A Slice of the Indigenous Literary Scene https://ift.tt/6J27Xuo
I grew up in Texas in the Hill Country / South Texas regions on the unceded land of the Comanche and the Lipan Apache. Growing up in a Texan public school system did little to teach me about these tribes and their history. I don’t imagine this is a terribly uncommon experience in settler nations. We were taught abstractly that Indigenous people lived in the U.S. today but were not taught about what Indigeneity looked like. They did not teach us, for instance, that Texas only has three federally recognized tribes (the Alabama-Coushatta, the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe, and the Ysleta Del Ser Pueblo), all of which are were subject to forced relocation or migration (from Tennessee, Great Lakes, and New Mexico respectively). Despite the fact there are only three federally recognized tribes, there are thirty-five self-identifying tribes in Texas and, as of 2009, one state-recognized tribe: The Lipan Apache Tribe, based out of McAllen, Texas, on the border. They also did not explain to us the concept of Chicanx Indigeneity, Latinx Indigeneity, Mexican Indigeneity, mestizaje, the Black Seminoles, or any other intersecting identities born out of colonial contact between settlers, enslaved folkx, and other immigrants. And so, for a very long time, Texas and the greater South seemed to me to be a place that Indigenous people had long since left. I, of course, came to realize that this is very much not the case, but it did lead me to want to explore what kinds of literature are being produced today by Indigenous writers from the U.S. South or explore what Indigeneity looks like today in this region.
Below you can find two kinds of texts: one by Indigenous authors living in or writing about life in the U.S. South and another by authors who, perhaps, have complicated relationships with Indigeneity, having grown up in places where the lines between Indigenous and not Indigenous were blurry, do not claim an Indigenous identity but write about that complicated relationship nevertheless. For those with Tribal affiliations, I’ve listed them, but, as I suggested above, not all tribes are or want to be federally recognized and therefore do not claim a formal affiliation. Lastly, I’ll add that this list is not all-inclusive. Rather, it is a small slice of a few books (and one show!) of a large and thriving Indigenous literary scene.
Note: All descriptions are taken from the publishers, author’s websites, or Bookshop. Some entries have been edited for clarity and length.
Short Story Collections
Never Whistle at Night
By Shane Hawk (Cheyenne-Arapaho/Hidatsa/Potawatomi) and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (Mackinac Bands of Chippewa/Ottawa)
Many Indigenous people believe that one should never whistle at night. This belief takes many forms: for instance, Native Hawaiians believe it summons the Hukai’po, the spirits of ancient warriors, and Native Mexicans say it calls Lechuza, a witch that can transform into an owl. But what all these legends hold in common is the certainty that whistling at night can cause evil spirits to appear — and even follow you home.
These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce readers to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples’ survival and imagination and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.
Under the shadow of gray clouds, three children venture into the woods, where they spot the corpse of an old man on a scaffold. Suddenly a wild figure emerges, with long fingernails and tangled hair. It is the Hattak fullih nipi foni, the bone picker, who comes to tear off rotting flesh with his fingernails. Only the Choctaws who adhere to the old ways will speak of him.
The frightening bone picker is just one of many entities, scary and mysterious, who lurk behind every page of this spine-tingling collection of Native fiction written by award-winning Choctaw author Devon A. Mihesuah. Choctaw lore features a large pantheon of deities. These beings created the first people, taught them how to hunt, and warned them of impending danger. Their stories are not meant simply to entertain: each entity has a purpose in its behavior and a lesson to share — to those who take heed.
A short story collection of nightmares, dreams, desires, and visions focused on the Chicana experience. V. Castro weaves urban legend, folklore, life experience, and heartache in this personal journey beginning in south Texas: a bar where a devil dances the night away; a street fight in a neighborhood that may not have been a fight after all; a vengeful chola at the beginning of the apocalypse; mind swapping in the not so far future; satan who falls and finds herself in a brothel in Amsterdam; the keys to Mictlan given to a woman after she dies during a pandemic. The collection finishes with two longer tales: “The Final Porn Star” is a twist on the final girl trope and slasher, with a creature from Mexican folklore; and “Truck Stop” is an erotic horror romance with two hearts: a video store and a truck stop.
1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas town driven by oil and cotton — and a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge. Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in and shared sense of unfairness of being on the outside through the slasher horror Jones loves, but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this summer teen movie of a novel gone full blood-curdling tragic.
In the fifteen years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer’s in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude, punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. And their son, Edgar, fled home long ago, turning to drugs to mute his feelings of alienation.
With the family’s annual bonfire approaching — an occasion marking both the Cherokee National Holiday and Ray-Ray’s death — Maria attempts to call the family together once more. But as the reunion draws near, each of them feels a strange blurring of the boundary between normal life and the spirit world.
Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of Justine — a mixed-blood Cherokee woman — and her daughter, Reney, as they move from Eastern Oklahoma’s Indian Country in the hopes of starting a new, more stable life in Texas amid the oil bust of the 1980s. However, life in Texas isn’t easy, and Reney feels unmoored from her family in Indian Country. Against the vivid backdrop of the Red River, we see their struggle to survive in a world — of unreliable men and near-Biblical natural forces, like wildfires and tornados — intent on stripping away their connections to one another and their very ideas of home.
I did not kill my brother. I did quite the opposite, really. It’s the year 2052. Stevie Henry is a Cherokee girl working at a museum in Texas, trying to save up enough money to go to college. The world around her is in a cycle of drought and superstorms, ice and fire … but people get by. But it’s about to get a whole lot worse. When a mysterious boy shows up at Stevie’s museum saying that he’s from the future — and telling her what is to come — she refuses to believe him. But soon, she will have no choice.
Anna Horn is always looking over her shoulder. For the bullies who torment her, for the entitled visitors at the reservation’s casino… and for the nameless, disembodied entity that stalks her every step — an ancient tribal myth come to life, one that’s intent on devouring her whole.
With strange and sinister happenings occurring around the casino, Anna starts to suspect that not all the horrors on the reservation are old. As girls begin to go missing and the tribe scrambles to find answers, Anna struggles with her place on the rez, desperately searching for the key she’s sure lies in the legends of her tribe’s past.
When Anna’s own little sister also disappears, she’ll do anything to bring Grace home. But the demons plaguing the reservation — both ancient and new — are strong, and sometimes, it’s the stories that never get told that are the most important.
Part gripping thriller and part mythological horror, author Nick Medina spins an incisive and timely novel of life as an outcast, the cost of forgetting tradition, and the courage it takes to become who you were always meant to be.
Elatsoe
By Darcie Little Badger (Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas)
Elatsoe — Ellie for short — lives in an alternate contemporary America shaped by the ancestral magics and knowledge of its Indigenous and immigrant groups. She can raise the spirits of dead animals — most importantly, her ghost dog Kirby. When her beloved cousin dies, all signs point to a car crash, but his ghost tells her otherwise: He was murdered. Who killed him and how did he die?
With the help of her family, her best friend Jay, and the memory great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother, Elatsoe must track down the killer and unravel the mystery of this creepy town and its dark past. But will the nefarious townsfolk and a mysterious Doctor stop her before she gets started?
Nina is a Lipan girl in our world. She’s always felt there was something more out there. She still believes in the old stories. Oli is a cottonmouth kid, from the land of spirits and monsters. Like all cottonmouths, he’s been cast from home. He’s found a new one on the banks of the bottomless lake.
Nina and Oli have no idea the other exists. But a catastrophic event on Earth, and a strange sickness that befalls Oli’s best friend, will drive their worlds together in ways they haven’t been in centuries. And there are some who will kill to keep them apart.
A Snake Falls to Earth is a breathtaking work of Indigenous futurism. Darcie Little Badger draws on traditional Lipan Apache storytelling structure to weave another unforgettable tale of monsters, magic, and family. It is not to be missed.
Alejandra no longer knows who she is. To her husband, she is a wife, and to her children, a mother. To her own adoptive mother, she is a daughter. But they cannot see who Alejandra has become: a woman struggling with a darkness that threatens to consume her. Nor can they see what Alejandra sees. In times of despair, a ghostly vision appears to her, the apparition of a crying woman in a ragged white gown. When Alejandra visits a therapist, she begins exploring her family’s history, starting with the biological mother she never knew. As she goes deeper into the lives of the women in her family, she learns that heartbreak and tragedy are not the only things she has in common with her ancestors. Because the crying woman was with them, too. She is La Llorona, the vengeful and murderous mother of Mexican legend. And she will not leave until Alejandra follows her mother, her grandmother, and all the women who came before her into the darkness. But Alejandra has inherited more than just pain. She has inherited the strength and the courage of her foremothers — and she will have to summon everything they have given her to banish La Llorona forever.
Welcome to Galveston, Texas. Population 50,241. Carly Castillo has only ever known Galveston. Her grandmother Magdalena claims that they descend from the Karankawas, an extinct indigenous Texan tribe, thereby tethering them to the land. Meanwhile, her boyfriend and all-star shortstop-turned-seaman, Jess, treasures the salty, familiar air. He’s gotten chances to leave for bigger cities, but he didn’t take them then, and he sure as hell won’t now. When word spreads of a storm gathering strength offshore known as Hurricane Ike, each Galveston resident must make a difficult decision: board up the windows and hunker down or flee inland and abandon their hard-won homes.
Moving through the extraordinary lives of these characters and the many individuals who circle them, The Last Karankawas weaves together a multitude of voices to present a lyrical, emotionally charged portrait of everyday survival. The result is an unforgettable exploration of familial inheritance, human resilience, and the histories we assign to ourselves.
A parallel universe. South Texas. A third border wall might be erected between the United States and Mexico, narcotics are legal, and there’s a new contraband on the market: filtered animals — species of animals brought back from extinction to amuse the very wealthy.
Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long enough to know to keep quiet and avoid the dangerous syndicates who make their money through trafficking. But his simple life gets complicated after a swashbuckling journalist invites him to an underground dinner at which filtered animals are served. Bellacosa soon finds himself in the middle of an increasingly perilous and surreal journey, in the course of which he encounters legends of the long-disappeared Aranaña Indian tribe and their object of worship: the mysterious Trufflepig, said to possess strange powers.
Television Series
Reservation Dogs
Sterlin Harjo (Seminole Nation of Oklahoma), Taika Waititi (Maori), Blackhorse Lowe (Navajo Nation), Bobby Wilson (Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota), Sydney Freeland (Navajo)
Following the exploits of four Indigenous teenagers in rural Oklahoma who steal, rob, and save in order to get to the exotic, mysterious, and faraway land of California. To succeed, they will have to save enough money, outmaneuver the methheads at the junkyard on the edge of town, and survive a turf war against a much tougher rival gang. This first-of-its-kind creative team tells a story that resonates with them and their lived experiences — and invites audiences into a surprisingly familiar and funny world.
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