Turtle Talk

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Excerpts:

Interview highlights

On the book’s title: “I didn’t really understand what my mother was talking about when she referred to stick houses. It’s just an architectural term. And when she said it, literally I thought it meant that we had houses made out of little like tiny sticks, but she meant houses that are just like regular houses now, made out of lumber. And that’s sort of the story. Indian people for the last 150 years in Michigan didn’t live in wigwams or teepees or lodges. We lived in houses. And my grandmother in 1921 was born in Allegan County, Michigan, in a stick house, and she wasn’t the first generation to be like that. It was more 19th century stuff. Graduate students probably at Grand Valley State or Western or something, insisted, and wanted to hear about how she her generation, or maybe her mother’s generation was born in a wigwam and that just wasn’t the case.”

“We’re a bunch of different things, like all people are, and I wanted to show some different sides to Native people that are not typically shown.”

Matthew Fletcher
author, “Stick Houses”

On themes of short stories: “‘Truck Stop’ is a parable about the Indian Child Welfare removals of the middle part of the 20th century. The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 is near and dear to my heart. And when you work on those cases, or you study them as a professor like I do, they kind of lose their emotional core. I mean, all you hear is surface level stories about the trauma of how Indian people went through this. But I wanted to kind of point out how Native people survived it as well. The trauma is there and it’s quite terrifying and can be really horrible, but sometimes there is a rekindling, a reconnection of culture and individuals to each other, and I wanted to drill into that a little bit.”

On what he hopes readers take away from his book: “I’ve been listening to this brand new punk rock band that’s fronted by an Indigenous poet. The band is called ‘Dead Pioneers,’ which is awesome and hilarious. … And he has this great line. He says, you don’t realize it that even though we’re Native and Indigenous and have a tribal existence, we’re also having an American experience, and that’s what this is about, right? Like everybody, we shade ourselves in different contexts and shade our personalities to address the context in a given social situation. That’s true professionally and in our educational lives as well. So we’re a bunch of different things, like all people are, and I wanted to show some different sides to Native people that are not typically shown.”