Bunkering With Books

Native American Authors and Books

BY CONNIE CRONLEY

Don’t you love it when wishes come true?

I read so much praise for “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer, it was on my wish list. Then, one bright morning, a friend showed up with a copy as a gift, not for any special occasion, but “because I know this is a book you will love.”

Another friend, an artist and teacher, believes that most women are weavers with an innate gift of weaving together people, ideas and organizations. That is similar to how Kimmerer describes “Braiding Sweetgrass,” a braid of three strands: spirit (indigenous knowledge), science and story.

Kimmerer is a botanist, a professor and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Some of her family stories are set in Oklahoma. She writes lyrically about the land, Native creation stories and things such as strawberries and pecans to illustrate a joyful relationship with the Earth. She connects strawberries, Fragaria virginiana, with the human choice of perception, to show us the natural world as a gift. With gratitude and reciprocity, both plant and animal are transformed and the land murmurs, “Ohhh, here are the ones who know how to say thank you.” It is a lovely, wise and thoughtful book for people who care about the environment and the rest of the living world. It pulled me to books by Nebraska native Mari Sandoz (1896-1966), one of the nation’s most acclaimed writers about the American West and Plains Indians. Sandoz fascinates me because of her subject matter and because some of Jay Cronley’s family knew her. What a hard life she had, first as a girl on a cruel prairie and then struggling to become a writer.

Her famous book “Old Jules” is celebrated as the definitive account of homesteading in western Nebraska, but it was painful to read because her father, Jules Sandoz, was so brutal to his family, and their lives were arduous anyway. Compared to that harsh book, I was captivated by more stories of her Nebraska youth in her slim book of collected essays “Sandhill Sundays and Other Recollections.”

Sandoz writes with the clarity of a sparkling brook, honest and without self-pity. As a child, she got to know the Sioux who camped near their homestead. She saw the difference between the Indians, who never punished their children, and her own family. “I remember the stern, distant faces of the Sioux when, in the swift heat of his temper, our father whipped us. Indians consider the whites a brutal people who treat their children like enemies – playthings, too, coddling them like pampered pets or fragile toys, but underneath always like enemies, enemies that must be restrained, bribed, spied upon and punished. They believe that children so treated will grow up as dependent and immature as pets and toys, and as angry and dangerous as enemies within the family circle.”

The essays led me to her classic biography “Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas.” She spent decades researching and interviewing Indians who knew this mystical, invincible warrior and leader. I have never been so immersed in another culture. No wonder it is called a book of genius. She clarifies the relationships and differences among the Oglala and Brule Sioux and the other five sub-bands of the Teton Sioux (Lakota). Here I saw their rich and structured social orders; their systematic but nomadic lifestyles of hunting, trading and visiting; their raids against traditional enemies, the Crow, Shoshone, Pawnee, Blackfeet and Arikara; the white invasion like a swelling flood along the Oregon Trail; the soldiers of the U.S. government, some kind and understanding, many vicious, and most with canyon-size ignorance of the Native culture. Example: White soldiers laugh when a young Cheyenne mother weeps over her baby, dead of measles. Look at her, they say, trying to be like a white woman.

The late author Vine Deloria Jr. invites us to read history as biography and biography as history. “Crazy Horse” shows us how to do that.