Fresh!

"The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal" edited by Geary Hobson, Janet McAdams and Kathryn Walkiewicz. The following is from University of Oklahoma Press website:

Writing by Indians of the American Southeast who were not removed

The two-hundred-year-old myth of the “vanishing” American Indian still holds some credence in the American Southeast, the region from which tens of thousands of Indians were relocated after passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Yet, as the editors of this volume amply demonstrate, a significant Indian population remained behind after those massive relocations.

The first anthology to focus on the literary work of Native Americans who trace their ancestry to “people who stayed” in southeastern states after 1830, this volume represents every state and every genre, including short stories, excerpts from novels, poetry, essays, plays, and even Web postings. Although most works are contemporary, the collection covers the entire post-Removal era. Some of the contributors are well known, while others have only recently emerged as important literary voices.

The Dance Boots: Stories by Linda LeGarde Grove

In this stirring collection of linked stories, Linda LeGarde Grover portrays an Ojibwe community struggling to follow traditional ways of life in the face of a relentlessly changing world.

In the title story an aunt recounts the harsh legacy of Indian boarding schools that tried to break the indigenous culture. In doing so she passes on to her niece the Ojibwe tradition of honoring elders through their stories. In “Refugees Living and Dying in the West End of Duluth,” this same niece comes of age in the 1970s against the backdrop of her forcibly dispersed family. A cycle of boarding schools, alcoholism, and violence haunts these stories even as the characters find beauty and solace in their large extended families. (The University of Georgia Press)

Muscogee Daughter: My Sojourn to the Miss America Pageant by Susan Supernaw, foreword by Geary Hobson

How American is Miss America? For Susan Supernaw, a Muscogee-Creek and Munsee Native American, the question wasn't just academic. Throughout a childhood clouded by poverty, alcoholism, and abuse, Supernaw sought escape in school and dance and the Native American Church. She became a presidential scholar, won a scholarship to college, and was crowned Miss Oklahoma in 1971. Supernaw might not have won the Miss America pageant that year, but she did call attention to the Native peoples living largely invisible lives throughout their own American land. And she did at long last earn her Native American name. (University of Nebraska Press)