Welcome to the Reader's Roundtable edition of CADL Cast

with Jessica Trotter, Mari Garza and Cheryl Lindemann.

Welcome back to Readers Roundtable edition of CADL Cast.

I am Jessica Trotter

and I'm joined around the mic by Cheryl Lindemann and Maricela Garza.

It's Native American Heritage Month and we really wanted to highlight

a selection of titles featuring indigenous authors.

There is

so much more to be found lately, which is so fabulous

and so many great works.

Yeah, that even kind of cutting this down to fit this.

It's a little hard.

To see that change from when I started becoming a librarian and publishing.

I mean, the stories were there.

They just weren't being published. Exactly.

I remember Louise Erdrich has stories and, you know, a few other authors.

But now.

In so many.

Other areas to children's adult nonfiction.

I do think it's really amazing thing.

I'm going to go ahead and get

us started with the first title that I'm recommending.

It's actually the reluctant storyteller

by Art Colson, and it's illustrated by Carolyn Bear.

Won't Walk, Don't walk. I'm sorry.

KAHLENBERG Don't walk.

And I actually before I began talking about this book, I do remember,

like lately I am thinking of picture books that are nonfiction.

Like we are still here,

my traces are all and also we are grateful.

I mean, these are just lovely, gorgeous, gorgeous books.

And that's been a lot of what I've been focusing on in the last few years.

But I've been reading fiction titles, too, and this one appealed to me.

It's called The Reluctant Storyteller, and it's actually a very compact

little book.

It's by Ray Craft of books, and there's kind of like

maybe two or three stories and then a nice little nonfiction section in the back.

So I, I recommend not just the story that I'm going to talk about,

but the other ones that are listed here.

So it's, like I said, a slim book and it starts off

with this family that's living in Minnesota.

And there's they all live together.

And this is the ten killer family.

They live with the boy, lives with his mom.

His name is Maurice, his mom, his uncles

and a number of other people all related

to the extended family in Minnesota.

And it's kind of a fiction book that has illustrations in it.

So it will I think it will definitely appeal to early readers,

early fiction readers. And

so Maurice talks, you can tell that he has

a little bit of resentment in that his family, they're storytellers.

They they like to tell tall tales, things that make people

laugh, things from family history.

And he's kind of like, not given so much to telling stories.

And he feels like he's being expected to tell

to also be a storyteller.

And he is on his way to

a spring break that he doesn't really want to be on

with his two uncles heading out to Oklahoma

because he is Cherokee

and he is heading to the area

in Oklahoma where the rest of his extended family lives.

He ends up going to a powwow

and you get to hear a little bit about what his dreams are for his life.

So this is a modern day and that's what I think most appealed to me is like I'm

getting to read about, you know, the potential for a boy in modern day

America living in native nations.

He's interested in cooking.

He's interested in bringing food alive, in making

Native American foods tasty for everyone

and bringing them to the greater cultures out there. But

it's illustrated.

I want to point you to pages 26 and 27,

because this is one of the stories that's featured here

is this story that one of the uncles tells the story of this fox

who is out in the woods and he's hanging out with the birds.

And he really wants to be like the birds.

But, you know, foxes don't generally fly.

And it is this tale, this story

that, you know, where he finds a way

to follow the birds up and up and up and up.

And it's kind of the setup for how he gets to

live out his dream.

That should be true as his his nickname is.

I liked the very end.

Well, I'm not sure if I mentioned this yet.

Page 26 and 27. You have to look at it.

Beautiful, beautiful illustrations.

You see the woods, you see the fox out there with the birds.

Really, really nice.

But I want to mention the very end where Tracy Sorrell gives

a really nice introduction to what modern day life is like

in a Cherokee reservation, lands in Oklahoma,

very developed,

first nation out there someplace I'd really like to visit.

And an invitation exists for children with school groups or even on your own,

with your family to go to go visit.

Yeah. Wow.

Okay. That sounds. Really good.

Well, I'm going to follow that up with I never read middle grade novels.

Never.

But I read a middle I've actually read to this year.

But this is one of them.

Um, the star that always stays by Anna Rose

Johnson is a middle grade novel set around about 1914,

and it features a bright and feisty young woman named Novella Nelson.

She is, uh, part Ojibwa,

and her father is actually.

He's from Norway.

Um, and she.

Her early life is on Beaver Island.

Um, she spends time with her, with grandpa,

who instilled a pride in her Ojibwa heritage.

But, um, her parents get a divorce, and this is 1914.

This is this very stigmatizing for the family.

Um, and her mother actually

sort of frighteningly gets married very quickly afterwards and moves

the family to Boyne City, where she now has, she has a new house, new school

stepfather, step

brother, who she's really not sure about older stepsister.

So she's just got all these firsts

and, you know, pulled out of everything she knows.

And on top of that, her mother would like her, not to mention

that she is native and not mention their heritage

because she's already got the stigma of the divorce hanging over her head.

And it's just she wants them to fit in.

And this is not thrilled with all of this.

And Roz Johnson does a really great,

um, kind of peek into this,

you know, young woman's life as she's just sort of trying to make it make sense.

Um, nearby is sort of leans hunter

inspiration from her favorite books like little women and and of green Gables.

And in some ways the the book itself becomes sort of a lovely, lovely

kind of love letter to those girl feisty girl characters in children's literature.

But it also pulls from,

uh, Johnson's own family history, too.

And there's a bit of a

afterword that talks about those times as well.

So again, it's, it's so it's Michigan story, it's uh, uh,

Ojibway family and it's kind of trying to make,

um, trying to understand that second found family and it,

it works out and that, I will say I particularly like this

because very rarely is the stepparent a really sweet, cool person in the story.

Yeah. That's and he is in this book.

So this is the star that always stays by Anna Rose Johnson.

Nice.

Yeah, that looks. Sounds so good.

That's been recommended a lot, I feel like.

Yeah, people are really enjoying that.

I have a book

called The Seed Keeper, a novel by Diane Wilson,

and this is by Milkweed Editions.

And we've talked about them on the podcast before.

They did an automatic buy now.

Yeah, pretty much.

They they make the most beautiful books.

They're so careful. They're beautifully made.

They're just they're just they're like works of art, each of them.

So are almost all the books we talk about.

But there's just a special carefulness put into these books

and this is a beautiful

and and moving, also painful work of fiction.

And it's about Rosalee ironing, who is a Dakota woman.

It's not just her story.

It starts with her, but it goes back multi generations to the US Dakota War of 1862

and the resettlement at that time of land and resettling of

of Indigenous people off their land goes into the boarding schools

and also talks about seeds and saving seeds, heirloom seeds

that were saved by by women during the U.S.

Dakota War, by putting they so them into their clothing.

And they buried them into these very tight, sealed, airtight places

so that they could be found by generations going forward

because seeds represented literally and figuratively survival.

MM Well then you move forward into settled land,

settled by European settlers, settled by German sources

set in Minnesota, the Minnesota River set in the Mankato.

Part of the story, part alongside the river.

But now you have land that's been settled by the largely German

immigrants in the area and Rosalie Iron Wing through a turn of events

ends up marrying one of the white farmers in the area.

And she does end up loving her life.

And she has she uses the seeds

from the German women in the family, the heirloom seeds.

She just loves gardening. Love seeds.

Well, a chemical company comes in town

and it says, hey, this is going to change everything.

You use our seeds.

And it sounds very chillingly similar to some true stories in America

of something happening like that.

You use our seeds, you're going to have better yields,

but you have to sign a contract, you have to use our seeds,

and you have to use these chemically treated scenes

that you have to use these chemicals.

Well, her husband ends up dying of cancer related to the chemicals.

So there's another complication there.

But this goes through multi multiple generations

of of people in the her family telling the story

and ultimately talking about the resilience of the seeds

and the resilience of of the women and of the family.

The author, Diane Wilson, is a Dakota member of Dakota Nation,

and she's also the head of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance.

And she talks about that in the back of the book

and the importance of saving seeds and of resisting efforts

to use patented and chemically treated seeds.

So there's a lot going on here, but just a beautiful book, The Seed Keeper.

Very cool.

Yeah. Oh, nice.

Well, I do have another picture book.

This is very song by Mikayla Gold.

And you probably recognize her name because she is the Caldecott

medalist and number one New York Times best selling artist of

We Are Water Protectors.

This was written by that book, was written by Carol Lindstrom.

But she's just really beginning to put out a lot more a lot more titles.

But that was

that was how I learned about that author or that illustrator, Mikayla Gold.

This is a beautiful, beautiful book

that kind of is an ode to the fruits of the land and specifically berries.

In this case,

she talks about here's a grandma and a daughter and granddaughter going

into the woods and they're pointing out all these different berries.

Berries, some that I had never heard of.

There's a well, I have heard of Linden Berries, a thimble berries.

I felt a little tiny bit familiar with those bunch berries,

bog blueberries.

It's just a lovely, lovely book.

And I was listening to some music this morning that reminded me

a lot of this music, this book in that

there's just this very like quiet

that you get going into the woods or the forest to look for the berries.

You have grandma and and the granddaughter, too,

celebrating the the beautiful fruits

of the land literally eaten in this case.

Right.

But I yeah, I really liked it.

And I want to say that Mikayla is from Alaska, which is, again,

not a nut, not a group of first peoples or native peoples

that I get to know, read much about.

So it was really, really a nice book.

And Cheryl, you said you had read this one, too.

Yeah, I loved that one.

And one of the things I loved about it is the mention of thimble berries.

One of my favorite stories of my grandmother, who grew up in the U.P.

and the Quinault Peninsula, which is rich with thimble

berries, was picking them blueberries with her in the woods.

So when I got to that point, I talked about that with my daughter.

And we have, you know, my parents have jars of blueberry jam

in their cupboard right now.

I probably used it for breakfast this morning.

We have a picture of them blueberries in our kitchen.

Nice big fans.

So it was really cool to see it in a book.

Yeah, because you just don't, you know,

it's surprising how many people don't know about them.

And it was just so fun to see it and think, Oh, of course, Alaska.

Upper Michigan kind of makes sense, you know, similar.

Yeah, similar climate. I mean, to some degree.

So what I really like, I think, you know, as I was listening to that music,

there's this theme in the book about, you know, taking care of the land.

We take care of the land and the land takes care of us.

It's just it's a refrain that goes goes on through the book.

It's really, really beautiful.

And just this this quiet way of enjoying the fruits

of what's inside the forests when you go out looking.

Yeah, yeah.

Very cool.

Okay, so I have a

fiction novel and this had been

I'm actually really a great I don't want to say

excuse because this meant I could bump this book up high on my higher on my list.

To do this podcast, I want to talk about

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan TALTY.

It's a collection of interlinked stories.

It's in a debut.

It's already it's been longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal

for Excellence, and it won the New England Book Award for Fiction.

This is stories

about contemporary life on the on and around the Penobscot

Indian Island Reservation for the Scott Tribe in Maine.

And they run the gamut from its biting humor, some sweet stories and

some really gut wrenching heartbreak.

He's examining generational trauma,

contemporary afflictions

and asking the questions.

I mean, you start to see as the stories go on,

kind of you're not it's not clear

what the link is from the beginning between the stories

you have to primary narrators is what it feels like.

But it is.

There's a running feeling and it comes out in words

in the IT towards the end of the book and it's like,

how did we get here and how do we get out of here?

It is, it is more on the downer side,

but it's also

there's some celebration but there's some

just an understanding of

how hard we've made it.

So it's just was this use of drugs that deals with issues of just

health care,

just family, um,

the cycles that you get stuck in.

So it's, it's really beautiful writing the list.

If you, if you're a person who's into picking a book by cover quotes

that people who have been blurbed for this book is off the chart,

but top and front and center is Tommy Orange.

And I'm pretty much on board with anything.

Tommy Orange is saying you should read,

but it also includes Brandon Hobson,

Carol Hoffman, Toni Johnson.

If you actually go to the page for the it's a Tin House publication,

if you actually go to the Tin House page, it just goes on and on and on forever.

It's really well done. It's real.

And I will add that it is a very good audiobook too.

I actually listen to a good portion of it.

So if you are an audiobook reader, this is a good one too.

Um, just

moving a set of stories and,

and maybe more comfortable

given it is a heavier topic, given that it is a set of short stories that you can

sort of pick up and think about and put down and think about.

So highly recommended.

The Night of the Living Rise by Morgan TALTY.

It sounds so good. Sounds nice.

Well, that sort of leads into my next book, Tommy Orange Blurb,

because this one has a Tommy Orange blurb on it too, as well as Alice Walker

and an introduction by our own Hattie Roy.

This is a very unique and exquisitely beautiful book called No Country

for Eight Spot Butterflies, a lyric essay

by Julian Egan and lyric it really is.

Julian is

indigenous

from Guam, born and raised in Guam,

and he is of the Chamorro tribe.

And this was Marty had mentioned in a previous podcast

about books that are set in places that you don't usually hear about.

I can honestly say in my career as a librarian,

I have never read a book fiction or nonfiction set in Guam.

So now I'm sure that they're there and we just haven't gotten to them.

But when I found that this is what this was about, I was just

there was no way I wasn't reading it.

It's an extremely slim volume and it's a compilation.

So it's a mix of poetry essays, two

amazing commencement speeches and it's

he is a human rights and environmental lawyer in Guam.

And he's been on some pretty important cases,

especially regarding the environment and environmental justice in Guam.

You know, having a large, long history of involvement with the U.S.

military being based there.

They're considering another base right now that it features in the book.

But there are parts of Guam that get displaced.

And one of them is a piece of land that has the eight spot butterfly, has a correct

and correct

environment for it to thrive and it's being threatened.

Birds have already been threatened on Guam because of different military exercises

that were there, where the fallout from

the military exercises looked like snow and children played in it.

So we have that history here, but we have this absolutely lyric,

incredibly beautiful writing.

And he's a big fan of Arundhati Roy

and she wrote a book called The God of Small Things.

And he talks about the small things and about

how can a government ever think about or love the small things?

And if they did, what a difference it would make if they loved the eight spot

butterfly, if they loved a people

who are a small number of them on a small piece of land

you all it goes all if we if we looked at things differently right.

So it's extremely rich.

It's one of the smallest books I've read this year, but absolutely worth it.

And I hope that he's on a tour this year and I hope that you get a chance

to check this one out.

No country for eight spot butterflies.

Okay.

So my last book is Still This Love Goes On.

And this is actually a book based on the lyrics by Buffy Sainte-Marie,

and it's illustrated by one of my favorite

illustrators, Julie Flood.

Well, I'll talk about the pictures in a moment, but let me just read

some of the lyrics or the writing from this book set beside

a Beaver Dam and watch the winter grow.

Ice was hard with little tracks appearing on the snow.

Fog is in the valley now and all the geese have gone cross the moon.

I saw them go and still this love goes on

and on Still this love goes on.

This is just an amazing, amazing song.

I did Look up

Buffy Sainte-Marie singing.

She is not just an activist, but a singer,

a movie, someone involved in the movies.

She's somewhat of like a folk singer.

Perhaps that was my take on listening to the song Just Beautiful

in Her, the way she's pointing to the land

and the love that you have for the the land around you.

She wrote the song in Alberta, and I will mention that these two

collaborators, Julie Flatt and Buffy

Sainte-Marie, are Canadian or

Kurri

Kurri Métis, in the case of Julie Flatt, which who we have talked about before,

but Buffy is Cree and I really the

the illustrations are just very

not simple in that just quiet.

And I think what I love the most about Julie Flats work,

it's actually gives you these pictures of native communities coming together

to celebrate whether it would be just a mom and a daughter or jingle dancers.

Just a gorgeous, gorgeous book.

I think you get to think about,

you know, what are the things that we love?

And also thinking about outside being such a beautiful place that,

you know, we'll love you always and you get to love, too,

whether you're out in the woods or are in the city.

So I hope you check it out.

It's really nice.

Okay. It's beautiful.

Julie Flat. I mean, yeah.

You just can't go wrong with the Julie Flatt book.

Oh, no,

no. Okay, we're going to finish on a hard left.

I have.

This was a kind of out of the blue find for me, and it was really for

my last book is Peacekeeper by Belle Blanchard.

This is debut.

Ms. an author Michigan setting

coming back to the Anishinaabe peoples

and this is

at its heart a mystery

but it starts with the thought

and it was kind of I've seen the

Blanchard interview.

It started as a passing thought.

And to drive into work one day like, so

what would what would the world look like

if North America had been colonized?

How would how would the indigenous

communities have developed without that?

And so that's the premise of the world.

And it's a it's a well-developed world

that this mystery is set against. It's

and it means

really thinking through what

the Blanchard has a law background

and that's sort of one of the areas where she really puts a lot of thought

into what's going on in terms of what legal systems would would prevail.

And as as you're coming through.

And so she developed, you know, what she thought would be a good system.

And her

main character tremendously is a peacekeeper.

It's sort of the equivalent of a

policeman type person, but it's not the same.

I mean, it is a wholly developed different system.

Um, and

he is the central character.

He, his world came crashing down on him 20 years before.

Um, he had been at a monument festival

in and around what, what is now the Sainte-Marie on both sides.

Um, the Canadian and and side

what is now the US side.

And he'd been out with friends when he got home.

His mother is dead before anything else can happen.

His father,

uh, confesses, and they have.

There are only so many.

I mean, they have developed the system.

It is very, very rare.

It's more a system of, um, reparation than it is

a system of penalizing.

But there's very rare cases where somebody is put away and actually imprisoned.

And his father.

This is a case where his father is actually imprisoned,

um, and he's left alone to care for a traumatized younger sister.

He leans very heavily on his mother's best friend, um, to help.

And so they kind of go on.

He that's

of probably part of the reason he becomes a peacekeeper.

Um, 20 years have passed.

It's kind of a not healthy cycle.

Um, him kind of home with his sister when he's not at work.

Um, his sister kind of locking herself in a room but expecting to be around

this sort of very it's uncomfortable

setting 20 years of past

women festival is happening and again

his mother's best friend is murdered

too similar to strange

he really needs to know what's going on and he will do anything

to hunt down the answers to why this is happening around him and what's going on.

So it's a domestic thriller.

It's very twisty, and then it's got a really well

developed world and it's the first of a series.

So I'm really looking forward to the next one, which I think is due out in

one to

say, March, but it's early spring, so I'm really looking forward to.

And that's the Peacekeeper by Bille Blanchard.

Nice. Yeah.

I think that's the first one we're doing today. Yeah.

Thank you all for listening.

Go search out more of these authors.

They are wonderful and it's so cool that there is such

a bounty of indigenous authors finally getting published and shared.

It's absolutely.

Very cool.

So happy reading, everybody.

Happy reading.

That be reading.

Thank you.