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[Ya-ta Boy]

Last month I decided to get caught up on my American Indian Lit reading so I went online and ordered some books. One of them was "Wild Indians & Other Creatures" by Adrian C. Louis. I'm about half-way through the collection of short stories. I would be finished but I spend about half my time laughing too hard. These stories are terrific. Some of them are about Coyote: "Five months later, toward the end of summer, Coyote heard a noise and peered up over the sagebrush where he had been snoozing in the wilting heat ever since Wanda kicked him out of the house for flirting with the dogcatchers." (The opening sentence in "Why Coyote Knotted His Whanger".)

Others are about Bobo and his friend Paulie. My favorite is "Bobo Murders Mickey Mouse" and is about a bad day of hunting on the rez. "...And to add insult to injury, after they had thrown the carcass into the bed of the truck, it had miraculously come back to life. Some of these damn coyotes on the Rez had more lives than a cat.

'Bobo was driving, as usual, and for some unknown reason Paulie turned his head around to look out the back window. When Paulie peered through the glass , he found he was face to face with a slobbering, grinning coyote. Not knowing what else to do, Paulie panicked and screamed. Bobo was so startled that he followed suit and screamed too, but not before he levitated from the seat and boinged his head a good one on the truck's ceiling. What's worse was he soiled his shorts--Paulie's screaming had startled him that badly."

Louis is a half-blood Paiute who teaches at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation (in South Dakota...which explains why he writes so much about the Sioux). He also wrote "Skins" which was made into a movie with Graham Greene and Eric Schweig. That novel is about brothers. One passage struck me because someone here at Dave's yelled at me about using the term 'Indian'. :

"Are you part Indian?" Rudy asked him.
"Tsalagi," he said.
"Salami?"
"No, damn it. Tsalagi."
"What's that?"
"Cherokee. I am a Native American."
"Indeed," Rudy said, and concentrated on a boil on his inner thigh that was almost ready to come to a head. Otherwise, he might have burst out laughing in Trudeau's face. He'd never met a 'Native American' before. He'd met Indians, skins, dog-eaters, sheep-*uckers, rabbit-chokers, Apaches, Arapahos, Cheyennes, Crows, Shoshones, Comanches, and several tough son of a *itch Paiutes, but he'd never met a skin who called himself a 'Native American."

I've also read "Indian Killer" (a serial killer in the Northwest) and have just started "Reservation Blues" about what happens when Robert Johnson meets Thomas Builds-A-Fire at the crossroads on the Spokane reservation. It's starting out terrific. Both are by Sherman Alexie. I've got a collection of his short stories "The Toughest Indian in the World" coming up. His "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" was not available when I ordered, but I'll be trying again to get it.

The third writer I bought was James Welch. I enjoyed "Fools Crow" about Blackfeet around 1870. It was pretty good, but the plotting wasn't as good as it could have been. Haven't started "The Heartsong of Charging Elk", a true story of a Sioux who got left behind in France by Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

I also read "My Life as an Indian" by J. W. Schultz. He is a white guy who married a Blackfoot woman in the 1870's and lived with the tribe as they transitioned from freedom to reservation life. It's a sort of semi-autobiography full of wonderful stories he heard around the campfires. If the stories aren't true, they should be. My favorite was a kind of Blackfoot Romeo and Juliet story.

If anyone has any recommendations to make for other Indian writers, I'd be glad to hear them.

[mole]

This may be way out-of-line.
But I've enjoyed many Tony Hillerman novels.

[Ya-ta Boy]

Not out of line at all. I really enjoy those. Did you know that some of them have been made into TV mini-series. They are shown on PBS. I think Graham Greene and Adam Beach are in them. I've never seen any, but would love to.

[bluelake]

Look up books by Simon Otto. He's a member of my tribe (Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians), and is a great storyteller.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books&field-author-exact=Simon%20Otto&rank=-relevance,+availability,-daterank/104-8612277-1411145

T

[VanIslander]

Too bad if you didn't hear Tom King's Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour, a CBC radio comedy show that went four seasons. "Jasper" was the best. I tuned in eagerly for each installment. Funny stuff. One of my favourite lines: "What do you do when you are not busy being famous?" (You have to be there, so to speak, in the context)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_King

I wonder if the episodes are packaged and for sale.

[merlot]

Yes, Sherman Alexie is an awesome writer/movie maker. I read many of his short stories and and poems; Tonto Fights the Lone Ranger in Heaven comes to mind, but I still haven't seen Smoke Signals. Maybe I'll do a torent search right now...

[seoulkitchen]

[bluelake]

One book I forgot to mention and definitely shouldn't have is The Indians of Hungry Hollow, by Bill Dunlop. It is the true story of Indians growing up in my hometown during the Depression.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0472111159/sr=1-1/qid=1150616066/ref=sr_1_1/002-3900186-5293610?%5Fencoding=UTF8&s=books


T

[Poemer]

Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King

Bearheart by Gerald Vizenor

both excellent reads and highly recommended for those interested in trickster motifs in native american literature

[Ya-ta Boy]

Thanks for the recommendations, folks.