Fiction – Page 9 – Turtle Talk

There’s a clue to the way Louise Erdrich’s mind works in a note at the beginning of her new novel, The Plague of Doves.

It’s a standard message stating that all the places and people in the book are imagined, but the author lists an exception, a character named Holy Track. “In 1897,” she writes, “at the age of thirteen, Paul Holy Track was hanged by a mob in Emmons County, North Dakota.”

Other writers hitting upon this intriguing and sad bit of history might construct a novel focused around Paul himself, but as Erdrich has demonstrated in her prior novels about an Ojibwe and French Canadian clan, she thinks in terms of generations. In this book, Erdrich embeds the detail in a larger narrative about relatives and neighbors that preceded or followed him. As in her other novels, she makes room for comedy next to tragedy and includes good doses of passion, from schoolgirl crushes to a college girl’s lesbian fling to forbidden romances among the elderly.

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Program for Society for the Study of Midwest Literature 2008 Annual Meeting

May 6, 2008May 6, 2008Matthew L.M. Fletcher

The annual meeting for the Society for the Study of Midwest Literature will be here at MSU beginning Thursday May. The program can be downloaded here. The events are in the MSU Union.

Highlights include:

Thursday

Session C — 4-5:30 PM — Parlor B — Law and Literature

Mae Kuykendall and Renee Knake of MSU law college will be presenting on this panel

Friday

Session G — 1:30-3 PM — Parlor C — Fiction Reading

Me!!! [right before I have to run off to make the law college graduation ceremony]. I’ll be reading from a short story called “Parker Roberts” (parker-roberts).

Saturday

Session K — 10:30-Noon — Gold Room B — Law and Literature

Fred Baker, Jr. on Justice Voelker and “An Anatomy of An Anatomy of a Murder”

Indian Frauds: Alternet on “Love and Consequences”

April 22, 2008Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From Alternet:

Last month, it was revealed that the New York Times and Manhattan publishing world were deceived by Love and Consequences, a faked memoir by a white girl who claimed to live the life you only hear about in Dr. Dre songs. The damage control was so good, the book never saw daylight, and we never knew how big of an embarrassment this cartoonishly racist gangster fantasy should have been. But last week a copy arrived at my doorstep.

Supposedly written by gangsta moll Margaret B. Jones, Love and Consequences turned out to be the work of middle-class liar Margaret Seltzer. She had invented the tale behind a laptop at Starbucks, tricking not only her publisher, but also her fans at the Times, which graced the memoir with repeated coverage.

After it was revealed her work was a forgery, the damage control was swift and successful. On March 5, with the book just out the door, the New York Times revealed the hoax, if not just how bad it was. Her agent, Faye Bender, told the paper, reassuringly, that “there was no reason to doubt her, ever.” And that set the tone for the coverage. Love & Consequences, wrote the L.A. Times, must have seemed “edgy, sexy, cinematic.”

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Forthcoming Book: “American Indian Education: Counternarratives in Racism, Struggle, and the Law”

April 15, 2008April 15, 2008Matthew L.M. Fletcher2 Comments

My forthcoming book — “American Indian Education: Counternarratives in Racism, Struggle, and the Law” — is available for pre-order.

The blurb:

American Indian culture and traditions have survived an unusual amount of oppressive federal and state educational policies intended to assimilate Indian people and destroy their cultures and languages. Yet, Indian culture, traditions, and people often continue to be treated as objects in the classroom and in the curriculum. Using a critical race theory framework and a unique “counternarrative” methodology, American Indian Education explores a host of modern educational issues facing American Indian peoples—from the impact of Indian sports mascots on students and communities, to the uses and abuses of law that often never reach a courtroom, and the intergenerational impacts of American Indian education policy on Indian children today. By interweaving empirical research with accessible composite narratives, Matthew Fletcher breaches the gap between solid educational policy and the on-the-ground reality of Indian students, highlighting the challenges faced by American Indian students and paving the way for an honest discussion about solutions.

If you picked up a flyer at Fed Bar (american-indian-education-fba-flyer), you get a discount.

Fast Cars and Frybread by Gordon Johnson

March 29, 2008March 29, 2008Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From BookSlut:

Gordon Johnson’s Fast Cars and Frybread is a slim volume of collected columns from the Press-Enterprise in Riverside County, California spanning 1993 to 2000 — forty-three of them, to be exact. Johnson is a Cahuilla/Cupeño member of the Pala Indian Reservation. In Johnson’s introduction, he mentions his ambition to pen “life moments [he] wanted to rescue from change.” Casinos, from Johnson’s point of view, dramatically altered reservation life and culture, thereby prompting him to detail reservation life before their advent.

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Law Stories Series: “Truck Stop”

March 23, 2008Matthew L.M. Fletcher

My contribution to the UMKC Law Review‘s “Law Stories” series — “Truck Stop” — is available for download on SSRN. Here is the description:

Every American Indian person – repeat, every American Indian person – is related to or knows someone or is someone who has been adopted out of or removed from their reservation family. A significant percentage of each recent generation of American Indian people has grown up among strangers, either adopted by non-reservation families or force-fed through a state foster care system. This is, of course, one of the fundamental issues Congress hoped to address when it enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978. This fictional narrative is my take on what it means for an Indian person to lose their family – and to regain it much, much later.

Indian Literary Frauds: David Treuer on “Going Native”

March 10, 2008Matthew L.M. Fletcher5 Comments

From Slate:

In 1930, shortly after the studio release of his movie The Silent Enemy, Buffalo Child Long Lance’s Indian identity began to crumble. He was a celebrity by that time, having boxed Dempsey and dated movie stars, but he was not, it turned out, a full-blooded Blackfeet Indian who had been raised on the plains, as he had claimed. He had not hunted buffalo from horseback as the prairie winds blew through his hair. And his name was not actually Buffalo Child Long Lance. His real name was Sylvester Long. He was from Winston-Salem, N.C. He was African-American. And his father was not a chief but, rather, a janitor.

Margaret B. Jones, the author of Love and Consequences, is hardly the first person to have invented an Indian self and a past. Her memoir tells of her upbringing as a half-white, half-Indian foster child by a black family in South Central L.A. In fact, Jones’ real name is Margaret Seltzer, she did not grow up in South Central, she’s never been a foster child, and she’s no more a Native American than Sylvester Long was.

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Literary Fraud: “Love and Consequences”

March 4, 2008March 7, 2008Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

From the NYTs:

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

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Treuer in the LA Times

February 5, 2008Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

From the LA Times:

Native American languages are dying out with the elders.

By David Treuer, Special to the Los Angeles Times
February 3, 2008

Only three Native American languages now spoken in the United States and Canada are expected to survive into the middle of this century. Mine, Ojibwe, is one of them. Many languages have just a few speakers left — two or three — while some have a fluent population in the hundreds. Recently, Marie Smith Jones, the last remaining speaker of the Alaskan Eyak language, died at age 89. The Ojibwe tribe has about 10,000 speakers distributed around the Great Lakes and up into northwestern Ontario and eastern Manitoba. Compared with many, we have it pretty good.

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