Review and Interview: Hutton, The Apache Wars. American Book Awards Announced.

Review: Paul Andrew Hutton. The Apache Wars. The Apache Wars. The Hunt For Geronimo, The Apache Kid, And The Captive Boy Who Started The Longest War In American History.
NY: Crown, 2016.  ISBN: 9780770435813

Michael Sedano

Paul Andrew Hutton in his backyard

Watching the seven and half minute video  (click here) of Standing Rock Sioux versus the mega pipeline you’ve never heard of, sets off a strong sense of historic reocurrence. Cast as protestors when they defend their land, the caravan drives up to a checkpoint. They are armed only with their volition and indignation. They deliver themselves willingly into the maw of the lumbering beast. Inevitably to be arrested, they’ll view from jail cells as earth-moving machines gouge a pipeline’s path scross Indian land.

It’s a modern-day view of what those final years of the Apacheria looked like at the end of the longest war fought on US soil. The video sent my thoughts to comparable history accounted in Paul Andrew Hutton’s The Apache Wars, such as when Geronimo agrees to a meeting with the pursuing cavalry.

Arizona rural big cities bespeak the standards of the robustly acquisitive English-speaking culture. A prolonged war with the Apacheria is winding down in favor of the United States. Northern Mexico remains vastly unpopulated. In Arizona and New Mexico, people are laying claims and parceling government land into ranches and farms. Indian reservations, into a second generation, have emerged as internal colonies, administered by Indian Agents and the U.S. Army, with meetings and commerce between the occupying government and the Indians normalized.

When Geronimo, who has gone AWOL from his reservation, agrees to meeting the leader of an opposing force, he’s used to collaborative exchanges with US forces. The forces meet the Animas Valley of New Mexico. Saying “Geronimo meets” is wild synecdoche. He’s not alone.

Eight warriors, twenty-two women and children travel with their leader. The band has captured a hundred horses and more cattle on the other side of the US-Mexico border. A reader’s visual cortex goes into high gear, imagining the scene of orderly rows of tents and armed men in company formation. La palomilla of mounted warriors accompanied by wives and children and several hundred head of livestock filter into the terrain. Following a river, drawn to the campfire smoke, guided by indian scouts who are U.S. soldiers, Geronimo and his families wend their way to the meeting point, thirty souls stepping willingly into the dragon’s mouth and all those soldiers.

From there, the Army leader, one Lt. Britton Davis, wants Geronimo to speed the march back to the San Carlos reserve by shedding the livestock. Davis warns the indian that the Mexican rancheros would come looking for their ganado, and the Army and Geronimo would have a bloody time of it. Davis’ orders were to protect Geronimo from any attack or threat.

Geronimo laughs off the fear appeal. It’s a colorful exchange that underlines the political dynamic and cultural flux coming into being in the region, and is a hallmark of an arrestingly captivating book.

“Mexican! My squaws can whip all the Mexicans in Chihuahua,” he exclaimed. “We don’t fight Mexicans with cartridges,” he noted with contempt. “Cartridges cost too much. We keep them to fight your white soldiers. We fight Mexicans with rocks.”    336

The moment of swashbuckling should give a reader pause, in a history. Such is the stuff of fiction, or highly creative non-fiction. Interesting as the moment appears, it's fact. Hutton cites three sources for the quotation. An article by Lt. Davis from the Army and Navy Journal published in 1885, and two third party resources, a memoir from the period, and a 1976 biography.

Hutton doesn’t make a point of it, but in an interview, the author declares the Apaches spoke Spanish, and many spoke bilingual in native Apache language and Spanish. Lt. Davis is a fluent Spanish-speaker. Some readers will be disappointed Hutton couldn’t share more details on the linguistic situation. The key anglo character in the history is a kidnaped white boy adopted into his captor tribe. He becomes a native Apache language speaker whose rudimentary English and good Spanish make him an interpreter and a Sergeant Major—the highest enlisted rank, a patriarch in an Army unit.

Geronimo and the pantheon of Apache leaders make up the book's most interesting characters. That captured-at-eleven half-Irish half-Mexican Apache joins with the US Army. He becomes an indian scout, the government's indian police force, skilled in hunting down and fighting  Indians unhappy enough to leave the confines of reservation land.

The role of indian scouts make interesting speculation as to their motives. In fact, some readers would welcome investigations on the psychology of the indian scouts, vendidos with a vengeance. But then, such an investigation might be a new research project, or might better be told in a novel.

Extensive documentation makes The Apache Wars a useful resource beyond the book. As an academic historian, Hutton puts himself through the paces to maximize authenticity and reliability of his eye-opening, often colorful, stories and conversations. The author derives his detail from four classes of written information: manuscript collections, journal articles, memoirs, and a host of books, most from University presses.

Non-academic readers will be pleased the extensive notes don’t intrude upon the flow of the narrative. No superscript numbers dot the page demanding attention across the 424 pages. Instead, there’s a page-sequenced list at the end providing over 50 pages of documentation linking the narrative to primary and key secondary sources.

Click here to view the video at Standing Rock Sioux reservation, blockading pipeline equipment.

The Dakotas. Now that Congress and government land speculators have given away land rights in the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, Indian people announced their willingness to die for their land. It's a classic "American" value, and the fate of so many indios who fought in their time.

Dying may be Standing Rock's fate one day. For now, unlike the heavily armed Army and money-grubbing indian agents of Geronimo’s era, uniformed police work like automatons when they take a prisoner defending her sovereignty. A view is overjoyed that the scene doesn't play out like so many cop-murders of people in custody.

The cops separate her from the protest scene on the blacktop and take her out of sight behind an SUV. Several large uniforms surround her; one keeps his hand on her all the while.

Physical and vocal intimidation doesn’t silence her, the prisoner continues to call out to her fellows. While a giant woman officer pats-down the handcuffed woman, the prisoner calls to her fellows, “Don’t let them cross our land. This is our land!” As the officer slides open the SUV the prisoner uulates with a defiance and fervor that echoes back to the 1880s and Geronimo's band of dying Apache people, making a show of it as they migrate--surrender--into the Army camp.

Jesus Treviño and Paul Andrew Hutton

In an interview, Hutton observes on the inevitability of the defeat and the ongoing extinction of Apache gente and cultura. When the US moved West, it was a steamroller. Today, when US private interests want to pipeline across indian land, and major rivers, indian rights and the idea of a reservation disappear. When something as precious as ones homeland is ripped out of your grasp, it will never come back. Realizing it is a lethal blow.

“But not every visitor was smitten with Geronimo. One observed the famous Apache was ‘about as mild mannered a man as ever scuttled a ship or cut a throat and for that matter butchered defenseless women and children.’
. . . .
The army had put the Apaches to work building cabins and laying out roads. A school was built so that the children could be educated at Mount Vernon and not have to be sent away to Carlisle . . . Many ended up adjusting quite well to their new home, including Geronimo, but one holdout refused to be reconstructed.

Old Nana encouraged the people to believe that it was only a matter of time until they would be returned to their homeland. One day a lady philanthropist visited . . . to write a report on the conditions there. Nana told her that the people did not want to stay there but wished instead to go back to their homeland. The lady had brought a small globe with her and handed it to Nana. She told him that people were coming from all over the globe to America, that the country was becoming crowded. The Apaches could no longer roam over the vast territory that once was their land.

Nana stared at the globe, shaken to the core. . . After that visit, Nana slipped into a deep depression from which he never recovered. He now understood that he and his people would never go home.” 418-19



Latinopia Publishes Interview with Apache Wars Author Hutton

Latinopia and La Bloga share a history and purposes of supporting, reporting, analyzing, celebrating Chicana Chicano, Latina Latino arts, literatures, music, cultura, and history. Y más.

Recently Michael Sedano and Jesús Treviño trekked to Albuquerque to interview Rudolfo Anaya. During our stay, Paul Andrew Hutton kindly invited us to his home to talk about a book Treviño discovered in his ever-continuing research for material to populate the already extensive latinopia archives.

In this interview video, Hutton sets the backgrounds of the Apache war, the relatively peaceful first contact, the factors that changed everything. And the story of that Anglo kid who, some say, is the reason for the war.

http://latinopia.com/latino-history/latinopia-event-the-apache-wars-1/

Jesus Treviño, Paul Andrew Hutton, Michael Sedano

Before Columbus Foundation announces

Winners of the Thirty-Seventh Annual

AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS
•
La Bloga Congratulates Jesús Salvador Treviño

Jesús Treviño addresses UCR "A Day of Latino Science Fiction”

From Press Release:
The American Book Awards were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community. The purpose of the awards is to recognize literary excellence without limitations or restrictions. There are no categories, no nominees, and therefore no losers. The award winners range from well-known and established writers to under-recognized authors and first works. 

There are no quotas for diversity, the winners list simply reflects it as a natural process. 

The Before Columbus Foundation views American culture as inclusive and has always considered the term “multicultural” to be not a description of various categories, groups, or “special interests,” but rather as the definition of all of American literature. The Awards are not bestowed by an industry organization, but rather are a writers’ award given by other writers.

The 2016 American Book Award Winners are:

Laura Da'
Tributaries (University of Arizona)
Susan Muaddi Darraj
Curious Land: Stories from Home (University of Massachusetts)
Deepa Iyer
We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future (The New Press)
Mat Johnson
Loving Day (Spiegel & Grau)
John Keene
Counternarratives (New Directions)
William J. Maxwell
F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature
(Princeton University)
Lauret Savoy
Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (Counterpoint)
Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette
The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry (Lawrence Hill Books)
Jesús Salvador Treviño
Return to Arroyo Grande (Arte Público)
Nick Turse
Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa (Haymarket Books)
Ray Young Bear
Manifestation Wolverine: The Collected Poetry of Ray Young Bear (Open Road Integrated Media)
Lifetime Achievement:
Louise Meriwether
Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award:
Lyra Monteiro and Nancy Isenberg
Andrew Hope Award:
Chiitaanibah Johnson

The 2016 American Book Award winners will be formally recognized on Sunday, October 30th from 2:00-5:00 p.m. at the SF Jazz Center, Joe Henderson Lab, 201 Franklin Street (at Fell), San Francisco, CA. This event is open to the public. 

Chicanonautica: Guajolete Con Go Go Gophers

by Ernest Hogan

I could just wish you a feliz Día de los Guajoletes and save myself a lot of work, but there are some important things that should be addressed about this pre-Black Friday kick-off to the winter seasonal capitalist consumer orgy. Something should be said about Native Americans and their part in the Thanksgiving mythos. And what about Chicanos? Latinos? And all the Nican Tlaca?

I mulled it over, then I was reminded of the Go Go Gophers.

Watch out, that theme song can be a real earworm.

The Go Go Gophers have been called racist and politically incorrect. But, cartoons from earlier decades were a lot worse.

An unpopular truth about cartooning is that it's all about stereotypes. That is, simplifications of our complex reality that allow us to learn to deal with it all. But then, the point is to learn to deal with it, after a while you are supposed to be able to look beyond the stereotypes and deal with reality. People and cultures outgrow stereotypes, hopefully.

Also, racist cartoons were considered “normal” in their time. They provide a documentation of ugly truths of the past. They should not be forgotten, and we need to be aware of them, otherwise we distort history. Do I have to repeat that cliché about how those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it?

And if you really want to blow minds, twist the stereotypes around until they become the opposite of they originally meant.

I consider the Go Go Gophers to be the most subversive Saturday morning cartoon of the 1960s. Really. 

Colonel Kit Coyote and Sergeant Okey Homa are out to drive Chief Running Board and Ruffled Feathers out of their homeland, though the theme song says “Colonel he vow they will soon disappear.” Ah, the old Vanishing Americans myth that our schools manage to transmit to most of our children! The Indians were in the way, then mysteriously -- and conveniently – disappeared.

But here in Arizona, I see Indians every day. Some of my fellow Americans wonder what happened to the Maya, and speculate about mystical teleportation while not realizing that Maya are vacuuming their floors and cutting their lawns. There are none so blind . . .

The last two Gopher Indians aren't about to cooperate in their disappearance. In the trickster tradition -- that has roots in Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the ancient mythologies of the world, including a powerful Native connection -- they thwart the Colonel's plans. Usually, Ruffled Feathers, finds out about the plans, tells them to Running Board in his oopa-doopa-doopa gibberish, Running Board translates for the audience, Ruffled Feathers oopa-doops his own plan, to which Running Board replies, “Oopy-doopy, you um genius!”

The social roles are reversed. The chief takes orders from the brave. And the guy who doesn't speak English is the smart one.

The results are slapstick mayhem. Also good advice for surviving oppression with guerrilla/trickster tactics. Though in real life you have to a lot sneakier.

I didn't find a Thanksgiving Go Go Gophers cartoon, but The Big Pow Wow can be considered an anti-Thanksgiving piece:

And Don't Fence Me In shows the folly of building the fence to keep the “aliens” out. Donald Trump and his fans should take note:

So, enjoy that guajolete, carnales!

And, P.S.: To Hell with the Puritan tradition!

Ernest Hogan's work has appeared in Amazing, Analog, and Aztlán, and has not been officially classified as a psychotropic drug – yet. Meanwhile, some of his cartoony drawings will be soon be on display at Harold Washington College in Chicago.

Bad Indians, a conversation with Deborah A. Miranda

Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir
Send your pony pic to kids on ponies.

Deborah A. Miranda is one bad Indian. Her memoir refuses categorization in its unique structure, gorgeous poetry, and painful story of resistance, strength, and survival. Part documentary of Mission Indians and part coming of age story, her book reaches back to the beginning of colonization of her ancestors to insist on an identity, both tribal and sexual, both painful and celebratory, of a people who many in California and the world relegated to extinction. Miranda was kind enough to offer generous answers about her extraordinary memoir Bad Indians: A TribalMemoir.

Melinda Ann Palacio:

Tell us about finding the structure for your memoir? When did you decide that you needed to go way back and give an entire history of Mission Indians and when did you decide you would focus on the bad Indian motif.

Deborah Ann Miranda:

The structure came about, I think, because of the massive amounts of materials that turned up in my research:  all the mission baptisms, marriage and death records, letters and diaries for the Franciscan priests, newspaper articles, family stories, genealogy, photographs, historical studies of the missions … so many stories, and every one haunting me.  When I tried to create one cohesive narrative out of all these fragments, I’d get overwhelmed and then frustrated, because I couldn’t keep a single narrative together.  It was too MUCH material for a single narrative.  But when I focused on just one of the stories at a time, let it speak, I could do right by that story.  A mosaic approach allowed me to chip away at a story that would otherwise be way too much for me to wrap my head (and heart) around, and privileged a collective voice without losing the individual voices. It would also allow me to include the historical context necessary for it all to make sense.  As for ‘bad Indians’ – that phrase turns up in the historical records over and over again.  Even my mother found it while reading notes about Indian relatives at boarding schools: “So-and-so is a bad Indian – he runs away all the time.”  My father had told me once, “They say the only good Indian is a dead Indian, but hell, even when we’re dead we’re not good enough.”  And of course, finding the newspaper article from 1909 with the headline “Bad Indian Goes on Rampage at Santa Ynez,” about a man named Juan Miranda, cemented the phrase for me.  I realized that the only reason I’m here today is because so many of my ancestors were ‘bad’!  A bad Indian is an Indian who resists in any way he or she can; a bad Indian survives.  A bad Indian, in other words, is a good Ancestor.  I wanted to honor those Ancestors, and honor what they did to survive so that we can be here today.

MAP:

What were some of the more difficult parts of writing this memoir? Were you waiting to publish the love/hate affair between your parents for a long while or did you seek their permission before their death or did you just decide to go for it? How has the book affected your relationship with your siblings.

DAM:

The research was challenging – finding the materials, digging for indigenous voices in what is a predominantly Euro-American archive – but reading those materials, knowing that the Indians being flogged or put into stocks, hunted down, humiliated, starved, abused, killed, were my relatives, my Ancestors – those stories, those individuals, haunted me.  I had a hard time sleeping; I was angry or grief-stricken much of the time.  But I knew that my own sadness was a drop in the bucket compared to what my Ancestors had endured.  I had to write through it.  As for publication – my mother had passed away in 2001.  My father died in 2009.  I told the parts of their stories that affected my life, the way I had experienced it, the connections I saw to historically traumatic events.  I didn't ask permission, because the stories in their lives created my life, became my story.  But I’m not sure I could have let the book be published if they had both still been alive.  The book had its own timing.  It hasn’t really changed my relationship with my siblings – those relationships that were strong to begin with are still strong, those that were not are still not. 

MAP:

What is the story behind your pony photo? Was it something you've always had or did you find it in your mother's things and has it always been a part of your identity?

DAM:

“Kid on a Pony” is an iconic photo for kids on the West coast and in the Southwest, too.  Itinerant photographers would go around neighborhoods with these little ponies, some cowboy dress-up clothes, and a camera.  Actually, in some places, they still do.  My older half-sisters have those pictures of themselves and their children!  I even have a page on my blog (badndns.blogspot.com) with the “Kid on a Pony” photographs that people have sent me.  My mom always had that photo around.  In fact, there are two of those pictures; in one, I’m raising my hand in a powerful “Peace sign.”  That’s the one I chose for the cover, but it was too faded for Heyday to get a good reprint.  That must have been my mom’s favorite.  It was taken right before we left California for good, I think; I remember living in those apartments, walking across the pedestrian bridge from kindergarten.  There’s something about that photo that captures a particular moment in my life; a cusp of some sort, when I was between worlds. 

Luis Rodriguez, Deborah Miranda, and Melinda Palacio at AWP in Boston

MAP:

There is beautiful poetry in the book. How did you decide when you could let loose with the lyricism and when to hold back and report the facts? What were some of the challenges in putting this book together and mixing poetry, stories, and assumed Mission histories? 

DAM:

As I said before, the forms for each piece emerged during the writing of that piece.  Early on each piece assumed an identity as poetry or prose or (in the case of the “Blood Quantum” series, a visual), and usually I left them that way.  Occasionally, however, a piece morphed into another form later in the final revisioning.  “Novena to Bad Indians,” for example, started out as poetry with line breaks, but over time I read it aloud and realized it was more of a prose poem, more along the lines of a true novena.  My biggest challenge was deciding how to divide the book into sections.  That much material needed some kind of structure, and chronological made the most sense; the problem was, in talking about historical trauma, linear time is not a reliable or even useful device.  Sometimes I needed to use a very old story – like the El Potrero materials from 1836 – to talk about a contemporary moment in my own life.  Where would that piece belong, in the post-missionization section, or the contemporary section?!  That took lots of moving and testing to see how the threads best held together, and several devoted readers who looked at multiple versions of the same manuscript (thanks especially to Margo Solod, Nina Solod Brodeur, and Chris Gavaler).  The biggest overall challenge was allowing myself to believe that this kind of mosaic structure would make sense to a publisher! 

MAP:

What challenges as an author do you have in presenting your book? And do you have any advice for new authors beginning their book tours?

DAM:

Most audiences do not have much knowledge about California history, the history of Catholic Missionization in North America, or California Indian experiences of triple-colonization, let alone the way all of this compounds historical trauma, which is a very real diagnosis for psychological damage.  So providing that kind of context in a brief, coherent way, without giving a lecture or boring people out of their minds, is tricky.  I’ve learned that a Powerpoint presentation really helps me get some of that context into the conversation early.  And over time, I’ve really pared those particular PPT slides down to the basics.  I started off wanting to tell much more than was really necessary (a problem all authors with extensive research have is believing that everyone else is just as obsessed with the minutiae of discovery as we are).  Advice for new authors starting out on book tours would include A) choose a balance of tones for the pieces you’ll read (sad, funny, contemplative, angry), B) time your readings so you don’t end up having to cut things short, C) do as much creative advertising of your readings as possible for each venue – send email flyers to local college professors, historical societies, writing groups, book clubs, libraries as well as newspapers, specialized media groups (for example, my sister Louise Ramirez hooked me up with Native Voice TV in San Jose for a great interview that aired locally and was subsequently made available online), FB, Twitter, and so on.  And be prepared to put most of your energy into promoting your book, not writing new stuff.  If you don’t have a paid assistant or the undying devotion of an unpaid friend or partner, you’ll be making all the travel, media and mailing arrangements yourself.  It’s a time suck.  Decide how much time and money you can invest, and do it whole-heartedly within those boundaries.

MAP:

You and your partner found each other after having been married and had children. I was wondering if you could talk a little about the last coyote story in the book. Is it symbolic of how shifting or tricky finding your own sexual identity. Your first marriage seems an attempt at escape and survival in the way you were eager to leave an abusive father. Is the coyote symbolic of your shift in finding a relationship that was more about who you are and was this difficult for you or your family to accept?

DAM:

Great questions.  I actually met that Coyote guy on the bus to Venice Beach.  Well, I met a guy whom I suspected had a lot of Coyote in him, anyway, and wrote a story about what could have actually been going on… and yes, I wanted that story to do a lot of work.  The narrative happens in a contemporary time, but also has a parallel time back in pre-contact and contact eras when many California indigenous communities had a ‘third gender’ role.  What happened to those people?  How did losing them affect us, our spirituality, the spirituality inherent in our sexual identities?  What role did the Catholic church of the Contact era have in colonizing Native sexual identities?  How has that historical colonization affect my own sexual identity?  What would it mean if we had choices about sexual identity, rather than prescribed roles?  So in a way, yes, “Coyote Takes a Trip” is about the blurred boundaries between male and female genders, and of course reflects some of my own negotiations as a Two Spirit.  Those negotiations have cause some necessary chaos in my life, but then, change is an act of creation.

MAP:

Thank you, Deborah. Is there anything else you'd like to tell La Bloga? Tour schedule? Future projects?

DAM:

I’ll be wrapping up my big push for this book by the end of April, so that I can get back to my new project (a collection of essays about Isabel Meadows’s stories titled The Hidden Stories of Isabel Meadows and other California Indian Lacunae, with U of Nebraska Press) and start planning for the 2013-14 academic year’s classes.  The tour dates are on my blog at www.badndns.blogspot.com. 

***

Sunday, in between St. Patrick's day parades and the L.A. Marathon is Beyond Baroque's Hitched Poetry Series featuring Melinda Palacio, Yago Cura, Elline Lipkin, and David Slavin.

Date:            Sunday, March 17^th

Time:            5pm

Place:            Beyond Baroque,  681 Venice Blvd, Venice, CA

Web:            http://www.beyondbaroque.org/events.html

HITCHED is a monthly reading series that couples established poets & writers with newer voices for the purpose of broadening community and celebrating writer relationships. The series is hosted by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo.

Next week: Sunday, March 24 Luivette Resto Presents La Palabra at Avenue 50 Studio, the feature is Melinda Palacio, 2- 4 pm, 131 N. Avenue 50 Studio, Highland Park, CA.

Chicanonautica: Welcome to the World Wide Wild West Show

by Ernest Hogan

Seems like the ghost of Buffalo Bill is stalking me. A reprint of a dime novel about him found me in New Mexico, then a copy of Linda Scarangella McNenly’s Native Performers in Wild West Shows: From Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney came my way.

Oh yeah. Buffalo Bill has set up shop in Paris. Like a persistent ghost . . .

The Wild West show and the dime novel were the origins of the western genre, which in the beginning was all about explaining just what are all these white people doing in this untamed country? After making his name killing buffalo, William Frederick Cody became the star of dime novels and pioneered the Wild West show: a chimera of theater and the circus that is also an ancestor of performance art.

McNenly’s book is a fascinating account of this business/art form with political consequences. It focuses on the native performers and their transformation from menaces to commercial attraction/myth figures. Faced with the deconstruction of their world, you can’t blame some for preferring show biz to the Office of Indian Affairs’ “civilizing” policies on the reservations.

As Short Boy, put it in 1911: I wouldn’t go back to the reservation for a new rifle and cartridges enough to last me the rest of my life . . . He enjoyed fighting American soldiers “even with blank cartridges.”

In 2004, Kevin “Kave” Dust, who worked at the Euro Disney (with Mickey Mouse) explained: I am protected through the medicine man and my strong tradition. I am still here, still proud, and still alive.

Native Performers in Wild West Show was a rather surreal read for an academic study. It has me rethinking my own Wild West environment, and wondering about futuristic developments.

It also gave me the urge to re-read Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller. South America’s myths and traditions about native tribes is different than those of the North. No heroic wars romanticized are by popular culture and the entertainment industry. Still, there are parallels to the bizarre world of the Wild West show . . .

The Storyteller of the title is Saúl Zuratas, called “Mascarita” because of birthmark on his face that, along with his being Jewish, makes him an outsider in Peru. He is driven away from civilization and becomes obsessed with the culture of the Machiguenga Indians: “Do our cars, guns, planes, and Coca-Colas give us the right to exterminate them?” He doesn’t want them made into “zombies and caricatures of men, like those semi-acculturated Indians you see in Lima.”

Disgusted by acculturation and assimilation, he wishes that Machiguenga could remain isolated, and their culture preserved in a state of purity. Instead of creating a mestizo identity for the modern world, he goes native, becoming a storyteller for the tribe.

But still, civilization is out there, creeping through the jungle . . .

Meanwhile, in Arizona, I see postmodern Americanos looking for the same kind of purity and spirituality that’s missing in their lives. They often find themselves in the hands of snake oil salesmen. Sedona is an inside-out Wild West show, with high-priced psychics instead of simulated Indian attacks.

Eventually, the entire world could be a Wild West show, but who will be the natives?

If you look at the rodeo coverage in the Navajo Times, these days, a lot of the cowboys are Indians.

Ernest Hogan discusses High Aztech, and Chicano science fiction in a video on Latinopia.com.

Chicanonautica: A Trail of Tears Through Cyberspace and Back

by Ernest Hogan

Ay! What a wild ride! Blake M. Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears is just the sort of novel that this sci-fi Chicano loves. It’s hard to describe in the conventional language of book reviewing, but then, that’s part of the fun.

The back cover blurb says: “Sherman Alexi meets William Gibson. Louise Erdich meets Franz Kafka. Leslie Marmon Silko meets Philip K. Dick.” I took it for hyperbole at first, but it's true. I would even add Ishmael Reed and myself to that list, if I could be so bold.

And the title is accurate. It literally is about riding the Trail of Tears. In a near future north Georgia, there’s a tourist attraction -- the Tsalgai Removal Exodus Point Park, or TREPP, where the price of admission buys the experience of being a Cherokee on the Trail of Tears, in virtual reality, of course.

The main character is Tallulah Wilson, a one-third Cherokee guide at TREPP. The viewpoint character is -- well, problematic to say the least. It says it’s a Nunnehi -- a Little Little Person, but then we are warned about Homeland Security, and the possibility of terrorists -- or others hacking into the system . . . readers with different backgrounds will end up arguing about it.

Which is why Riding the Trail of Tears is so hard to categorize. As a writer who’s sold to Analog Science Fiction & Fact, I find Hausman’s technical conceptualizations to be state of the art for that genre. The word “surrealistic” appears on the back cover, but I’ve found from living in Aztlán, reality is often close to surrealistic satire: An Elvis impersonator gives helicopter tours of mystical sites in Sedona, other tours feature New Age guides who plug distortions of Hopi beliefs into the 2012 Mayanoid delusions, tribal-owned casinos suggest that their gambling will be a mystical experience . . .

Combine that with an honest, and often hilarious, portrayal of impure Cherokee characters -- the East Coast equivalent of mestizos -- and the border between Native American Lit and sci-fi has been breached. I’ve dealt with this when writing about modern technology hooking up with ancient belief systems -- it gets hard to sort out. Fantasy? Reality? Myth? Religion? Politics?

Looks like another 21st century identity crisis. Better call Homeland Security, or the Nunnehi.

And maybe for marketing’s sake we should call it dystopia, because the kids dig dystopia these days. It would make a kick-ass movie, and we do have the technology. And so many Americanos carry Cherokee DNA -- people who are now classified as “white” and “black” could discover a new common identiy as Cherokee Americans.

See? Reading this book gets the imagination raging -- ideas erupt. Yeah, I know. Dangerous.

Maybe I should just put on my HOMELAND SECURITY -- FIGHTING TERRORISM SINCE 1492 T-shirt, shut my mouth, and await further instructions from headquarters.

Ernest Hogan’s first novel, Cortez on Jupiter, will very soon be available as an ebook. And that is only the beginning.

Review: Indian Country Noir. Call for Poets Arizona. Unapologetic Mexican.

Michael Sedano

Sarah Cortez and Liz Martínez, eds. Indian Country Noir. NY: Akashic Books, 2010.
ISBN: 9781936070053 (pbk.) & 1936070057 (pbk.)

Isn't that a marvelous cover? It shouts out loud, "Indian Country!" New Mexico's magnificent Ship Rock outlined against towering thunderclouds. I looked at the cover and thought, Jim Chee, Joe Leaphorn, House Made of Dawn. Ira Hayes, maybe.

As the adage goes, do not judge a book by its cover. Because anyone looking at the cover art of Akashic's Indian Country Noir and thinking Southwestern United States has misled themselves. Indeed, in what comes as a pleasant surprise, most of the tales selected by editors Sarah Cortez and Liz Martinez take place in a broader conception of America as indian country--the entire northern continent, in fact.

Tony Hillerman isn't even an afterthought, nor are N. Scott Momaday nor Sherman Alexie. True to the noir series convention, the current iteration of Akashic's run of outstanding titles features fourteen writers--seven women, seven men--you may not yet have come across, and a few you have, but in other contexts. The pleasure, mostly, is all yours, in this case.

The most-published, and perhaps best known, writer in the collection is Lawrence Block. He's no Indian, attesting to the editors' decision to include stories featuring North American Indians in one way or another, rather than adding a stricture that the writer also must be an Indian.

That's a tough break for some India Indio writer looking for some ink by breaking into an "Indian" anthology. But then, some writers' or stories' conecta to Indiohood are tenuous. There's Mistina Bates, who declares herself the "great-great-grand-daughter of a full-blooded" Cherokee who served as a Texas Ranger. I bet family reunions were interesting in that familia. Then there's Block's story, "Getting Lucky," the oddest, most inappropriate selection in the anthology. It's a sex story featuring a con woman posing as a Yupper Indian who suckers a lucky gambler into an orgiastic tryst before scalping him alive. Plenty noir, but not at all "Indian." Tough break for that hungry writer whose place Block takes. Maybe it's a deliberate irony, the phony India and the usurping Anglo writer.

One of the more touching stories introduces Ira Hayes, as the old song goes, fighting drunken Ira Hayes. The Mt. Suribachi flag-raiser is on a war bonds tour in Chicago, in Liz Martínez' account near the close of the book. Hayes feels comfortable only when he hits the bar. The military has assigned a minder to ensure Hayes gets his drinks and stays out of too much trouble. And that's what goes down, until Hayes, in a drunken stupor has a flashback to hand-to-hand combat back on Iwo Jima. Unfortunately, his enemy is a Chicago cop, who ends up shot dead, along with an innocent bystander. It's a perfect crime.

A couple of other stories stand out for tension or noirish wit. There's David Cole's "JaneJohnDoe.com" set in Tucson, Arizona. A narcotraficante on the lam from the latest crack down on smuggler murderers kidnaps a woman whose specialty is creating phony identities. The narca, a lusty woman, gets hers in the end with a faked identity that would pass muster from even the most racist Arizona cop's "reasonable suspicion" that the narca is in the country illegally. The noir twist in the ending, where the victim gets the one-up on the villain, is the fun part. Not all is ideal with Cole, however. In a gaffe, his bio at the back of the collection claims he writes about "illegal immigrants." That's not noirspeak, thats puro offensive talk, no matter Cole wrote it well in advance of the current fascist pedo in Arizona.

Reed Farrel Coleman's "Another Role" has its roman à clef moments and a delicious comeuppance for the bad guys. Harry Garson looks muy Indio but he doesn't have a clue what kind. Ni modo, he's made a grand living playing chiefs and warriors in a string of western movies, in roles Iron Eyes Cody doesn't land. Garson's big break came years ago as Chief Smells Like Bearstein, in the teevee farce "Crazy Cavalry." Now Garson's down on his luck hitting the bottle too hard.

Readers will enjoy how Coleman has lots of fun playing against Hollywood stereotypy. Coleman gives down-on-his luck Garson one final Indio role, one that brings a hit man after him. In a heart-warming twist, the Indio gets to discover his tribal identity, using it to turn the table on the crooks who hired him. When the hit man stares down at Garson's body, he has a flash of celebrity recognition, a "cute meet" in reverse. "Bearstein!" the hit man whispers, "Sorry, chief."

One of my dad's favorite family stories is about his two uncles, footloose boys in Redlands, an orange-picking town east of Berdoo. The local cop didn't care for Mexicans nor Indians, and made it his business to kidnap the boys for transport to Riverside's Sherman Institute, a boarding school for Indians. Every time the cop took my great uncles to Riverside they'd show up back in Redlands in a day or two. Finally the cop gave up and the family remained together.

Few Unitedstatesians realize that Indians invented forced busing when the government kidnaped Indio kids and shipped them off to Indian Schools like Sherman Institute or the well-known Carlisle school where Pop Warner coached football and where Charley Bear, AKA Indian Charley, was housed until he ran off. Charley is Joseph Bruchac's character in "Helper," the anthology's opening story. It's a good choice for Indian Country Noir, replete with humor, depravity, revenge, and justice.

Carlisle may be familiar to sports fans and movie goers as the place where Burt Lancaster as Jim Thorpe begins his fabled athletic career. The school for Charley Bear is an ugly place that sends kids into slavery and sexual exploitation on local farms. Charley Bear gets a small measure of revenge on a family of monsters, an act that comes back to threaten him decades later. Bruchac loads his story with the Indian obbligato of war heroism, exploitation, a friendly white man, closeness to mother earth. Despite these commonplaces, from the opening lines readers will recognize a masterful writer who'll keep you reading despite the stereotypy: "The one with the missing front teeth. He's the one who shot me. Before his teeth were missing."

Akashic Books has not failed me yet with its noir series. While I haven't read every title in the series--I wish I could--each one that I've read has been a genuine pleasure that fulfills expectations for mystery, detection, suspense, humor, in a word, noir. The occasional gaffe borne of thoughtless bio shorthand, or the persistent image of drunken Indios, are a couple of those irritations one unwillingly suspends in pursuit of story and fun, and, in this case, enlarging one's acknowledgment of America as Indian country.

Arizona Institutionalizes Hate. Call for Poets.

Recent legislation by Arizona law-passers has the country in furor. Breathing while brown and walking while brown join the de facto crime of driving while brown, under Arizona legislation requiring law enforcement to demand papieren from anyone who looks like they are in the state without proper immigration documentation. I'm sure refugees from Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano are quaking in their boots, along with the state's Indians and Mexican origin gente, and habitués of tanning salons.

Is ability to pronounce Eyjafjallajokull reasonable suspicion for arrest?

Francisco Alarcón, joined by Alma Luz Villanueva and Antoinette Nora Claypoole, have issued a Call for Poets to write about Arizona's current status. La Bloga Tuesday will publish selected submissions beginning next Tuesday, May 4 and continuing. Alarcón, Villanueva, and Claypoole are investigating turning the submissions into a hard copy anthology.

Submit work by posting a Note to Facebook at Poets Responding to SB 1070.

The Unapologetic Mexican

When I was a kid, the cultural praxis related to ethnicity enforced a fantasy history that called Chicanas Chicanos "Spanish" or "American of Mexican Descent," or plain old "American." Among courteous people, it was impolite to accuse someone of being "Mexican." Among the pigs and haters, "Mexican" was, at best, a slur, akin to such counterparts as "White asshole", "Okie", "Arkie", "white trash." Among la palomilla, we called ourselves Mexicans or Chicanos, and the anglos were Americans, or Anglos. Lurking silently in the background was that etiquette of self-denial. Not even el movimiento erases all of that.

Meet The Unapologetic Mexican. It's a web presence as well as the persona of its author, Nezua. Make that personae. Nezua has taken his persona through at least two iterations. The earliest presence offered puro confrontational art; intellectual, reasoned, informed, distinctly nationalistic Xicanismo. A few years later, the site morphed into a self-consciously higher tech version. Since that opening of Act II, the UMX has become El Machete that sees its responsibility to provide information with a "Latino-Centric" perspective. As such, the site merits your attention and recognition as, if not an antidote to "mainstream" media's blowhard portavozes for hate, at least a worthwhile counterstatement to all that crap.

I find interesting the four year history of the site as a time-compressed mirror of the movimiento. Chest-pounding, fire-breathing indictments of every racist xenophobe exact a price in personal exhaustion. Xicanismo is not free. And after a while that stuff grows old. I'm reminded of Cicero's insight in De Senectute, that bitter old men are not bitter because they are old but because they were bitter young men. I'm not sure some veteranos of el movimiento ever learned that. But it seems something of this dawned, if obliquely, on the Unapologetic Mexican. I see this in the quiet, controlled delivery of Nezua's most recent video. I like this approach--though as an old public speaking teacher I'd like to see more engagement from the speaker--and will look with interest to see how the Unapologetic Mexican handles the pedo from Arizona. Click the various links in the above and take your own tour of Nezua's endeavor, and please leave a comment on what you think.

Book Give-Away Winners, News & Notes Reminder

Last Tuesday La Bloga posted a quiz that produced two 100% correct answers to 100% of the questions. In return for their perfection, Hachette Book Group mailed a free copy of Iris Gomez' Try to Remember to:

1. Linda Rodriguez of Kansas City MO

2. Mariana Marin of Carmichael CA

Here's the quiz and the correct answers:

1. The Los Angeles Theatre Center current season is called _East of Broadway_.

2. Dan Olivas' reading technique is notable because _he stands away from the lectern.

3. The La Bloga columnist who is an oral communication teacher and "read your own stuff" coach is named _Michael Sedano_.

4. Juanita Salazar Lamb writes mystery stories featuring a character named __Sara Garcia_.

5. The title and author of the book you'll receive if you're among the first three to answer all these questions correctly are _Try to Remember_ by __Iris Gomez_.

Congratulations to winners Linda and Mariana. I'm crossing my fingers one or both of you winning La Bloga readers will contribute a guest review. A ver.

CSULA Selects May 14-15 for Annual Octavio Paz Conference

La Bloga friend Roberto Cantú invites scholars, students, and people interested in the Mexican nobel laureate to the 2010 edition of the school's annual celebration of the writer's career. The 2010 meeting, titled, World Civilizations, Modernity, and Octavio Paz: A Plurality of Pasts and Futures opens in the Golden Eagle Ballroom on the El Sereno campus near East LA. The event is free, although conference organizers warn that campus cops enforce parking regulations 24/7.

For information on the conference, visit the Paz blog or contact Dr. Roberto Cantú at the Department of Chicano Studies, California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90032. (323) 343-2195. rcantu@calstatela.edu.

That's the final Tuesday of April, a Tuesday like any other Tuesday, except You Are Here. Thank you for visiting La Bloga. Over half a million people have visited La Bloga since we started counting. That was a year or more after RudyG, Manuel Ramos and I launched La Bloga.

Thank you for reading. Nos wachamos next week in the month of May.

mvs

La Bloga welcomes your comments on this and all columns. Click the comments counter below to add your observations. La Bloga welcomes guest columnists. If you have a book review, an extended commentary on something you've read here at La Bloga, a literary, arts or cultural event to report, or something from your writer's notebook, click here to discuss being our guest.

Memento Mori

Studs Terkel, prize-winning author and radio broadcast personality was born Louis Terkel in New York on May 16, 1912. His father, Samuel, was a tailor and his mother, Anna (Finkel) was a seamstress. He had three brothers. The family moved to Chicago in 1922 and opened a rooming house at Ashland and Flournoy on the near West side {LISTEN}. From 1926 to 1936 they ran another rooming house, the Wells-Grand Hotel at Wells Street and Grand Avenue. Terkel credits his knowledge of the world to the tenants who gathered in the lobby of the hotel and the people who congregated in nearby Bughouse Square, a meeting place for workers, labor organizers, dissidents, the unemployed, and religious fanatics of many persuasions. In 1939 he married Ida Goldberg and had one son.

Terkel attended University of Chicago and received a law degree in 1934. He chose not to pursue a career in law. After a brief stint with the civil service in Washington D.C., he returned to Chicago and worked with the WPA Writers Project in the radio division. One day he was asked to read a script and soon found himself in radio soap operas, in other stage performances, and on a WAIT news show. After a year in the Air Force, he returned to writing radio shows and ads. He was on a sports show on WBBM and then, in 1944, he landed his own show on WENR. This was called the Wax Museum show that allowed him to express his own personality and play recordings he liked from folk music, opera, jazz, or blues. A year later he had his own television show called Stud's Place and started asking people the kind of questions that marked his later work as an interviewer.

In 1952 Terkel began working for WFMT, first with the "Studs Terkel Almanac" and the "Studs Terkel Show," primarily to play music. The interviewing came along by accident. This later became the award-winning, "The Studs Terkel Program." His first book, Giants of Jazz, was published in 1956. Ten years later his first book of oral history interviews, Division Street : America, came out. It was followed by a succession of oral history books on the 1930s Depression, World War Two, race relations, working, the American dream, and aging. His latest book, Will the Circle Be Unbroken : Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith, was published in 2001. Terkel continued to interview people, work on his books, and made public appearances until his death. He was Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the Chicago Historical Society.

(Courtesy: http://studsturkel.org)

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Tony Hillerman was born in 1925, in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma. Although he was raised among the Pottawatomie and Seminole Indians and studied at an Indian boarding school, Tony Hillerman is not Native American. He attended Oklahoma State University (1943), the University of Oklahoma (B.A. 1946), and the University of New Mexico (M.A. 1966). He worked as a journalist in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico (1948-63), lived in Albuquerque, and taught journalism at the University of New Mexico (1976-85).

He has written numerous mystery novels drawing on Native American culture, the most successful featuring Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police. His many bestselling novels include Sacred Clowns, Coyote Waits, and A Thief of Time. Hillerman is a past president of the Mystery Writers of America and has received their Edgar and Grand Master awards. His other honors include the Center for the American Indian's Ambassador Award, the Silver Spur Award for best novel set in the West, and the Navajo Tribe's Special Friend Award. He lived with his wife, Marie, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

(Courtesy: http://mysterynet.com)

Lisa Alvarado