🐱  I read this book as a part of the February reading of @indigenousreadingcircle

🐱  This is easily my first extremely horrifying book of this year, and I have read a book this year that has feces turning into a full ass human. So you get the drift. 

🐱  The plot happens on a Flathead reservation where whites are as prejudiced as ever. Their bars have placards of "No dogs or Indians allowed". 

🐱  Louise White Elk, a young Native American woman, is trying her best to live the way she wants in a world that only has several odds stacked against her. Baptiste Yellow Knife is a Native American man, who has, despite the white man and his persistence, defied movement from the Native ways. Charlie Kicking Woman, the opposite of his cousin Yellow Knife, has become a stooge of the white man and his systems. The story is narrated from the povs of these three people, and as you read, you figure that the povs of the woman and the men while narrating the same incidents, differ a LOT from each other. Almost like they're talking of different incidents altogether. Charlie's pov of being a cop under the white man, and how it affects his identity and community, is a very revealing read. 

🐱  People do things for survival as they think fit. But the reservation, with its extreme weather changes, ferocious rivers, unending violence, oppression, abuse, and snakes, decides how and who gets to survive. 

🐱  This is a grim tale. The writing is poetic and full of similes in so many places, it becomes heavy, not just because of the way it's done but also because of the story it's attempting to tell. I found it a bit slow initially. I also struggled to invest in the characters for the first 60% but then the plot suddenly sped up and things started to happen quickly. I now feel I should go back and read the 60% again because I am sure I missed a few things I should have caught on. The last 40% is hauntingly beautiful. I am still unsure of the dynamics of the main characters and I have several questions but I am glad I kept going and finished the book. I learnt a lot of things I wouldn't have otherwise learnt. 

🐱  I am very keen now to explore more by the author and the genre.

🐱 Quotes 🐱

"I got the call no more than ten minutes into my shift. Some Indian disturbing the peace in the Dixon Bar. I was sick and tired of those calls, sick of the sign above every small bar and tavern across the state of Montana and beyond, anywhere there was an Indian, no dogs or indians allowed. Tired of being the authority charged to uphold a law that forbid me to enter a bar when I wasn’t in uniform. Who the hell was I to haul off a brother looking for small comfort? "

"And I stood there, dumb to the nuns. I stood there with a pencil and a hardback report and I couldn’t make sense of any of it. It just seemed to me the more good the white man tried to do for us the more trouble we had. The government thought it was a good thing for the Indians to attend the white man’s school, to be instructed by a group of women who had never known love. Women who were more lost than we were as a troop of wild-eyed Indians, homesick, lousy, smelling like woodsmoke. Women who came from France, women who came from Germany. Women who were more like us Indians than they cared to admit. Women who had lost their identities, too, even their names, like our names, were lost to them. Nuns. Sisters who were not sisters. Their hands so white there was a gray look about them.
And I used to think they hated us. I’d been struck by these women, had my ears slapped for laughing, had been cuffed so hard I bit through my lower lip. But I felt sorry for these women and their lonesome lives. I used to walk up behind the school and look at the graveyards of all these women buried far from their families, knowing that long after we had left the Ursulines’ they would stay."