The first and second posts in this series were filled with a variety of forms and styles, and last time there was talk of  poetry, more mythology, some short stories, and a collection of academic essays. Now: a mystery, a dystopia, and more poetry.

How comforting to pick up a copy of Thomas King’s Deep House (2022), the latest in the Thumps DreadfulWater series. King, a Greek/Cherokee writer, is one of my MRE authors (MustReadEverything), and the last time I spent in the company of his series was here, with Obsidian. It’s been awhile, and time has passed with Thumps, too:

“During the pandemic, when people were supposed to stay in their homes, Thumps had rediscovered the pleasure of sitting and reading. Archie had helped. The Aegean had been closed for much of the contagion, but the little Greek had dropped off care packages of books on Thumps’s porch. The man could be a pain with his incessant interest in the lives of the people around him, but there was nothing wrong with his generosity.”

Even though those who have followed the path of both Thomas King and Thumps DreadfulWater can recognise some elements of their lives that are shared, Archie has—until now—been the only bookish element of this series. But here Thumps has, like so many others who weren’t readers, learned to spend time with a book during lockdown. Whereas he’s been all about his camera, now he’s into Love in the Time of Cholera.

“Everyone likes mysteries,” the sheriff says to Thumps, who relies in typical taciturn simplicity: “No, they don’t.” But the sheriff transforms a recent oddity in the community into the title of a mystery novel and drops it into casual conversation, knowingly drawing Thumps towards solving a mystery once more.

It would be possible to gobble King’s mysteries. The chapters are short, the font is generous, and there’s a lot of dialogue and only a few new characters. But I enjoy parsing them out, a couple of chapters in the evenings. In contrast, the next novel I read in a single sitting.

Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) begins with scenes from ordinary family life in the North, a father providing for his family (wife and children, extended family too) by hunting (not for sport, nor for gratuitous gore, but simply an act of sustenance in the context of Indigenous life on the land) and preparing for the coming winter. It’s a typical week, but there has been a power outage, so the parents long for the opportunity to “put the kids in front of a movie” and observe how strange it is to see strings of homes without lights in their windows. This outage also creates the opportunity to discuss the process of negotiating for this power on the reservation land, lines running from the massive dam to the east, which meant that the band’s diesel system would be decommissioned (all the individual generators running off fuel hauls trucked in) the next year.

Evan’s friend teases that he is lucky to have a “good kwe at home” to raise their kids “right” and the good-natured ribbing adds a light-heartedness to scenes of hard work and increasing worry as a storm approaches. Evan grew up without cell service, which his parents knew nothing of, which his children accept as commonplace in the present-day: the generational contrasts in technology and tradition are elements of curiosity at first, but later play into the story directly.

The connection to white culture, to government money, is also provided for context (for instance, the way that the housing that was originally built to house workers from the South who worked to establish that hydro grid was temporary from a southern perspective but “stayed up and got used” from the perspective of those living on the rez) but dependence on that southern culture soon takes on a particular important plot-wise as well.

For the sake of those readers who are concerned that this is too dark a story to read, but also avoid spoilers, I’ll say that Rice’s story is structured around the seasons and deliberately ends at spring.

Giles Benaway’s Ceremonies for the Dead (2013) is a collection in five parts: Prayers and Invocations, Feasting the Murmuring Bones, Gods of My Fathers, Lovers and Other Strangers, and Good the Dark. The sections reflect the sombre and haunted tone of the work. Trauma lurks. “Advice for Abused Children” begins: “the most important thing to remember / is everything was your fault.” There are many kinds of losses, from childhood innocence to dementia. In “Lingering” (which opens with an epigraph from a Sue Sinclair poem), “his memories come undone, clutter up the room in layers of meaning, stagnant with loss as he realizes time has left him here alone.”

In “Fainting,” there is a “skin forgetting itself, turning me out instead of keeping me in.” This reminds me that the poet now identifies as Gwen and the relationship between inner and outer selves figures prominently throughout the work. Benaway also identifies as Odawa Potawatomi Cherokee British and Anglo Métis.

Mourners’ heads like trampled grasses,
tilt forward, bend at the middle, fall back
as if a spine was another excuse
for undignified behavior. “Cemetery”

June is a popular time to read and discuss indigenous literatures in (the country currently called) Canada, but of course anyone can start a personal reading project at any time, even if you’re not in the habit of doing so.

If you enjoy reading in company, Lisa at AnzLitLovers is hosting a week dedicated to the works of indigenous authors, an event she has retitled First Nations Reading Week, July 3rd-10th, and she has plenty of recommendations to peruse as well.