Do you wanna be Up North? Are you here already?

Sandhill cranes return every year.

 

Everyone wants to be here! Is that a problem?

 

Bear with me while I start far from Michigan....

Wilma Dykeman, in the volume of the “Rivers of America” series entitled The French Broad, which gives the history of a river region that encompassed western Tennessee and eastern North Carolina, writes in one chapter of a boom in tourism set off initially by “lowlanders” on the coast seeking to escape heat and malaria by summering in the mountains. At first conditions were rustic, but as time went on more and more elaborate hotels and resorts were built. The boom did not last forever—as transportation alternatives came along that allowed greater distances to be covered, the lowlanders were able to vacation much farther from home than Appalachia—but while it was on, it was definitely on, enticing foreigners from England, Scotland, and Germany as well as residents of North Carolina’s seacoast. In the 19^th century, the region of the French Broad River saw “a mingling of Northern wealth and Southern abandon.” 

Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be there. 

 

It was the peak of the boom for the watering places in the French Broad country. To these springs and hotels came people who at a later date would be gasping over the canyon of the Yellowstone rather than the canyons of the French Broad. The ‘Lowlanders,’ who set out from their malarial flatlands with a caravan of carriages and trekked up through the foothills and into the mountains on a journey that cost at least two weeks every year, were looking for the same things many of the tourists who hurry through so rapidly today are seeking: A combination of comfort and ruggedness, the uneasy balance between a luxurious personal surrounding and an untamed natural background. They simultaneously sought new experiences yet managed to establish many of their old ways of life in the country they visited. 

 

-      The French Broad, by Wilma Dykeman, from the Rivers of America series, edited by Carl Carmer, as planned and started by Constance Lindsay Skinner

 

The French Broad was published in 1955, that post-World War II era when Americans began vacationing in automobiles, when motels began to replace earlier “tourist resort” campgrounds, but are Americans who leave home today, whether for two weeks or permanently, much different? Don't most still want new places to offer both comfort and ruggedness, nature and luxury, the excitement of new experiences along with the familiarity of their old ways of life?

 

My bookstore is in Leelanau County, Michigan, and these days it sometimes seems to locals as if everyone wants to be here. Or in Grand Traverse or Benzie County or Antrim or Charlevoix or – well, a bookseller friend in the U.P. feels as if everyone wants to live on her road! But the other side of the coin is that businesses rely on customers, whether locals or weekenders or new residents. Then, too, not all of us who live here were born here, by a long shot. I was born in South Dakota myself, of an Ohio-born father and a California-born mother!

***

Who wouldn't want to be here?

[PLEASE NOTE: I was still reading the two books discussed below, i.e., had not finished either one, when I put this post out into the world, because I could not wait!]

Tim Mulherin’s This Magnetic Book: Candid Conversations on a Changing Northern Michigan explores the “relocation phenomenon” that is swelling the population of places like Traverse City. Northern Michigan, of course, is not the only destination of people fleeing crowds and climate disasters. Arizona and New Mexico and Idaho and Montana are all getting their share of well-to-do “climate refugees” from California. Some people are still moving to the South for warmer winters and sunshine, but others are moving away from the South. 

Americans on the move! Pulled by magnetic forces away from home to new homes!

Mulherin begins with his own migration story, but then in Chapter 2 ups the ante seriously with “An Indigenous Perspective,” interviewing several members of the Grand Traverse Band, whose people were here long before Europeans “discovered” North America. In fact, a list of chapters will tell you a lot about the scope of Tim’s book: 

 

Chapter 1. “A Migration Story”

Chapter 2. “Indigenous Perspectives”

Chapter 3. “Welcome Wagon”

Chapter 4. “Settlers”

Chapter 5. “A Taste of Northern Michigan”

Chapter 6. “Invasive Species”

Chapter 7. “America’s Most Beautiful Place”

Chapter 8. “Protecting Paradise”

Chapter 9. “Eyes to the Sky”

Chapteer 10. “Every Day is Earth Day”

 

Mulherin interviewed over 75 Northerners from various walks of life and a multitude of backgrounds. Pandemic & climate refugees or lifestyle migrants? Which label fits better as you see it? If you came here from downstate or farther away, does either label seem to fit your move to Leelanau or the greater Grand Traverse area? If you’ve lived here all your life, how do you view newcomers and change? 

One fruit grower Mulherin interviews points out that the very places seen as most desirable for new houses are also the most advantageous locations for orchards.

Growing specialty fruit crops in northern Michigan calls for being close to Lake Michigan, within several miles, and on sloping ground. This, of course, also makes for perfect view property. ‘Our desirable fruit-growing land is getting turned into golf courses and subdivisions and wonderful view mansions that can see Grand Traverse Bay,’ King McAvoy explains with a tinge of cynicism.

The lake offers protection, cooling the land in summer and keeping it warmer in winter, but property prices keep going up, while farming remains a gamble from year to year.

Mulherin, who still maintains a home in Indiana, does not presume to have answers or give prescriptions, but it’s clear that no one he talked to wants change and growth to destroy what makes this part of the country such a magnet for vacationers and relocators alike. Unfortunately, where some see destruction, others see improvement. 

 

I admit that part of my pleasure in reading Mulherin's book is encountering so many old friends, but anyone who loves our area and cares about its future will want to read This Magnetic North.

***

Now, can work be a vacation? Maybe that depends on where you are.

 

When Robert “Carlos” Fuentes introduced himself and his book to me recently, my enthusiasm was immediate. The Vacation: A Teenage Migrant Farmworker’s Experience Picking Cherries in Michigan is a personal account of what it was like to work in a Leelanau cherry orchard a few decades ago. Robert’s family were not year-round farm workers—his father had a floor cleaning business—but the summer he was 14 Robert was told by his father that the family was going to Lake Leelanau for vacation. The only catch was that they would be picking cherries from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and for a few hours on Saturday mornings. 

 

The day before they left home, when Robert tells his friend Luis that he’s going to Lake Leelanau for a cherry-picking vacation, Luis scoffs at the idea of picking cherries as a “vacation.” 

 

He tells me it is hard, dirty, thankless, and physically strenuous work. His family is still partly in the migrant farmworker stream. All Mexican American families in our neighborhood were from Texas and came to Michigan as migrant farmworkers. Luis tells me that he and his family have already done two weeks of hoeing at some local fields and will soon be heading up north to pick cherries at a farm on Old Mission Peninsula.

 

Robert was grateful he didn’t have to move around the country harvesting different crops. He liked having a settled home in Alma, Michigan. But he was excited about the “vacation” his father had planned for the family on the Esch Farm in Leelanau County, where his grandfather had first come (from Texas) to pick cherries in 1946 and, in later summers, had led church services in Spanish in the barn for the migrant workers.

Before mechanical shakers came along, cherries, like apples, were picked by hand. The author writes in his brief introduction that when machines came to the orchard,

 

…the backbreaking tradition of handpicking gave way to mechanized efficiency. In a matter of years, the thousands of workers who had once filled the orchards, their laughter and voices rising with the rustling leaves, were no longer needed. A way of life was disappearing. 

 

With these few, spare introductory lines, Fuentes reminds us that change is nothing new in northern Michigan. 

 

Robert’s cherry-picking vacation was in 1969, just a year before I moved to Traverse City from Lansing, and I remember the era well: “muscle” cars, Wolfman Jack, the miniature model Traverse City and the zoo in Clinch Park. I don’t remember ice cream at NJ’s. The Twister for ice cream (where Fiddleheads is now) must have come along much later.

 

But whether you knew the area in 1969 or not, the author will take you back in time, as he seamlessly weaves facts about the cherry industry with personal experience (Robert could pick enough to fill an average of 22 lugs in eight and a half hours; the best pickers could fill 25-30 lugs a day but worked longer hours; growers were paying 80 cents a lug in 1969; and growers were paid by the pound, varying from seven to 15 cents in those days), and his story includes not only facts and sights but also sounds and tastes and smells of those days, as well as descriptions of his own thoughts and moods. 

As we read, we hear the whine of mosquitoes and the strains of Tejano music from car and truck radios, taste a special lakeside supper of grilled hot dogs with catsup and mustard (a change from the family’s customary and probably more delicious Mexican fare), smell the Zest soap in the cold shower, and see the roadside daylilies that catch Robert’s eye. He is nervous about talking to a girl he finds attractive, but when she smiles at him all the world is bright.

On a typical day, he and his siblings would have cereal for breakfast, pick fruit until stopping for a half-hour picnic lunch, pick again until quitting time, and then enjoy a trip to a Lake Leelanau beach for another picnic meal, maybe later to NJ’s for ice cream, winding up, for Robert, with an evening gathering of teen boys in their “clubhouse” in the barn, where they would trade baseball cards and have farting contests, which he acknowledges was totally a guy thing. Outside the clubhouse, however, his sensitive nature responded to northern Michigan.

Walking back to the tent through dew-covered grass, I take in my surroundings. I gaze at the sky, marveling at the stars and planets. The wind rustles the leaves, their sound blending with the chorus of crickets and katydids…. This place feels so peaceful right now….

 

***

I am reading Mulherin and Fuentes almost simultaneously--toggling back and forth between them, that is. I’m enjoying the experience, immersed in how life was then compared to how it is now in the same region, and I recommend you do the same. 

The big question is, of course, what do we want this part of Michigan to be in the future, and what can we do about it? Your thoughts?

P.S. Current summer bookstore hours here. 

The Twisting Road of History

Peaks of Dos Cabezas seen from New Mexico state line

We have arrived at last! We were six days on the road, rather than the usual five, owing to an unexpected, migraine-motivated, two-night stay in Alamagordo, New Mexico. (We had also stayed two nights in Springfield, Illinois, but that was planned and enjoyable.) We were able to make the last leg of our cross-country journey on Tuesday, however, and it was an easy drive on a clear, sunny day. My heart leaped up when I spotted the twin peaks of Dos Cabezas as we crossed the state line from New Mexico into Arizona, and later on, everything in the car dragged into the cabin, as we prepared to hit the road once again, briefly to stock up at the grocery store in Willcox, we were both thrilled to see the moon rising gloriously over the mountains. 

For me, the drive from central Illinois to southeast Arizona presents not only challenges of the road and beautiful scenery and whatever surprises we encounter in towns we visit along the way — it’s also puts front and center in my mind the history of our country. For instance: we see enormous bales of cotton (size and shape of the large round hay bales sometimes seen back in Michigan), and I wonder how it was that the growing of cotton moved west to Kansas and Oklahoma and Texas and even as far as Arizona and how much of that crop’s westward migration story is tied to the larger story of slavery and the Civil War and the migrations of Southerners to the West and Southwest and when the growing of cotton on former buffalo lands came about and how it affected the lives of the Plains Indians. A bit of searching on my phone delivers a fact that surprises me: that the Choctaw began planting cotton in 1825. Unsurprisingly, cotton's history in the second half of the nineteenth century was complicated, to put it mildly. If you're interested, the link is there to follow and read more.

But every mile of the road is saturated with history and the effects of history’s unrolling on the present. Cities are booming, in the Great Plains as elsewhere (we avoided cities as much as possible so as not to deal with the traffic), but across the country the pain of nearly forgotten small towns is palpable. On the two-lane roads we travel -- sometimes detouring a bit off the road to find what is called hopefully a business district -- we see towns where beautiful old buildings stand empty of commerce, wide streets empty of traffic, towns with not a soul on the sidewalks. The scene is the town correlate of the abandoned and derelict farmhouse, an empty house falling into ruins among sheltering trees as cattle graze up to the edge of the front porch, farms having grown larger and larger although country cemeteries tell of larger populations in times past.

Intersection of brick streets, Medicine Lodge, KS

We detoured off the road Saturday morning to explore one formerly prosperous Kansas town and admired beautiful brick streets and buildings in our search for breakfast but were unable to find a single place open for business. We fared better down the road in Medicine Lodge, another town of brick streets. The “Welcome” sign on Frosty’s Donut Shop was contradicted by a “Closed” sign on the same door, but down the block a few doors we found an open cafe. (I neglected to photograph the front of the business but think I recall its name as Latte-Da.) Fancy European coffees have penetrated the heartland! We stuck with straight American brew, fresh and dark and delicious. The sweet white china cups were so much more luxurious than mugs and light years better than gas station styrofoam! Avocado toast, my menu choice, came to the table topped with cheese and a fried egg and was a breakfast worth the wait and the search that had led us to Medicine Lodge. 

Medicine Lodge calls hard on history for recognition. Along with being the one-time home of temperance agitator Carrie Nation (there is an oxymoron for you: temperance agitator), it was also the scene of 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty between the U.S. government and “more than 5,000 representatives of the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho and Kiowa-Apache nations,” joined soon by members of the Southern Cheyenne. The town of Medicine Lodge celebrates the colorful treaty gathering annually, despite its short-lived success. 

…[C]ontinual attempts to renege on the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty came to a head in 1903 in the landmark Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock case, in which a member of the Kiowa nation filed charges against the Secretary of the Interior. The Supreme Court ruled that Congress had the right to break or rewrite treaties between the United States and Native American tribes however the lawmakers saw fit [my emphasis added], essentially stripping the treaties of their power.

Read more at this site from which my quote is drawn. 

Visual support for the local high school team on one store window aroused my curiosity, and I looked up the town on City Data, an online site that helps me see beneath appearances, where the report (this would be from the 2010 census) told me that the Native American population of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, is 0.00%. But history is what the town has, and it’s clear they are struggling to hold onto some kind of identity.  When a young woman with a hauntingly plaintive country voice sang “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” in the little cafe, our feelings for the place and its people were warm, and we wished everyone well as we said goodby. I remember struggling years in Northport, Michigan, and can’t help being sympathetic to other small towns fighting an Interstate highway system, flight to cities, and online shopping. As for the burden of history, it is one none of us can escape. All we can choose is how we will go on from where we are.

I won't try to give a day-by-day or mile-by-mile or even road-by-road account of this year’s trip west but will skip now from Kansas to New Mexico, where our last stop on our last day of travel was in the town of Deming. Remembering a very pleasant visit to a little bookstore called Readers' Cove in December 2018, I had been looking forward to stopping there again this year. First, however, we sought out a downtown cafe — and again, as in Medicine Lodge, fortune smiled on us. “Rise and Shine” was drawing in others besides ourselves for their gourmet coffee, but we took a table and made it a lunch stop, as well. Then on to Readers' Cove. 

Margaret was still there, the little dog, the cat (I was told there is more than one cat on the premises), and again I found enough books to carry off a little stack, although we did not tarry as long this year, eager as we were to reach our ghost town destination. 

… And then there it was, finally coming into sight a bit farther down the road (I-10 now), the twin peaks of Dos Cabezas visible from the New Mexico/Arizona state line. (See back to my top photo of today's post, if you've forgotten.) I was so happy to see my mountains again! We took the first of the three exits to Willcox, so as to enter past the livestock auction grounds and the old town along the railroad. Later, having unpacked at the cabin and returned to Willcox for the shopping expedition, we saw the old town strip after dark, beautifully lit up for the holidays — a photo op that must wait for another evening, however, as road weariness was overcoming us. And so, home and to bed, with a short spell of reading aloud, and then to sleep, at last, in our winter ghost town stomping grounds.

Until a high desert dawn brought another day, much calmer and more relaxed than the week past has been. I note today the birthday of Michigan, Montana, and Arizona writer and our good friend, the late Jim Harrison. Here's to you, Jim! You got your work and paid your rent in the universe!

Ghost town dawn

Wandering Through the Canadian Wilderness

Last week: false spring in Leelanau in November

Cinnamon! She opened the little glass jar of powder, held it to her nose, and breathed in the deep, almost ecclesiastical perfume. She was suddenly in her father’s house, in the kitchen, following the old cook around while she worked, sitting on the counter by the sink licking a spatula thinly covered in gingerbread batter. She remembered flour sifted into a wide ceramic bowl in perfect peaks, salt and sugar denting the summit, and finally a tiny spoonful of cinnamon dropped in, a small thrill among the whiteness. 

- Gil Adamson, The Outlander

A reader is many chapters into The Outlander before learning Mary’s name, long after learning — though all this not immediately revealed, either — that she has killed her husband, lost an infant, and is being tracked through forests and over mountains by her husband’s twin brothers. Functionally illiterate but raised in a genteel household with servants, Mary could not have found life easy in her husband’s dark, windowless, isolated log cabin, far off in the Canadian wilderness, away from everything she had ever known. But her grandmother’s object was achieved by the marriage of the young, motherless girl to an older man: the girl was spared the horrors of "spinsterhood."

With a well-worn, familiar Bible but no money and no change of clothes, Mary is running away, seeking to cross a river by ferry, pursued by a pair of red-headed identical twins when first we meet her. She is wearing an oddly put-together costume of black supposed to serve as mourning. Only now that I am halfway through the book, after chapters of the protagonist's stumbling through snowy woods and almost dying of starvation, has she find refuge with a widowed minister in a mining camp. She has a real bed to sleep in again at last.

It looked like March last week, after an early, January-type storm

Along the way, however, she had already been rescued three times, first by an old lady famous for taking in needy strays. When "the widow," as Mary is simply called in the early chapters, flees the old lady’s house, she makes off with a horse, an elaborate pipe, and enough good tobacco to last a while.

New snow a week later, a new storm and new snow

Her second rescuer in the mountains is called by authorities the Ridgerunner. The Ridgerunner is a man who lives by his wits and by stealing food and whatever else he needed from Forest Service cabins. Captured, tried, and acquitted once in a court of law, he returned to his old life and tells Mary with a laugh, “They probably think I’m dead by now.” With William, she discovers laughter and passion, but the Ridgerunner has been alone too long to take her on as a permanent companion, and one day he simply vanishes, taking all his gear with him. The widow is once more on her own.

The third person (second man) who comes to her assistance is Henry, a Crow Indian, and it is Henry who delivers her to the Reverend. Henry’s wife warns Mary that the Reverend Bonnycastle is the only man in the mining camp she should trust, and Mary finds the minister's character to be everything promised. But the red-haired twins have hired a tracker and are close on her heels. 

-- What will happen next? I was happy to reach the pleasant, cozy cinnamon-in-kitchen interlude on Sunday morning at home while enjoying my first cup of coffee with delicious cinnamon bread baked by a friend. Outside a new blizzard raged. We would not be taking to the road as planned....

The calm after earlier wild gusting and blowing

Early chapters of The Outlander, as I’ve indicated, were all set outdoors, and the author’s attention to sensual detail is beautiful and vivid on every page.

She left her belongings and wandered aimlessly. Spider webs brushed her face and she did not wipe them away but let spiders climb to her and ride a while and drop away. The sun came down in beams and shafts, and once, when she looked up, she saw the moon hung high and pale in the blue morning. Tricky thing, pretending to be gone when it wasn’t. She was reduced to an idiot child lost in the woods. It was with an idiot’s glee, then, that she came across the tracks of her horse, and bent to see the deep, scored prints where the animal had run and dodged and dodged again. Other horses had run with it and diverged through the trees, hounded by dogs. Not dogs, she reminded herself. Many wolves, harrying the horses.  

The widow followed the tracks and came across a carcass. It was a big mule deer. The body lay with its hooves toward her. From ten yards away she could see blood pooling in paw prints in the mud, the throat and belly torn away, intestines dragged over the ground. One leg askew.

Hungry wolves want that deer meat, but so does the hungry young woman alone on the mountain!

When a friend and I discussed Moon of the Crusted Snow the other day, she expressed disappointment that the story was so short on detail and left so much to the imagination. I had rather appreciated the author’s spare, light touch, but I understood what my friend was saying, especially when she told me she wanted to know, “What were the women doing?” Ah, yes, good question! The first scene in the Rice novel shows us an Anishnaabe hunter who tracks, kills, and butchers his moose, and he has learned from his father how to tan hides, but we do not see how women transform hides into clothing or harvest rice together or do any of the work that would have been so crucial to survival after the power grid goes dark. Their contributions are referred to only in passing. 

In The Outlander (I’m not sure yet that the title refers to the protagonist; that remains to be seen), we see everything that the woman does. She is the character in focus, and as the year is 1903 and she is fleeing alone on foot through mountain wilderness, survival is of paramount importance in this novel, as well. But “the widow” has no survival skills and would have been dead several times over were it not for the rescuers she meets along her way, so while there is much detail given of her travails and much of the beautiful country she passes through, Mary is hardly a model for ancient knowledge, and this lone white woman is also very much without community.

I enjoyed Moon of the Crusted Snow — devoured it! — and am also fascinated by the Gil Adamson’s Canadian story, The Outlander. I think of how Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River was compared by many reviewers to Huckleberry Finn, Campbell offering a female version of running away downriver. 

Frozen wild grapes

What my friend wants, though, is something different from all of these books, if I have her criticisms right (and maybe she will tell me if I don’t): She wants a story of Anishnaabe post-apocalyptic survival that stresses community aspects and particularly the contributions made by women in the group. What kinds of traditional knowledge of nature would be crucial if the lights went out and there were no more grocery stores? How would clothing be replaced, food prepared, sicknesses treated? Knowing how these aspects of life were carried on in the traditional past would be part of survival into a future if one truly had to live off the land. 

If a novel telling such a story were to come out of Peshawbestown, I would read it eagerly! For today, I'm content to be snowed in again, preparing for eventual departure in leisurely fashion. The Artist and I needed a day of rest before beginning our travels.

Whose “Good Old Days” Are You Talking About?

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” said the character Stephen Daedalus in the novel Ulysses, by James Joyce. True for the Irish, and it should have been true for the English, also, but was it? An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is a difficult book to read, because the facts themselves are brutal, but for that very reason it is also an important corrective to U.S. history as generally taught. I’ve made my way through it slowly so as not to skip over any of the unbelievably horrible but horribly real — and horribly repetitive — details. The awful repetition of horrors is important because it shows that, rather than being something that can be brushed aside today as anomalies, all were part of systematic, government-sanctioned and often (though not always) government-led racism and genocide in our country’s history. 

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz did not grow up on a reservation but “in the midst of,” as she puts it, Native communities in rural Oklahoma, her father a cowboy, her mother “ashamed of being part Indian.” She became involved in political movements in the Sixties — antiwar, civil rights, anti-apartheid, women’s lib — and eventually with the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the International Indian Treaty Council. She earned her doctorate in 1974 with a dissertation on land tenure in New Mexico. It’s easier to tell you about the author’s background than about what’s in her book, though, because even white people know, after all, that the history of the frontier was not a happy one for Native Americans. We have all heard and read that the westward movement was made possible by a series of broken treaties and bloody encounters. But what about colonial days? Weren’t we taught in grade school about a peaceful “First Thanksgiving” between Native Americans and English colonists?

One point the author makes repeatedly is that the “Indian Wars” did not begin in the Wild West but right there in the beginning on the Atlantic Coast. From England’s invasion and subjugation of Ireland (that nightmare history) came the practice of scalping, with bounties paid and few if any questions asked about sex or age of the murdered and mutilated. Thus immigrant men without property in the colonies and new United States, organized into volunteer militias, might better themselves financially as scalping and land-taking practices accompanied immigration to the North America.

European justification for seizure of Native lands can be traced back to the 15th century, when the pope promulgated and clarified the Doctrine of Discovery, cited in 1792 by Thomas Jefferson and reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1823. According to this doctrine, which came to be enshrined in international law, “discoverers” of a land could claim it as territory for their own country, thus jumping the property rights claims of all other European countries. Prior inhabitants (called “First Nations” in Canada) were not considered to have any property rights in their own homeland. In their religion, land was too sacred to be bought and sold — and so they were sold out by invaders with a different set of values and customs.

Another theme Dunbar-Ortiz presents is the idea that “total war” — i.e., war fought not only between armies but waged against an entire population, with villages and crops burned and game slaughtered so that, facing starvation and “scorched earth,” no choice is left but to take to what was called, in the case of the Cherokees, the “Trail of Tears” — is nothing new to the U.S. military. Used first against Native Americans, it was national and military policy at the highest levels of American government, as the author demonstrates with quotations from governors, generals, and U.S. presidents. Military experience in dealing with Native Americans was subsequently taken overseas to the Philippines and, later, to Vietnam. The first U.S. invasion of Iraq was promised to bring speedy victory of U.S. forces over Iraqi “Indian country.” The phrase “Indian country” came from the Vietnam era but has come to be abbreviated as “In Country,” disguising the origins of the term designating “behind enemy lines,” the change, though at best only cosmetic, perhaps due in part to a protest from the National Congress of American Indians in 1991.

I’m refraining from incorporating very many quoted passages, but here’s one that encapsulates all the rest. The author writes that Dee Brown’s 1970 account of a 19th-century massacre, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, became a “surprise best seller,

so the name Wounded Knee resonated with a broad public by 1973. On the front page of one newspaper, editors placed two photographs side by side, each of a pile of bloody, mutilated bodies in a ditch. One was from My Lai in 1968, the other from the Wounded Knee army massacre of the Lakota in 1890. Had they not been captioned, it would have been impossible to tell the difference in time and place.  

- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

Dunbar-Ortiz, however, does more than bust myths and document genocide. Equally important to her story is Indigenous resistance and survival, from the beginning to modern times, including legal battles ongoing today. Here’s one that may surprise you:

…In the first land restitution to any Indigenous nation, President Richard M. Nixon signed into effect Public Law 91-550, which had been approved with bipartisan majorities in Congress [my amazed emphasis added]. President Nixon stated, “This is a bill that represents justice, because in 1906 an injustice was done, in which land involved in this bill — 48,000 acres — was taken from the Taos Pueblo Indians. The Congress of the United States now returns that land to whom it belongs.”

Yet today, even as I was working on this expanded version of my review of the Dunbar-Ortiz book (a shorter version was written for another publication), a young man from Leelanau County, Zhaabadiis Biidaasige, whom I knew when he was a little boy as Johnny Petoskey, was standing before the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous People, representing the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, Kitchiwikwedongsing Anishinaabak, and speaking to the issue of unfulfilled treaty promises made by the State of Michigan to the Anishnabe people. 

Survival. Resistance. Renewal.

A special edition for young people of this book is due for release in late July. How will the story be told there? And what do we want American children of any skin color or ethnic background to know about American history? How do we tell them the truth and still inculcate in them a love of their country? Perhaps that depends not only on how we teach about the past but even more on how we conduct ourselves in the present and into the future. 

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), paperback, 296 pages with index, $16

Allow Me to Recommend a Book For Your Consideration

I have never asked a bookseller for a book recommendation. Disclosing desires and expectations to a stranger whose only connection to me is, in abstract, the book, seems too much like Catholic confession, if only a more intellectualized version of it. Dear bookseller, I would like to read a novel about the banal pursuit of carnal desire, which ultimately brings unhappiness to the ones who pursue it, and to everyone else around them. A novel about a couple trying to rid themselves of each other, and at the same time trying to save the little tribe they have so carefully, lovingly, and painstakingly created. They are desperate and confused, dear bookseller; don’t judge them. I need a novel about two people who simply stop understanding each other…. 

- Valerie Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

As a bookseller myself, I am perhaps oddly cautious about recommending books. I absolutely never tell anyone they should or, worse — God forbid! must read something, but my reticence goes further than that. Even when directly asked for to make a recommendation, I counter gently with a general question of my own, such as, “What kind of books do you like to read?” Because there’s no point in recommending a tome on history or economics to someone looking for light fiction or vice versa. And I cannot think of a single book, no matter how extraordinarily wonderful, that would do as a recommendation for anyone and everyone. Often I’ll go so far as to say that I enjoyed or even loved a particular book and to suggest that the person looking for something to read might also enjoy or even love it because..., giving a few of my reasons, which might or not be reasons for that other person, but I never insist. There is no better way, I believe, to put someone off a book by trying to trap or shame them into reading it. Years ago, a man visiting my bookstore who learned I had not, at that time, yet read Kristin Lavransdatter told me, in these very words, actually (I kid you not!) shaking his finger as he scolded, “You should be ashamed of yourself!” Rather than rushing to mend this fault in my character, I avoided reading the book for years, seeing that horrible man’s scolding face whenever the title came up in conversation or a copy of the novel came, briefly, into my hands. 

No, no, there are books I wish more people would read, but I refuse to present reading them as a duty.

I will, however, if asked — and occasionally without being asked, as I do in today’s post — recommend a book for someone’s consideration on the basis of my own fascination with it. So if your interests and reading tastes and preferences are similar to mine, you might be moved to try it, and if it’s not up your alley at all, for whatever reason, you’ve saved time by finding that out, too. Although I’m not sure, now that I think about that…. Maybe if it sounds like something you wouldn’t care for, I’ve somehow misrepresented it? I certainly hope that won’t be the case today!

…We order four hamburgers and four pink lemonades and spread our map out on the table while we wait for the food. We follow yellow and red highway lines with the tips of our index fingers, like a troupe of gypsies reading an enormous open palm. We look into our past and future: a departure, a change, long life, short life, hard circumstances, here you will head south, here you will encounter doubt and uncertainty, a crossroads ahead.

Brief digression: Years ago I sat at a table in a bar with a group of other graduate students in philosophy, and one of the group, a student from another country (the young man from Spain or Otto from Finland?) asked innocently, of a song playing on the jukebox just then, what "City of New Orleans" was about. Well, ask eight philosophers what anything in this world is about and prepare yourself for a perfect storm of disputation! 

I think of that evening and the philosophical discussion that ensued because Lost Children Archive could be characterized in so many ways. In the most basic and simple sense, it is the story of a road trip, as a couple married for four years, his young son, and her even younger daughter set out on a cross-country road trip from New York to the American Southwest. They travel first in a southerly direction, then in South Carolina begin their westward trek. Their progress is unhurried, as they take time to sight-see along the way. In the car they listen to audiobooks and music but always remain attuned to towns and landscapes they are passing through, parts of the country they have never seen before. Road trip. That’s the simplest, shortest way to describe the book.

Of course, there’s much, much more to it.

Right at the beginning we learn that the man and woman share an unusual career. She is a sound “documentarian” (her word), he a “documentarist” (his word). Both record and assemble documentary soundscapes. They first met on a project in New York, where their assignment was to go about the city and record as many of the world’s spoken languages as they could find. The different names they give to what they do, however, indicate differences in both background experience and what kind of projects they want to take on in the future, differences that put their future as a couple in doubt. Will they remain together or part to go in different directions? That is one of the relationship questions posed by the novel.

At Chiricahua National Monument

Their travel destination is one the man has chosen for a new project he has conceived on “echoes” of the Apaches who lived in the Chiricahua Mountains in southeast Arizona, and the woman has realized that she can expand new work she began with immigrant children in New York to an exploration of the situation of undocumented children along the border with Mexico. In that way, their separate projects can be pursued in parallel, at least for a while, once the family reaches the Southwest. As they makes its way toward what they mistakenly believe to be Fort Still, Oklahoma — learning of their error only when they arrive, which seems strange, because wouldn’t they have seen it written as Fort Sill on their maps? Yet we often see what we expect to see rather than what is before our eyes — the woman begins to see a way in which the separate projects may actually overlap, at least for her. As the man tells the children about the Indian Removal Act,

I don’t interrupt his story to say so out loud, but the word “removal” is still used today as a euphemism for “deportation.” I read somewhere, though I don’t remember where, that removal is to deportation what sex is to rape. When an “illegal” immigrant is deported nowadays, he or she is, in written history, “removed.” I take my recorder from the glove compartment and start recording my husband, without him or anyone noticing. His stories are not directly linked to the piece I’m working on, but the more I listen to the stories he tells about this country’s past, the more it seems like he’s talking about the present. 

art on border wall at Douglas, AZ

And so, the novel is also about American history and American current events, Apache history, history of the Western frontier (and the myth of the frontier and the vanished frontier), about U.S.-Mexican history, the current situation on the border, immigration, and more. With makers of sound documentaries at its center, documents and documentation and archives form another general theme of the book, specific needed documents also being what the immigrant children, at risk of being “removed,” too often lack. And it is about what makes families and what holds them together. There are also two very specific "lost children," two girls, undocumented, that the woman has been asked by their mother to look for in New Mexico or Arizona. 

The main characters are referred to simply as “the man,” “the woman,” “the boy,” and “the girl” throughout the novel. We are never given their names. The woman tells the story -- thus we have more physical descriptions of the other three, more of the woman’s thoughts as they travel -- but we see and hear them all as they interact. The boy, ten years old, is learning to use a camera, undertaking his own documentation of their trip. The five-year-old girl, full of life, brings a fresh perspective to many moments. [Later note: Halfway through the book, the boy takes over for a while as narrator, and later still voices mingle, in ways and for reasons I leave you to discover for yourself.]

All this “about” talk, though, tells you nothing of the spellbinding narrator’s voice. Indeed, it tells you nothing of the spell cast by the the story of the trip itself, deepening with every mile as we learn more of what has brought these people to where they are and what propels them forward into their uncertain future, as we share their experiences along the road. 

For a reader without deep concerns about immigration or border security or lost children (though I ask myself, who could that reader possibly be?), Luiselli’s novel can/could be read for the innovative and yet somehow timeless beauty of the writing. That would be reading at the level of enjoyment. Deeper still, one can read the story (as I’m sure most will) for both its contemporary and historical context. 

Finally, then, a personal note, one that comes very early on in the novel:

Finally, one night, my husband spread the big map out on our bed and called the children and me into our room. He swiped the tip of his index finger from New York all the way down to Arizona, and then tapped twice on a point, a tiny dot in the southeastern corner of the state. He said:

Here. 

Here, what? the boy asked.

Here are the Chiricahua Mountains, he said.

And? the boy asked.

And that is the heart of Apacheria, he answered.

There it is, you see, for me. It all comes together for me, as it seems to be coming together (I am as yet not halfway through the novel) for the woman telling the story: the Chiricahuas (Echo Canyon), the Dos Cabezas, the Dragoons (Cochise Stronghold); Cochise and Geronimo and Lozen and U.S. policy with Native Americans from the beginning of our country's history; the U.S. border with Mexico; immigration and immigrants without documents and the lost immigrant children; where we’ve been as a nation, where we are now, and where we’re going; the sights and sounds and roads and small towns and big cities across this land. It’s all here. It’s all in this book.

north of border

south of border

You might want to think about reading Lost Children Archive. If you love it only half as much as I do, it will be well worth your time.

July 1 postscript: The only part of the book that really bothered me was reading about Cochise being buried at Fort Sill. He wasn't. His grave is not there and never was. Cochise died in Arizona and was buried somewhere in the Stronghold, by Apaches, in an unmarked grave. When the fictional family in the book is on the road, on their way west, they think they are going to Fort Still — they have the name wrong — and that took me aback, but it’s their mistake, and when they see the sign they realize their error, so I kept thinking they would correct the part about where Cochise was buried, too, but apparently the author is the one who misinformed her characters on that score. Did she visit Fort Sill? I’d say not. There is so much Apache history in the book, how did she miss the fact that Cochise died before Geronimo and the others were “relocated” by train to Florida? In biographical/historical terms, it’s a serious error. In literary terms, in terms of the length of a book’s life span, maybe it doesn’t matter quite as much. Who am I to say? Historians, as well as living descendants of Cochise today, cannot have the viewpoint of possible heirs of world literature centuries in the future — if civilization lasts that long.

The thing is, I haven't even begun to describe for you the lyrical beauty and the interweaving of life, literature, and documentation that make this book worth your consideration. Please give it a try!