HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: THE SEA IN WINTER

 

The Sea in Winter
By Christine Day (Upper Skagit)

Published by Heartdrum

Published in 2021

Reviewed by Jean Mendoza

Review Status: Highly Recommended

Back in September 2020, Debbie blogged about her positive reaction to reading the ARC of Christine Day's second novel for young people -- The Sea in Winter. Since then, the book has gotten positive critical attention, including a Kirkus starred review and School Library Journal "Best Book". Here, finally, is my "short and sweet" AICL review. 

The publisher, Heartdrum, says this about The Sea in Winter:

It’s been a hard year for Maisie Cannon, ever since she hurt her leg and could not keep up with her ballet training and auditions. Her blended family is loving and supportive, but Maisie knows that they just can’t understand how hopeless she feels.... Maisie is not excited for their family midwinter road trip along the coast, near the Makah community where her mother grew up. But soon, Maisie’s anxieties and dark moods start to hurt as much as the pain in her knee. How can she keep pretending to be strong when on the inside she feels as roiling and cold as the ocean?

Reason One to recommend The Sea in Winter: The sense of place. 

The author writes from the heart when she describes the story's setting. It's good to have a book about a contemporary middle schooler, that celebrates geoduck clams and the removal of the Elwha River dam. It's set in much the same part of the continent as a certain popular vampire-and-werewolf series, but Day's storytelling is noticeably more attuned to the landforms, the weather, the animals, the sea. 

Reason Two: Respect for advocacy and activism. 

Advocacy for social and environmental justice, and for Indigenous rights, are natural parts of family life in Maisie's world. For example, readers learn that her family has been directly affected by treaty rights to harvest shellfish, and removal of dams that kept salmon from spawning in local rivers. And conflict around the 1999 Makah whale hunt (the tribe's first effort to hold its traditional hunt in 70 years) forced an important decision for some of Maisie's Makah relatives. 

Reason Three: The protagonist's unique perspective. 

The Sea in Winter offers the young reader a window on the experience of a child with an unusual level of ambition. Most children Maisie's age haven't discovered an activity that inspires the kind of commitment she has to ballet. What is it like, at age 12, to have your entire life, including peer friendships, revolve around ballet, because you love it that much? Who else understands such dedication? And how do you cope, at age 12, when you face the loss of your beautiful dream? Is that what depression feels like?

Reason Four: Maisie's solid, loving Native family. 

Leo Tolstoy famously, or infamously, wrote, "All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Though Maisie's family faces some challenges, including Maisie's depression, they are fundamentally "happy" together -- affectionate, thoughtful, supportive, respectful of boundaries, and knowledgeable about their Native identities. But they're by no means ordinary, stereotypical, or indistinguishable from other fictional families that are doing essentially okay. The author makes them interesting, not merely quirky or weird, as individuals and as a unit. 

In short, I add my voice to the chorus of recommendations: Read and share The Sea in Winter with young people in your life!

COPPER MAGIC by Julia Mary Gibson, or, an emphatic "Cut it out!" from AICL

In Copper Magic, twelve-year-old Violet Blake is digging by a stream near her house in Michigan and finds a "talisman" -- a copper hand that she comes to call "the Hand." Violet feels that this hand has some kind of power. She thinks she can use it to make wishes come true. Course, her first wish (for a new dress) does come true (actually she gets TWO new dresses), so she's thinking about how she'll use it to get her mom and little brother back home. Her mother is half Odawa.

Well, it turns out there was more than just that copper hand in the spot where Violet was digging. There's also a skeleton there that is dug up (another kid finds it), reassembled, and displayed as a curiosity in a local hotel.

Cue some fake Hollywood Indian music...

Can't be messing around in them Indian burial grounds, right?! We've seen THAT enough times in movies and TV shows to know that messing with bones and artifacts means bad things are gonna happen. And of course, bad things happen to the people in Copper Magic. Lots of bad things. A wicked storm. Lake water behaving in odd ways. Death. Before all that happens, Mercy (Violet's new friend) talks about how there might be a curse on the grave... Violet and her mother (remember--her mom is half Odawa) have special powers, too. They can see things other people can't.

"Cut!"

Cut that fake Hollywood Indian music, that is, and an emphatic "Cut it out!" as my parents would say when I was doing something wrong.

Cut it out, Julia Mary Gibson! 

Cut it out, Susan Cooper! 

Cut it out, Rosanne Parry!

"Cut what?" you may wonder... Quit writing about Native spirituality! You mean well, but you don't know what you're doing. From a place of ignorance, you're adding to an already-too-tall pile of garbage that gets circulated as information about Native people.

A good many writers have a moment in their life that touched them in such a way that they feel they must write about Native people. Gibson's moment is described in her Afterword. When she was eleven years old, she and her family found some bones near their summer cottage in Michigan. "[A]n expert" said they were "most likely American Indian but not old enough to be archeologically significant" (p. 329), so her grandfather "pieced together a skeleton and mounted it on plywood." Her "superstitious" grandma didn't like it and insisted the bones be reburied. This took place in the late 1960s or early 1970s (my guess, based on Gibson's bio at Macmillan that says she was born "in the time of Freedom Rides and the Vietnam War").

Gibson goes on to say that her grandfather didn't know better.

In Copper Magic, Violet is Gibson. The person who puts the skeleton on display is Mr. Dell, a hotel owner intent on increasing his business. The superstitious person who wants the bones reburied? Well, that is Mrs. Agosa, an Odawa woman who tells Violet to "Watch out for ghosts out by you" because "mad ghosts can throw out curses" (p. 134).

Gibson, Cooper, Parry and many other writers poke around a bit and pack their stories with bits of info that make it sound like they know a lot about American Indians. Gibson does that in Copper Magic when she has some of her characters talk about grave robbing and why it is wrong. She also does that when she has Mrs. Agosa talk about the hotel owner burning her people's village and orchards because he wanted their land. In the Afterword, Gibson tells us that part of the story is true (p. 330):

"The real people of the Chaboiganing Band were yanked from their houses by a crooked land grabber and the local sheriff, who flung kerosene over homes and orchards and burned down the whole village, just as Mrs. Agosa tells it."

The burning of that village is important information. It is what major publishers like Macmillan (publisher of Copper Magic) ought to make known. I wish Gibson had made it the heart of her story. Instead, she chose to tell a story about grave robbing, curses, and mystical Indians. There's more to the "mystical Indians" theme... Interspersed throughout Copper Magic are pages about two ancient women: Crooked Woman and Greenstone. Those parts of Gibson's novel are presented in italics. They feed the mainstream monster of stereotypical expectations--where people love to read about "mystical Indians" and our tragic history.

In Copper Magic, Violet's dad is a steady voice saying that Indian graves deserve respect and ought to be left alone. Violet parrots some of what he says but doesn't really understand. Ironically, Gibson is more like Violet than she realizes. Her understanding is superficial. Violet wants to use the hand to get what she wants. Gibson uses the childhood story to do what she wants.

As you may have guessed by now, I don't like what Gibson has done in Copper Magic. And of course, I do not recommend it. Copper Magic is another FAIL from a major publisher (published in 2014 by Starscape, which is in Macmillan's Tor/Forge line.)

Patricia Riley's GROWING UP NATIVE AMERICAN

Today (November 1st, the first day of American Indian Heritage Month), I'd like to introduce you to Patricia Riley's Growing Up Native American. The subtitle is Stories of oppression and survival, of heritage denied and reclaimed--22 American writers recall childhood in their native land. 

Published in 1993, it is an excellent volume for teachers who are using the writings of any of the 22 writers in the book. You'll find short stories, and excerpts from longer works, too, from Native writers I've written about on AICL and elsewhere. Eric Gansworth is one example. The anthology includes his short story, "The Ballad of Plastic Fred." I looked around the Internet. This is close to what Gansworth describes as Plastic Fred:

Just a few days ago, I received Gansworth's YA novel, If I Ever Get Out of Here. I'm working on a review of it and will post it soon. Some of the stories, like the excerpt by Francis La Flesche, are from autobiographies. His The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe is set in the 1800s at the Presbyterian mission school in Nebraska. Simon Ortiz's story, "The Language We Knew," is about his childhood at Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico.

Here's the Table of Contents:

GOING FORWARD, LOOKING BACK
"The Language We Know" by Simon Ortiz
"The Warriors" by Anna Lee Walters

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
From Waterlily by Ella Cara Deloria
From Life Among the Piutes by Sara Winnemucca Hopkins
"Ni-Bo-Wi-Se-Gwe" by Ignatia Broker
"Wasichus in the Hills" by Black Elk as told to John G. Neihardt
"At Last I Kill a Buffalo" by Luther Standing Bear

SCHOOLDAYS
From The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe, by Francis La Flesche
From Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions by Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes
From Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
"A Day in the Life of Spanish" by Basil Johnston

TWENTIETH CENTURY
From Sundown by John Joseph Mathews
From Mean Spirit by Linda Hogan
From The Names: A Memoir by N. Scott Momaday
"Notes of a Translator's Son" by Joseph Bruchac
"Turbulent Childhood" by Lee Maracle
"The Talking That Trees Does" by Geary Hobson
"Water Witch" by Louis Owens
"Grace" by Vicki L. Sears
"Uncle Tony's Goat" by Leslie Marmon Silko
From Yellow Raft In Blue Water by Michael Dorris
"The Ballad of Plastic Fred" by Eric L. Gansworth

Teachers can select a story to use based on the age and reading level of their students. Some will work for middle school students. And... don't confine your use of Native literature to November! Teach it, and read it, all year long.

2010: Best Books Recommended for Middle School

If I was starting a library in a middle school, these are the first ten books I'd buy.  In reading these books, students would be reading stories Native writers create about Native people and places.  The books I list here include fiction, historical fiction, and poetry. 

• Bruchac, Joseph. Hidden Roots. Update on Sep 30 2023: I (Debbie Reese) no longer recommend Bruchac's work. For details see Is Joseph Bruchac truly Abenaki?
• Carvell, Marlene. Who Will Tell My Brother?
• Dorris, Michael. Sees Behind Trees.
• Erdrich, Louise. The Birchbark House
• Loyie, Larry. As Long as the Rivers Flow: A Last Summer before Residential School
• Ortiz, Simon. The People Shall Continue
• Smith, Cynthia Leitich. Indian Shoes
• Smith, Cynthia Leitich. Rain Is Not My Indian Name
• Sneve, Virginia Driving Hawk. High Elk's Treasure
• Sterling, Shirley. My Name is Seepeetza

For annotations, see my Native Voices article in School Library Journal.

Update: Jan 7, 2012
Though she is not Native, Debby Dahl Edwardson has lived her adult life with her husband in his Inupiaq village in Alaska. Her commitment to Native lives and story is not abstract or romantic. Add her book, My Name is Not Easy to this list of must-have books for middle grade students.

See also:
Top Ten Books Recommended for High School
Top Ten Books Recommended for Elementary School

Download a pdf with all three lists:
Selecting Children's and Young Adult Literature about American Indians

Documentary: WAY OF THE WARRIOR

A documentary produced by Patty Loew, a colleague at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will be broadcast in the coming weeks on PBS. Titled Way of the Warrior, the documentary is about American Indians in the armed services.

The article about the documentary includes an excerpt, and a photograph and image of a diary (shown here) kept by Loew's grandfather, Pvt. Edward DeNomie. He served in the military during a period when American Indians did not have the right to vote.

There is much to learn about American Indians in the US armed forces. I'm looking forward to viewing this film, and it seems an important one for US history teachers.

To read the article and view the excerpt, click here:
Professor's film on Native American soldiers to air on PBS.
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Margaret Craven's I HEARD THE OWL CALL MY NAME

[This review used here by permission of its author, Beverly Slapin. It may not be published elsewhere without her written permission. You may link to it from another site, but cannot paste the entire review on your site.]

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Craven, Margaret, I Heard the Owl Call My Name. New York: Doubleday (1973). 159 pages; grades 7-up; Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl)

It is possible for an author to put down, in truth and beauty, the lives of a people not her own. Such authors are few and far between. Margaret Craven is one of them.

Mark Brian is a young vicar, dying but not knowing it, assigned to minister to the bishop's “hardest parish,” the Kwakiutl village of Quee (“inside place”), which the whites call Kingcome. He encounters a place of incomparable beauty and a people of ancient tradition and ceremony, of prefabricated houses and an alien­ated younger gen­eration. In this place, and from these people, he learns of living and dying, of compas­sion and commitment.

Writing in the third person, Craven clearly and with great good humor sympathizes with the villagers. She describes how they take revenge on the intruders by serving them mashed turnips, and how they “cautiously confabulate” about the newcomer's “looks, his manners, even his clean fingernails.” “He will be no good at hunting and fish­ing,” Jim tells Chief Eddy.

He knows little of boats. All the time he says we. “Shall we have dinner now? Shall we tie up here?” Pretty soon he will say, “Shall we build a new vicarage?” He will say we and he will mean us.

Craven has the handful of white characters doing and saying things that will have (at least) Indian readers chuckling. Such as the British anthropologist who insists on calling the people “Quackadoodles.” “For the past century in England,” she argues, “this band has been known as the Quackadoodles and as the Quackadoodles, it will be known forever.” And there is the teacher:

This was the teacher's second year in the village. He did not like the Indians and they did not like him.... The teacher had come to the village solely for the isolation pay which would permit him a year in Greece studying the civilization he adored.

Craven's writing is spare, simple, and beautiful, with understanding and compassion. Here, the swimmer, having laid her eggs, meets her end:

They moved again and saw the end of the swimmer. They watched her last valiant fight for life, her struggle to right herself when the gentle stream turned her, and they watched the water force open her gills and draw her slowly downstream, tail first, as she had started to the sea as a fingerling.

After Mark has died, and the villagers have laid him to rest, she writes:

Past the village flowed the river, like time, like life itself, waiting for the swimmer to come again on his way to the climax of his adventurous life, and to the end for which he had been made. Wa Laum. That is all.

I Heard the Owl Call My Name is a book of great beauty that can teach much, without polemic, for those who will listen.

—Beverly Slapin

Update on Sep 30 2023: I (Debbie Reese) no longer recommend Bruchac's work. For details see Is Joseph Bruchac truly Abenaki?

Joseph Bruchac's Wabi

[Note: This review used with permission of its author, Beverly Slapin, and may not be published elsewhere without Slapin's written permission. Wabi is available from Oyate. ]

Bruchac, Joseph (Abenaki), Wabi. Dial, 2006. 198 pages, grades 5-up.

If you’ve been raised as an owl (even if you find out later that you’re also a human), there’s one thing you need to know: “If you don’t hop off the branch, you’ll never catch anything.” That’s what Wabi finds out from the wisdom of his great-grandmother, who is also a shape-changer. And hop off the branch Wabi does, into the adventure of his life.

As Wabi watches and listens to the people in the village below, he learns what it is to be human. But in his quest to find out who he is and where he belongs, his way of seeing the world remains delightfully ornithno-centric: “If you can hear the deliciously terrified heartbeat of a mouse hiding in the grass far below your treetop perch, it is not at all difficult to make out a human conversation within a nearby wigwam.”

Wabi is at first perplexed by the humans: their physical makeup, with fingers instead of talons and legs that bend forward instead of backward; their homes, built like upside-down nests; their eating habits that eschew “delicious-looking chipmunks” and “yummy and crunchy” baby crows; and their etiquette, which precludes the presenting of one’s beloved with a live rodent.

With Abenaki words sprinkled throughout the narrative and elements from traditional Abenaki tales—and the great Tao interpreter Chuang Tsu—seamlessly woven into the story, Wabi rescues a wolf cub who becomes his devoted companion, falls in love with a human girl, and engages in mortal combat with monsters intent on destroying their world. The sometimes gruesome encounters will resonate with middle readers, as will Wabi’s wry observations (“It is very easy to locate a large, bloodthirsty creature when it attempts to tear out your throat”).

Bruchac’s considerable talents shine through Wabi’s story; There’s not a single wasted scene in this expertly crafted thriller.—Beverly Slapin

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Tim Tingle's Spirits Dark and Light: Supernatural Tales from the Five Civilized Tribes

[Note: This review used with permission by its author, Beverly Slapin, and may not be published elsewhere without her written consent.]

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Tingle, Tim (Choctaw), Spirits Dark and Light: Supernatural Tales from the Five Civilized Tribes. August House, 2006. 192 pages, grades 5-up; Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole

“You might see yellow knots on a floating backwater log,” Tingle cautions. “Better not reach for it, it might have teeth. Maybe it looks like a pile of leaves lying on the ground. Better not step on it, it might have fangs. Maybe it seems like a bunch of moss hanging from a tree limb. Better not touch it, it might have claws.” It might be Naloosa Falaya.

In Spirits Dark and Light, Tingle seamlessly weaves elements from traditional stories of the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole peoples into tellings that are eerie, gruesome, frightening, poignant—and just plain satisfying. In these stories in which the world of the spirits and the natural world come together, terrible witches and conjurers stalk the careless, the dead offer advice to the living, greed is properly punished, and heroism takes many forms.

Sometimes lessons are directly stated; sometimes they are inferred; sometimes a reader will have to look pretty hard to find them. And sometimes, as Tingle tells the reader, there may not be any. “Now I am not claiming this tale to have any moral attached to it,” he says. “But if it did, it might be this: if you pull a sticker burr out of your foot, a hard sticker burr that hurts bad, once you get that sticker burr out, don’t turn right around and poke it back in.”

Tingle is a master storyteller; his flow and timing are superb. Young readers will feel like he’s talking directly to them. The stories in Spirits Dark and Light are wonderful for reading aloud at a campfire or in a darkened room.—Beverly Slapin

Pamela Porter's Sky

[This review used by permission of its author, Beverly Slapin. It may not be published elsewhere without her written permission.]

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Porter, Pamela, Sky, illustrated by Mary Jane Gerber. Groundwood, 2004. 83 pages, b/w illustrations, grades 4-6

It is 1964. Eleven-year-old Georgia Salois lives with her Paw Paw and Gramma, “high in the scrub pines” on the edge of the Blackfeet reservation in northern Montana. Suddenly, on March 26, violent rainstorms overflow Birch Creek, destroying the Swift Dam and killing a number of people. The devastating floods take everything—the house, the barn, the livestock; nothing is left except the clothes on their backs, the washtub, a few blankets.

And—miraculously—a foal, whom Georgia names Sky.

Told in Georgia’s honest, open, child voice, the survival of her family and community becomes real. There is no complaining, no asking why; they accept what has happened and move on, rebuild. Georgia’s relationship with her grandparents, the economy of subsistence, the racism they encounter—all of it is real, told in Georgia’s matter-of-fact voice.

“The sheriff led us into the gym where the people who weren’t Indian were lying on cots with pillows and blankets on them,” she says. Unlike the white people who are fed for free, they are charged for the food and charged again for use of the plates and utensils, so “none of us at the Indian table even tried going back for seconds.”

Sky is based on the stories told to the author by her friend Georgia Salois. It is highly unusual for a non-Native author of children’s books to refrain from the need to “teach” something about Indians. Porter is highly unusual. It isn’t until page 58 that Georgia even mentions that she is Cree, and that is as it should be. And Georgia’s dialect—which Porter gets right, too—is engaging. —Beverly Slapin

Marlene Carvell's Sweetgrass Basket

[This review is by Beverly Slapin and used with her permission. It may not be published elsewhere without her written permission.]

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Carvell, Marlene, Sweetgrass Basket. Dutton, 2005. 243 pages; grades 5-up (Mohawk)

Sweetgrass Basket is a young adult novel, told in the alternating voices of two young Mohawk sisters attending the now-notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the early 1900s. Unlike most young adult novels by cultural outsiders, Sweetgrass Basket contains no self-conscious “anthropological asides” to explain to readers what the writer assumes to be important details of an “other” culture. Rather, it’s a wrenchingly beautiful story of two sisters trying to keep themselves together in an atmosphere that fosters only hate and shame. But amidst all the abuse, the children resist the value system being foisted on them, sometimes with great good humor. “I must say,” the older sister Mattie says to Sarah about the hated Mrs. Dwyer, “‘that I hope she steps in a hole and is swallowed by the earth.’ Suddenly Sarah’s eyes brighten and a smile spreads across her face. ‘Mattie, how dreadful,’ she says in mock horror. ‘What a terrible thing to do to Mother Earth.’” The ending is a surprise that’s not really a surprise. Children died at Carlisle, in front of cold, hard white people who didn’t give a damn.

Carvell’s husband’s great-aunt Margaret, who attended Carlisle, was the inspiration for Sweetgrass Basket. Ordinarily, information like this would be enough for me to roll my eyes and close the book, at least for a while. But, as in Carvell’s earlier novel, who will tell my brother?, she really did her homework, and she’s a wonderful writer. I imagine Aunt Margaret is pleased as well.

—Beverly Slapin