26-08-2023, 01:37 PM
Have just finished The night watchman, Louise Erdrich, abiout the attempt in the 50s to 'terminate' any govt help tp Native Americans. Her grandfather was involved in it & the book drew on his experince, which for his tribe, The Turtle Mountain band, was successful. others weren't so fortunate.
Well worth reading, I really enjoyed it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertain...story.html
"The National Book Award-winning author of “The Round House” and more than a dozen other treasured novels had abandoned several manuscripts and given up. She was certain her “impetus had disintegrated.”
Fortunately for us, she was wrong.
One day, she woke from her depressed slumber impelled to read a cache of letters written in the middle of the 20th century by her grandfather Patrick Gourneau. He had been chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Advisory Committee during the tribe’s modern-day fight for survival. The threat at that time was legal but as potentially disastrous as earlier assaults: In 1953, the U.S. House passed a resolution declaring that a number of tribes should be rapidly “freed from Federal supervision.”
Beneath that glorious promise of emancipation lurked the government’s true plan: the unilateral abrogation of treaties, the wholesale termination of tribes’ rights and the abandonment of Native Americans already impoverished by centuries of genocidal policies.
Reminded of that dark era and her grandfather's heroic role in saving the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, Erdrich knew she had found the inspiration for her next book."
Well worth reading, I really enjoyed it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertain...story.html
"The National Book Award-winning author of “The Round House” and more than a dozen other treasured novels had abandoned several manuscripts and given up. She was certain her “impetus had disintegrated.”
Fortunately for us, she was wrong.
One day, she woke from her depressed slumber impelled to read a cache of letters written in the middle of the 20th century by her grandfather Patrick Gourneau. He had been chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Advisory Committee during the tribe’s modern-day fight for survival. The threat at that time was legal but as potentially disastrous as earlier assaults: In 1953, the U.S. House passed a resolution declaring that a number of tribes should be rapidly “freed from Federal supervision.”
Beneath that glorious promise of emancipation lurked the government’s true plan: the unilateral abrogation of treaties, the wholesale termination of tribes’ rights and the abandonment of Native Americans already impoverished by centuries of genocidal policies.
Reminded of that dark era and her grandfather's heroic role in saving the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, Erdrich knew she had found the inspiration for her next book."
in order to be old & wise, you must first be young & stupid. (I'm still working on that.)