Slate critics Dan Kois, Meghan O’Rourke, and David Haglund discuss Sheila Heti’s polarizing novel about life and art.
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New Books in Native American Studies - Brendan C. Lindsay, “Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846-1873” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012)
Brendan C. Lindsay‘s impressive if deeply troubling new book centers on two concepts long considered anathema: democracy and genocide. One is an ideal of self-government, the other history’s most unspeakable crime. Yet as Lindsay deftly describes, Euro-American settlers in California harnessed democratic governance to expel, enslave and ultimately murder 90% of a population on their ancestral homelands in the mid-to-late 19th century.
Murder State: California’s Native Genocide, 1846-1873 (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) is difficult but vital reading for residents of any state. Culling evidence from newspapers, public records, and personal narratives, Lindsay’s lays out an ironclad case that “genocide” is precisely the word to describe to the process faced by Native people in California, despite its rarified usage in academic and public discourse.
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Slate Books - Audio Book Club: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Dan Kois, Emily Bazelon and Hanna Rosin discuss the plot-twisting thriller Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.
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World Book Club - Jodi Picoult – My Sister’s Keeper
In September's edition of World Book Club superstar US novelist Jodi Picoult talks about her heart-rending novel My Sister's Keeper.
A searing examination of what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person - My Sister's Keeper confronts the question of whether it is morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child’s life.
In the programme Jodi talks with disarming openness about the near tragedy in her own life that helped to drive her to write the novel and she explains why for her writing feels like a form of schizophrenia.
New Books in Native American Studies - Angela Pulley Hudson, “Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South” (University of North Carolina Press, 2010)
Most historians have understood Native American history through the use of the “middle ground” metaphor. Notably, historian Richard White used this metaphor to explain the social relationships between Native American with European Americans in the Great Lakes region in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. Increasingly, more studies have also emerged to explain such encounters between Native Americans and African Americans, particularly in the Southeast. Angela Pulley Hudson, Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M, is firmly engaged within this wide body of literature in her first published monograph, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). She vividly describes the history of Creeks and their ideas about encounters with outsiders of their land along the geographic borders of Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee from the early national era to the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Her work not only contributes to the analysis of contested borderlands in American history, but also complicates our understanding about the intersections of racial, gender and kinship boundaries in an eloquent way that makes for a great read.
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Slate Books - Audio Book Club: Capital by John Lanchester
Dan Kois, Emily Bazelon and David Haglund discuss the sprawling London novel Capital by John Lanchester.
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New Books in Native American Studies - Kate Buford, “Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe” (Bison Books, 2012)
If you watched the U.S. broadcast of the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony, you may have heard Matt Lauer and Bob Costas mention Jim Thorpe during Sweden’s entrance. Thorpe, arguably the best all-around athlete in U.S. history, won Olympic gold in both the pentathlon and the decathlon in the Stockholm 1912 games. But his victory was marred by a controversial International Olympic Committee (IOC) ruling that stripped him of his medals six months later.
In Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe (Bison Books, 2012), the first comprehensive biography of Thorpe, biographer Kate Buford explores how Thorpe’s Native American heritage shaped his life, but also the impact Thorpe himself had upon American sports. Ultimately, he was the country’s first celebrity athlete, excelling at both baseball and football. His life was memorialized in a 1951 film and, in 1963, Thorpe was among the charter class inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Despite his other successes, the revocation of Jim Thorpe’s medals remains a source of contention for his admirers, Buford among them.In 1982, the IOC approved the reinstatement of Thorpe’s medals and during London 2012, the Hammersmith tube station has been temporarily renamed in Thorpe’s honor. But, despite public outcry, the IOC still refuses to enter Thorpe’s scores into the official record of Olympic events.
As Buford writes: “A gentle person, intelligent and funny, with many flaws, Jim Thorpe was not a complicated man. But what happened to him was.”
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New Books in Native American Studies - Christina Snyder, “Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America” (Harvard UP, 2010)
Most readers are probably more familiar with the context of slavery or captivity in the context the African slave trade than in the Americas. Some may assume that slavery in the Americas was exclusively a phenomenon that became institutionalized into chattel slavery and racially codified exclusively against African Americans by the seventeenth-century. There has been increased scholarly attention over the last decade to expand our ideas of slavery, including scholarship about enslavement of African Americans within the “Five Civilized Tribes.” However, there has been little focus on the long and nuanced history of Native American captivity practices.
Historian Christina Snyder argues that we have to re-imagine the history of captivity by understanding the evolution of such practices amongst Native Americans in her prize-winning book, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2010). Captivity practices existed amongst many indigenous nations from the pre-Columbian era throughout the nineteenth-century. She broadly describes the evolution of these practices from incorporating captives into kin networks, and to shifting notions of slavery that became codified by race. She begins her work by vividly describing Mississippian indigenous cultures of the pre-Columbian era, including the fascinating history of Cahokia, and the captives who were buried in these mounds. She also discusses the roles of Native American women, including Cherokee “beloved women” would were closely involved in determining the fate of captives. Her work is captivating and extensive, and greatly contributes to the historiography.
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Slate Books - Audio Book Club: Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James
Dan Kois, Meghan O'Rourke, and Hanna Rosin discuss the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James.
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New Books in Native American Studies - Nicolas Rosenthal, “Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles” (University of North Carolina Press, 2012)
The term “Indian Country” evokes multiple themes. Encompassing legal, geographic, and ideological dimensions, “Indian Country” is commonly understood to be a space outside of or surrounded by the boundaries of the United States. It’s also been used for a pan-tribal, continental consciousness, found, for example, in the popular periodical Indian Country Today. For non-Natives familiar with the term, however, it’s safe to say what the term does not connote: cities. Indian County is “out there” somewhere, a dusty reservation remote from the bustle of modern life.
Historian Nicolas G. Rosenthal argues that this concept is not only problematic but wholly inaccurate. In Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Rosenthal illuminates the forces that drew or forced Indian people to Los Angeles, the “urban Indian capital of the United States,” and the process of forming individual and communal identities away from tribal homelands. Los Angeles typifies a larger trend. In 1940, the census counted 27,000 Indians living in cities, about 8% of the total Native population. By 1950, it spiked to 45%. In 1980, 53%. While the majority of Rosenthal’s compelling narrative focuses on city of angels, he also reckons with these wider trends, reconceptualizing “Indian Country” to reflect a complicated and diverse reality. His intervention is invaluable.
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