!

If Special Collections were compared to a National Park- a thoughtfully curated, accessible experience of the wilderness of the natural world- where would its edges lie? What would be considered off the beaten path, how would its boundaries be defined, and in what ways would the landscape beyond those boundaries inspire our imagination and broaden our conceptions of the world and our communicative capacities?

That’s the realm of pluralistic inquiry explored by Feral Fridays, a new weekly post where we’ll feature items from our collection like zines, experimental book arts, independently produced poetry and other unruly materials that exist at the margins of publishing and literary traditions.

Let’s get Feral!   

--Ana, Special Collections Graduate Intern

Images:

That Way Issue 1, Spring 2021

That Way Issue 1, Spring 2021, pp. 23-24 (excerpt from interview w/Erma Fiend)

Thing Issue no. 3, Summer 1990

Re: Creation by Nikki Giovanni, Broadside Press, 1970

Aquarius Rising by Ben Fama, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010

excerpt from Ugly Duckling Issue 6, October 2003

Lynch by Inch: an interview to Ali Khalid Abdullah 2003

Blue Horses for Navajo Women by Nia Francisco, Greenfield Review Press, 1988

Mildred Pierce Issue 3, April 2009

The Match! Number 97, Winter 2001-2002

[whilereadingandwalking]

Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction anthology was a good Halloween read. It had many genuine scares. I did find myself wishing that editors Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. had been stricter with how many stories got into the anthology; the quality went very up and down throughout.

But the highlights made it well worth reading. In Mathilda Zeller's "Kashtuka," the main character is warned of violent doubles who can impersonate you; in Cherie Dimaline's "Tick Talk," a terrifying tick grows on a body in a play on resentment and grief. Characters wrestle with traumatic histories and real-life monstrousness (from residential schools to sexual assault to missing women) and with the horrors of indigenous folklore and belief, from the Weshtigo to ancient curses to uncanny doubles to creatures whose eyes flash red. They deal with Get Out–like monsters as well, whether in Rebecca Roanhorse's story about a woman willing to do near-anything to be accepted into a rich, white family, to people who collect indigenous bodies like trophies in stories by Conley Lyons and Amber Blaeser-Wardzala.

Content warnings for forced abortion, neglect/abuse, sexual assault/rape, violence/gore.

[byronicist]

"I came into this world already scarred by loss on both sides of my family. My Indigenous side; my European side. My father and my mother were the kind of damaged people who should never have had children. But of course, they had me, and so my first language was loss."

Deborah Miranda, When Coyote Knocks on the Door (2021)

[sleepysera]

"And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?"

-H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1897)

[andrumedus]

And I ask you what bitter words are ruining your soft-skinned village, because I want to make a poem that will cup the inside of your throat like the fire in the palm of a healing animal. [...]

Joy Harjo, In Mad Love and War; “Healing Animal”

[read-alert]

Happy Indigenous Heritage Month!

Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology ed by Shane Hawk and Theodore C Van Alst Jr

Kapaemahu by Dean Hamer, Joe Wilson, Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, and Daniel Sousa

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliot

Funeral Songs for Dying Girls by Cherie Dimaline

Feed by Tommy Pico

The Night Wanderer by Drew Hayden Taylor

Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study by Michael A Sheyahshe

This Place: 150 Years Retold ed by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm

[have-you-read-this-short-fiction]

"Hybrid Vigor" is available to read here

[outstanding-quotes]

I am doing my best to not become a museum

of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out.

I am begging: let me be lonely but not invisible.

Natalie Diaz, “American Arithmetic”

[applebees4prez]

having a fairy tale special interest/hyperfixation is so hard and confusing. like what do i even do. go back and study the entire history of fairy tales? where do i even begin? what do i read? do i just have to go back and watch disney movies? rewatch neverafter again? which btw if you like fairy tales please go watch dimension 20’s neverafter it’s my favorite piece of media ever.