eBook From the River's Edge ePub

Everyone should read this book.

I recently read "From The River’s Edge" a second time after letting it lie for more than a year. I am so glad I did. I have been reading Native American fiction, history, and culture for almost fifty years and I now feel this book ranks with some of the best. I liked "From the River's Edge" the first time but I like it a lot more now. The first time around I was focused on the events and trying to sort out timelines and characters from John's early life and their relationship to his current predicament.

There is the terrible historical trauma of losing culture and integrity of life with Ash Hollow murdering General Harney's edicts to the council as they face colonial subjugation to life along the river. Harney makes their situation all too clear. They are under occupation by foreign rule with all the un-natural legal, religious, educational, and political systems that entails.

Then, after a century, comes traumatic disruption of their new life along the river. Lifelong homes, assets, memories, and sense of place are once again forcibly taken for benefit of the colonizers. The unfair removal itself would have to be highly traumatic. And, there is grief for multi-layered personal, familial, tribal and cultural losses. Like in a sensory deprivation chamber, identity and culture are stripped away with the loss of input from a known environment. Nonetheless, John goes on ranching as best he can up the hill from the encroaching water, dying trees, and lost barns, fields, and gardens-- house and cows are all that he had moved.

His wife is Christian but he is a somewhat reluctant carrier of traditional practices entrusted him by family elders. After one ceremony, he finds solace with a beautiful young lover much desired and used by many men. He becomes Aurelia's protection from them and she an exotic refuge from his failure to protect his culture, his ranching enterprise, his true self and his extended family.

Thus stuck in powerful grief, he is traumatized again as he finds almost half his hard earned (against all odds) cattle herd diminished by half. He has been on a drinking spree (connecting him) with his brothers. He knows the trial will not make things right. There will be no restoration of his herd, his fragile economic solvency, and his sense of self. But, the district attorney is hell bent on exacting retribution from the smug son of white neighbors.

The trial adds new trauma even as it triggers old ones. As with Camus’ Meursalt in "The Stranger," John’s character is put on trial. His love affair is outed with wife and daughter in attendance. Sacred ties to other family are twisted and distorted. When against all odds the white man is convicted by the jury, he perpetrates another devastating trauma against John. The novel ends on a note of hope for John and for culture and family to find meaningful life against formidable odds.

My summary here does much injustice to the author’s skill at subtly weaving these and other elements into a very beautiful and forceful story with a minimum of preaching about the underlying injustices highlighted above. Reading a second time, I was struck again by how powerfully the fabric of everyday life rings true and the beauty of the land, culture and people becomes palpable throughout. If you want to better understand the depth of emotions motivating today’s water protectors along this river in North Dakota, you can learn much from this book. Enjoy.

"Surrounded and absorbed, we tread like Etruscans on the edge of useless law; we pray to the giver of prayer, we give the cane whistle in ceremony, we swing the heavy silver chain of incense burners. Migration makes new citizens of Rome." ― Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

The author's quote sums the experiences of the protagonist,John Tatekeya. He is a Dakotah and a cattleman, who loses forty-two head of his hereford herd to cattle rustlers. When he identifies three of the animals and seeks help through the white man's court he finds the experience quite removed from his cultural beliefs. John reflects upon the changes in his life due to the white man's actions. He is further disillusioned when he finds a family member testifying against him. As the case progresses, John realizes that his life is changing forever. He wins the case but his hay is mysteriously burned immediately afterward. What should he do now?

During the tale, the author leads the reader into the mind of John Tatekeya as he struggles with what he learned from the old ones such Benno who taught him so much, contrasting it with the white man's law. The thoughts of his lover, Aurelia, were less meaningful for me but I think that the author may have meant to show the differences between the ages. Aurelia is less attuned to the wisdom of the old ones, perhaps more attuned to living today. (John is much older than she is.) This is a quiet and thought provoking read that can help the reader begin to understand the conflicts that have long existed between the white and Indian cultures. I hope that I do. I found this read a moving experience.