"Fireboy"
By Edward Willett
Published by Shadowpaw Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$22.99
ISBN 978-1-998273-42-3
There are several things I can count on
each time I open a book for young readers by Regina author Edward Willett: the
story will be technically well-written; the characters credible and clever; and
whatever weird, fantastical situations the young cast finds themselves in,
there’s bound to be laughs along the way. In short, I know I’ll be impressed.
Fireboy is the Aurora Award-winning author and publisher’s latest title, and with this blaze-paced novel it’s clear that Willett’s lost none of his … fire. The story’s told by thirteen-year-old Samantha “Sam” MacReady, who missed out on her Grade 7 overnight field trip (“a camping-trip-and-astronomy-adventure”) in May and thus was spared when her fellow “Limberpine,” Alberta classmates were involved in a tragic school bus accident. The bus was driven by Grade 7 science teacher Dr. Ballard, and he and a single student—loner Meg, from the wrong side of the tracks—were the sole survivors. The remaining nineteen students mysteriously vanished, and no one can say for sure what even caused the bus to flip on its side.
After the news crews left the small town folks alone and “The rest of the world moved on,” motherless Sam “dealt with [the tragedy] by moping and throwing things and binge-watching anime.” She especially mourns the loss of her best friend, Lorenzo. Sam’s dad takes her camping to try to cheer her, but the poor weather does little to improve her mood. She says, “̒He thought we would bond through shared misery. I don’t know if we bonded, but we definitely mildewed.’”
Later that night Sam’s woken by a voice calling her name. She leaves her tent to find that the previously extinguished campfire is now wildly ablaze, her name’s being called from within it, and she sees Lorenzo’s face in the fire, but “It looked like a mask made of glass and filled with flames.” Then he screamed.
The following night, Lorenzo appears to Sam again, aflame “in the trees behind [Sam’s] barn.” The boy’s become a walking, talking campfire, and he tells Sam that he doesn’t know what happened the day of the accident, but he woke up “locked in a room.” He doesn’t know where his actual body is, but he knows the other kids are detained, as well. There’s a powerful masked man and his wife, in lab coats, and a vague awareness of being controlled by the man via a strange pressure, but Lorenzo’s quickly learned how to return to his human body from his “flamesicle” state, if only briefly.
Sam has her work cut out for her. How will she rescue Lorenzo and their classmates? Does Dr. Ballard or the vice principal have anything to do with the crash and abduction? And what in the world do the four classical elements (Earth, Wind, Fire and Water) and Paracelsus, “’the prince of alchemists,’” have to do with all of this?
Sam’s life’s become “a straight-to-video horror movie,” and it’s a treat to read Fireboy and find out why.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“We are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition”
By Sarah Hernandez
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$39.95
ISBN 9-780889-779181
In We are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition, American academic Sarah Hernandez (Sicangu Lakota) examines the colonial dismantling of Dakota, Nakota and Lakota intellectual traditions, including “star knowledge through oral storytelling.” She writes that when missionaries arrived in the early nineteenth century, the “linguistic [colonization]” began.
Hernandez teaches Native American literature and is the director for the Institute for American Indian Research at the University of New Mexico. She states that “missionary translations of the Dakota language set a dangerous precedent that denigrated Oceti Sakowin star knowledge and supplanted [their] tribal land narratives with new settler-colonial land narratives that ensured that many of our people converted to Christianity and assimilated to the American nation.” Missionaries learned the Dakota language and printed bilingual Dakota-English newspapers which contained “misinterpretation[s] of Dakota origin narratives” and essentially “delegitimize[d] the Oceti Sakowin’s intellectual traditions”—and Christians replaced them with their own. These settler-colonials subsequently “stripped the Dakota nation of 35 million acres of land” and forced them onto a “ten-mile-wide reservation” in Minnesota.
Hernandez frequently makes a connection between land and ideology. Countless injustices followed the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, including the confinement of “Dakota women, children, and elders” into a “concentration camp” known then as the Crow Creek Agency, where 300 people died within a year. Survivors were subjected to hard labour and sexual assault. The women—revered as the tribes’ “culture keepers and culture bearers”—still kept their traditional stories alive, despite hardships that ranged from imprisonment to exile to boarding schools.
Traditional stories were passed down through the generations, resulting in almost 200 books authored by Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota women who used “English-language literacy and the printing press to perpetuate the knowledge handed down by oral storytellers and historians.”
In the book’s second section, Hernandez demonstrates how these oral traditions have been preserved via “re-imagining” by print storytellers, including Charles Alexander Eastman (b. 1858), whose eleven novels feature his grandmother; Ella Cara Deloria (author of Waterlily, a novel concerning Lakota women “bound together by kinship, storytelling, and tradition”); and writers involved in the Oak Lake Writers’ Society, a longstanding “tribal group … dedicated to protecting and defending the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota literary traditions” via publications, presentations and a podcast series, #NativeReads.
Hernandez is a longtime member of the Oceti Sakowin-led Oak Lake Writers’ Society, and she contends that this combination of “old and new land narratives, old and new literary genres” is an “extension of the Oceti Sakowin oral tradition,” and that the books produced will “guide and empower future generations by reminding [them] of ]their] connection to the stars, the land, and each other.”
This scholarly text is an homage to the women who were the early story and culture keepers, and it’s a celebration of those Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota women who continue the Oceti Sakowin literary tradition—and healing—today. The book cover’s significant “ledger art” (art superimposed over a financial or legal document) was created by Ruben Hernandez, the writer’s brother.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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“Nakón-wico'i'e né uspénic'iciyac/Practising Nakoda: A Thematic Dictionary”
By Vincent Collette, Tom Shawl and
Wilma Kennedy
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$27.95
ISBN 9-781779-400185
Language and cultural identity are intrinsically connected, and for the Nakoda people, who believe that “language is a gift of the Creator,” the Nakoda language is, “through prayers and songs, the means by which important cultural values and spiritual knowledge are transmitted from generations to generations.” This is the first tenet I learned in the tri-authored book, Nakón-wico'i'e né uspénic'iciyac/Practising Nakoda: A Thematic Dictionary, published by University of Regina Press.
In Canada, Nakoda (aka Stoney or Assiniboine) is spoken by an estimated 50-150 people … and they’re aging. Understanding the import of language to one’s culture, Vincent Collette—professor of linguistics at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi—teamed with Montana’s Tom Shawl (former Nakoda culture and language instructor at the Aannii Nakoda College) and activist Wilma Kennedy (d. 2020), who lived on the Carry the Kettle Nakoda First Nation in Saskatchewan and had previously worked with Collette on two other Nakoda books (including a concise dictionary), to create a “thematic” dictionary for Nakoda-learners.
The thematic dictionary makes learning Nakoda easier as Nakoda’s a “polysynthetic language where words are often built up with many elements that attach to the root,” and thus seeing the words in thematic groupings builds the student’s “morphological awareness.” Once the root of each word is learned, and the “morphemes” (a morpheme is the smallest unit of language that contains meaning, and there are five types. "Dog" is an example of a free morpheme … the word "incoming" has three morphemes "-in," "come," and "-ing" – study.com) understood, learning Nakoda’s made easier.
In short, this is no A to Z dictionary: it's “divided into sections meant to enhance daily and ceremonial communication (including dances, ceremonies, and ceremonial clothing),” and yes, one could perhaps find an app and locate the Nakoda word for “dress,” for example, but this dictionary is a teaching tool that will help learners form sentences “in order to communicate in a meaningful way with other Nakoda speakers.”
Nakoda consists of eight vowels and seven word classes, including nouns, verbs, and interjections, like Ahé (an “expression of humility used at the beginning of prayers or songs”). Unlike English, verbs are “almost always at the end of the sentence,” making Lakoda a SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) language. The writers give this example: English: That dog is running. Nakoda: Dog that runs.
The book’s many chapters, or themes, include the “Human Body,” “Feelings, Instincts, Emotions, and Motives,” and “Agriculture, Gardening, and Ranching.” With this dictionary you can learn how to say both practical, everyday things like, “It is a very nice day today, thus we will go fishing” and “My grandmother is in the garden,” and you can also learn how to say specific things, like “My lips are chapped because of the wind,” and “She had two miscarriages.”
As “full immersion with native speakers is not possible” currently, Practising Nakoda is the next best thing for anyone wishing to learn/preserve the language. It’s a ground-breaking reference book “for the documentation, revitalization, and strengthening of Nakoda language and culture.”
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THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
