Old School Indian
A little history? In June of 1998, I was rushed to the South Austin ER. Maybe 24 hours later, western medicine started treating me for a weird blood disorder, like an overactive autoimmune thing. Short version? Near Death Experience, all better, no recurrences. Freaked a lot of people out. Red blood cells ate the white blood cells.
Me? I had a vision the first night, might’ve been oxygen getting to my brain for the first time in days. Who knows? Leads to an intimate knowledge of autoimmune disorders, host pitfalls, and so forth. Stuck in a hospital with tubes running into me, jacked up beyond recognition on various steroids, thinners, thickeners, and in-betweeners. But that was then. (Pluto conjunct Sun, see Predictive Astrology.)
Digging further into history, my understanding of indigenous populations, tribes, and the peoples? My understanding, comprehension, is based almost solely on two sources, natives and lands encountered in my southwestern pilgrimage and media, i.e., The Lone Ranger, &c.
Between school then living in New Mexico and Arizona, that furthered my understanding. So setting this, in part, upstate New York with Indians, it goes smashing through some of my own preconceived understandings. The same — only applies in a very different setting. Expands on ideas, concepts, and my personal grasp of the material.
Freaking white appropriation.
Old School Indian
Pitched as a bildungsroman, only the guy is in his mid-forties, kind of an elder millennial, Xennial, no that’s Gen X, by some standards. To my ear and eye, certainly darkly comic, set against the backdrop of a disease that is eerily eating away at his body. To a Caucasian? It’s about a Mohawk Indian. Dark comedy as death is lingering at the front door, top of mind.
In my mind, it’s a novel that deserves a place alongside Ceremony, House Made of Dawn, Bless Me, Ultima and other literary luminaries. I still have several shelves full of Western American Literature, and this would be a book to add to that cannon.
True “Western American Literature” has to include, be dominated by, denizens of the land, the cultures, the indigenous, the native, Chicano, Mestizo, Mexican, and all the First Nations.
Especially the voices of the lands and its peoples.
