Greg Sarris

Forgetters

"This stunning collection puts humanity and mystery back into the text where they profoundly belong. . . . A must for any serious student of native literatures, or for any serious student of life."—Joy Harjo, poet, author of In Mad Love and War "A wonderful, empowering book."—Michael M.J. Fischer, co-author of Anthropology as Cultural Critique

A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts

Keeping Slug Woman Alive

A Novel in Stories

Grand Avenue

A world-renowned Pomo basket weaver and medicine woman, Mabel McKay expressed her genius through her celebrated baskets, her Dreams, her cures, and the stories with which she kept her culture alive. She spent her life teaching others how the spirit speaks through the Dream, how the spirit heals, and how the spirit demands to be heard. Greg Sarris weaves together stories from Mabel McKay's life with an account of how he tried, and she resisted, telling her story straight—the white people's way. Sarris, an Indian of mixed-blood heritage, finds his own story in his search for Mabel McKay's. Beautifully narrated, Weaving the Dream initiates the reader into Pomo culture and demonstrates how a woman who worked most of her life in a cannery could become a great healer and an artist whose baskets were collected by the Smithsonian. Hearing Mabel McKay's life story, we see that distinctions between material and spiritual and between mundane and magical disappear. What remains is a timeless way of healing, of making art, and of being in the world.

Weaving the Dream

Mabel McKay

This remarkable collection of eight essays offers a rare perspective on the issue of cross-cultural communication. Greg Sarris is concerned with American Indian texts, both oral and written, as well as with other American Indian cultural phenomena such as basketry and religion. His essays cover a range of topics that include orality, art, literary criticism, and pedagogy, and demonstrate that people can see more than just "what things seem to be." Throughout, he asks: How can we read across cultures so as to encourage communication rather than to close it down? Sarris maintains that cultural practices can be understood only in their living, changing contexts. Central to his approach is an understanding of storytelling, a practice that embodies all the indeterminateness, structural looseness, multivalence, and richness of culture itself. He describes encounters between his Indian aunts and Euro-American students and the challenge of reading in a reservation classroom; he brings the reports of earlier ethnographers out of museums into the light of contemporary literary and anthropological theory. Sarris's perspective is exceptional: son of a Coast Miwok/Pomo father and a Jewish mother, he was raised by Mabel McKay--a renowned Cache Creek Pomo basketweaver and medicine woman--and by others, Indian and non-Indian, in Santa Rosa, California. Educated at Stanford, he is now a university professor and recently became Chairman of the Federated Coast Miwok tribe. His own story is woven into these essays and provides valuable insights for anyone interested in cross-cultural communication, including educators, theorists of language and culture, and general readers.

Grand Avenue runs through the center of the Northern California town of Santa Rosa. One stretch of it is home not only to Pomo Indians making a life outside the reservation but also to Mexicans, blacks, and some Portuguese, all trying to find their way among the many obstacles in their turbulent world. Bound together by a lone ancestor, the lives of the American Indians form the core of these stories—tales of healing cures, poison, family rituals, and a humor that allows the inhabitants of Grand Avenue to see their own foibles with a saving grace. A teenage girl falls in love with a crippled horse marked for slaughter. An aging healer summons her strength for one final song. A father seeks a bond with his illegitimate son. A mother searches for the power to care for her cancer-stricken daughter’s spirit. Here is a tapestry of lives rendered with the color, wisdom, and a quest for meaning that are characteristic of the traditional storytelling in which they are rooted, a tradition Sarris grew up hearing and learning. Vibrant with the emotions and realities of a changing world, these narratives—the basis of an HBO miniseries—are all equally stunning and from the heart.

In Watermelon Nights, Greg Sarris tells a powerful tale about the love and forgiveness that keep a modern Native American family together in Santa Rosa, California. Told from the points of view of a twenty-year-old Pomo man named Johnny Severe, his grandmother Elba, and his mother, Iris, this intergenerational saga uncovers the secrets—and traumatic events—that inform each of these characters’ extraordinary powers of perception. First published in 1998, Watermelon Nights remains one of the few works of fiction to illuminate the experiences of urban Native Americans and is the only one to depict the historical conditions that shape a tribe’s rural-to-urban migration. As the novel opens, Johnny is trying to organize the remaining members of his displaced California tribe. At the same time, he is struggling with his own sexuality and thinking about leaving his grandmother’s home for the big city. As the novel shifts perspective, tracing the controversial history of the Pomo people, we learn how the tragic events of Elba’s childhood, as well as Iris’s attempts to separate herself from her cultural roots, make Johnny’s dilemma all the more difficult. In the end, what binds both family and tribe together is a respect—albeit at times reluctant—for the traditions that have withstood so many challenges. This new edition of the novel features a revised preface by the author and an afterword by Reginald Dyck, who identifies broader contexts important to our understanding of the novel, including tribal sovereignty, federal Indian policy, and the effects of historical trauma. Gritty yet rich in emotion, Watermelon Nights stands beside the works of Louise Erdrich, Stephen Graham Jones, and Tommy Orange.

Watermelon Nights

"It is said that Coyote was sitting atop Sonoma Mountain when he decided to create the world and people, and many of the songs that Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people have sung since the beginning of time are gifts from the mountain. The stories go on and on because the mountain itself has so many things--rocks and animals; birds and grasses, fish, frogs, springs and creek, trees--and many of the stories connect with other stories, just as the animals and plants and all other things on Sonoma Mountain connect with one another. In this book of stories from the award-winning author of Grand Avenue, Greg Sarris retells sixteen creation stories from his ancestral homeland."--Provided by publisher.

Stories

How a Mountain Was Made

James Richard Giles

Connie A. Jacobs

This volume seeks to enrich teachers' and students' understanding of the fictional world Louise Erdrich creates and to address the challenges of teaching her novels and poetry. The first part of the book provides background readings that establish a context for teaching Erdrich and acquaint teachers with Native American traditions, history, customs, and culture--especially those of the Ojibwe, or Chippewa. In the second section, experienced teachers of Erdrich discuss the strategies they use to engage students in a sometimes unfamiliar world. Essays provide information on Erdrich's tribe, the Turtle Mountain Chippewa of North Dakota, and an overview of tribal history for the past 150 years; sort through Erdrich's large cast of fictional characters, with their complicated family ties and clan relationships; examine her collaborative relationship with her late husband, Michael Dorris; and offer analysis, cultural references, and approaches to teaching Erdrich's most widely anthologized poems.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich

First published in 1998, Watermelon Nights remains one of the few works of fiction to illuminate the experiences of urban Native Americans and is the only one to depict the historical conditions that shape a tribe's rural-to-urban migration.

A Novel

Bound together by a lone ancestor, the lives of the American Indians form the core of these stories—tales of healing cures, poison, family rituals, and a humor that allows the inhabitants of Grand Avenue to see their own foibles with a saving grace.

Greg Sarris

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