A Day Trip To Port Huron, MI

We took an overnight trip to Port Huron, Michigan to donate two family heirlooms to the Port Huron Historical Museum. 

Gary's New Testament has been in his family for almost 200 years and was given to his great-great-grandmother Margaret McDonald Scovile by John Riley, a Native American important in Michigan history. It will now be part of the museum and eventually go to a Native American museum in the future. 

The John Riley New Testament belonging to Margaret Scoville

Andrew Kercher, Manager of Community Engagement for the Port Huron Museums, did a quick search and determined the New Testament was published by the American Bible Society. The ABS was founded in 1816. This book may date between 1818 and 1820! Read my blog post about the bible here.

My father's flea market find of a brass oil can for a lighthouse fourth-order fresnel lens will also be part of the museum collection.

The brass fuel can for a fourth-order fresnel lens

Port Huron is situated where Lake Huron narrows into the St. Clair River, which then flows past Detroit and into Lake Erie. It is the site of Ft. Gratiot and the Ft. Gratiot Lighthouse, the first Michigan lighthouse.

St. Gratiot Lighthouse complex

My contact Shelly arranged for us to stay overnight in the lighthouse keepers home, built in 1870. The house is beautifully restored circa 1930. Bunk beds in the bedrooms are perfect for groups.

Freighters

We had lunch at Freighters, enjoying the beautiful view of the river and the freighters streaming downriver. 

freighter under the Blue Water Bridge

Freighter coming down the St Clair River

After lunch we walked along the river as a freighter went by, stopping at the Thomas Alva Edison Museum in the Port Huron Train Depot.

Thomas Alva Edison museum

There were nice educational displays about Edison's life and work, and artifacts like this beautiful Edison machine that played wax cylinders.

We stopped along the St. Clair River to see historical markers, like this stone marker. We later met the man responsible for this memorial!

Next stop was the museum housed in the Carnegie Center. We saw artifacts of native beadwork.

And Great Lakes Maritime displays.

Musical instruments and a violin maker's shop were in another room.

They have a nice collection of vintage clothing, Civil War era rooms, and much more!

We met with members of the Port Huron Museum and the Blue Water Indigenous Alliance and formally donated the John Riley New Testament. I told the story of my research into the bible and what I had learned about Riley. The group had recently held their first Pow Wow in many years. Read about it here.

For dinner, we enjoyed the shade and cool breeze on the patio of Tia Gordes. The Mexican food was excellent. I had chicken mole and Gary had poblanos.

 Back at the lighthouse, we walked around until dusk.

 And then settled into the 1930s era restored rooms to read our books until dark.

I was pleased not to miss the sunrise over Lake Huron. The sun was a ball of bright red.

For breakfast, we returned to downtown Port Huron to Chef Shell's, right next door to where we had dinner. We had wonderful omelets but had to take home a doughnut each after watching streams of people coming to buy a dozen at a time.

 We found out why they advertise they have "the best darn donuts!"

On the way back to the lighthouse we saw another ship and talked to a lady who warned us that the largest ship on the lakes was due in 40 minutes. We ran back to the lighthouse to turn in our key. At the Coast Guard Gift Shop, we bought a coffee mug and magnetic bookmarks.

First, we saw a 'salty.' This area has one of Michigan's salt mines. I researched the Michigan Room at the public library and found that Gary's great-great-grandfather Jacob Bellinger appears in the 1919-1922 city directories as a manager at Morton Salt in Port Huron.

Gary decided to walk up to the top of the light. I did not go since I have been experiencing vertigo.

Then finally the MV Paul S. Tergurtha came by, blowing its low horn to warn the sailboat and other craft to clear way.

 It was time to say goodbye to this historical light. 

I brought home several beach stones and a magnetic book mark.

Before leaving town, I had to stop at the Sew Elegant quilt shop where I picked up fabric with a daisy meadow print.

We hope to make a day trip back to Port Huron. We had a lovely time.

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

David Grann's masterful account of the Osage Murders is one of the most horrifying histories I have read. Uncovering layer after layer of murders, Grann exposes an entire society in which (supposed) upstanding pillars of society committed horrendous crimes then orchestrated a massive cover-up. 

The Osage had been savvy enough to reserve the mineral rights to the land they bought and became rich leasing the rights to oil companies. White society did everything to limit the natives' access to their own money, requiring them to find trustees to handle their affairs. When the Osage began to die--of poison, guns, and bombs--their money landed in the hands of white trustees and spouses.

What kind of person raises children with a spouse and then participates in their murder---for money? One would think only a rare sociopath, but Grann discovers a whole was society complicit.

I commend Grann for his amazing research and his determination to find the truth and for his sensitivity and compassion toward the Osage and their heirs.

I received a book from my Goodreads friend Allen. Thank you!

“[C]lose to impeccable. It’s confident, fluid in its dynamics, light on its feet…. The crime story it tells is appalling, and stocked with authentic heroes and villains. It will make you cringe at man’s inhumanity to man.” 
—The New York Times

from the publisher:

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER   –  NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST 
A New York Times Notable Book

Named a best book of the year by Amazon, Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, GQ, Time, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly, Time Magazine, NPR, Vogue, Smithsonian, Cosmopolitan, Seattle Times, Bloomberg, Lit Hub, and Slate

From the #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Lost City of Z, a twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. 

As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.

There There by Tommy Orange

When I read the powerful Prologue in Tommy Orange's novel There There through the First Look Book Club I knew I had to read this book. A distinct, strong voice offered an abbreviated history of Indian-European relations and our stereotyped images of Indians. It was brutal and blunt.

"We are the memories we don't remember, which live in us, which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, our heads, for a bounty, or just to get rid of us." Prologue, There There   

I was a lucky giveaway winner and began reading the book as soon as it arrived.

Orange imagined a novel for the untold stories of urban Native Americans, people who have lost their traditions yet are labeled as 'other' by society. Readers meet a community of characters seeking to understand who they are, struggling with alcoholism, broken families, poverty, and addiction. 

They are all headed to the Big Oakland Powwow, to reconnect with family or their heritage or to find an easy way out.

"We all came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling threads of our lives got pulled into a braid--tied to the back of everything we'd been doing all along to get us here. We've been coming from miles. And we've been coming for years, generations, lifetimes, layered in prayer and handwoven regalia, beaded and sewn together, feathered, braided, blessed, and cursed." from Interlude, There There

There are a lot of characters--twelve--and each chapter skips from one character to another, building our understanding of a bigger picture. We know from the first character's story that everyone is heading into danger which creates tension as our investment in the characters deepens. The climax likewise is told from multiple viewpoints, and with Orange's beautiful writing, even violence becomes a dance and an awakening.

The book is already a national bestseller that has garnered acclaim. It is a sensational debut.

There There
by Tommy Orange
A. A. Knopf
$25.95 hardbound
ISBN: 978-0-525-52037-5

The Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

In a world of governmental breakdown, wars, and natural disasters, winters without snow, the over expansion of American government, something--perhaps a virus-- has tampered with genomes to set off a cavalcade of reverse evolution.

In this world lives one twenty-six year old pregnant woman, Cedar, writing to her unborn child. After an ultrasound, the doctor tells her to flee and go into hiding. Congress has revitalized articles of the Patriot Act to round up pregnant women, searching medical data bases, considering it an 'issue of national security.'

Cedar decides to seek out her birth parents on an Ojibwa reservation. Her adoptive parents warn her about an impending state of emergency. Siri and GPS no longer work, the world is falling apart. But Cedar is determined.

As she nears the reservation she sees a billboard. "Endtime at Last! Are You Ready to Rapture?," and another that reads "Future Home of the Living God."

Cedar had turned to Catholicism for an extended family. She writes and publishes a magazine "of Catholic inquiry." Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin thought evolution was bringing humanity to perfection. But all creation is devolving, backward, to prehistoric forms. Is God asleep at the wheel? Has God abandoned Earth? Will the written word die out, incomprehensible to whatever humanity is becoming? Is humanity losing its spark of the divine, their souls?

Cedar's birth father is nonplussed. "Indians have been adapting since before 1492 so I guess we'll keep adapting." Cedar counters, "But the world is going to pieces." "It's always going to pieces," Eddy replies.

Aware of the beauty of the vanishing 'now', haunted by an unknown future, Cedar must hide from the  American Government, now the Church of the New Constitution, which is rounding up pregnant women, controlling who is bred and who is born, endeavoring to save humanity.

Louise Erdrich's novel The Future of the Living God  is many things: an extended letter to an unborn child, the story of a woman seeking her family, a fable warning of the over-extension of governmental power, a warning of the consequences of tampering with nature. It is a theological reflection and speculative fiction. And it is the story of resistance and the fight for self-determination.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Future Home of the Living God
Louise Erdrich
On Sale Date: November 14, 2017
ISBN: 9780062694058, 0062694057
Hardcover $28.99 USD, $35.99 CAD

Quiet Until the Thaw by Alexandra Fuller

"Life is a circle and we as common people are created to stand within it and not on it. I am not just of the past but I am the past. I am here. I am now and I will be for tomorrow." Oglala Lakota maxim

Alexandra Fuller spent most of her life in Africa. In her letter which opens the galley of her debut novel Quiet Until the Thaw she writes that in encountering the Lakota Oglala Sioux she found an "unexpected homecoming, if home is where your soul can settle in recognition." The Native Americans were the only kindred spirits she had found in America. The love she bears her subject shines through every word and page and image.

On the Tex in the 1940s, two orphaned boys are suckled by a resentful Mina Overlooking Horse. At age forty she has raised a child every year for twenty-four years. She counts the years until the boys will be grown.

Rick Overlooking Horse keeps his words to himself, while You Choose Watson is determined to wreck his anger on the world, even to the point of self-destruction. Mina teaches Rick Overlooking Horse that the world is; nothing is taken away, nothing is added. He seeks to understand why he is in the world here, now.

Rick Overlooking Horse does not resist being drafted and sent to Vietnam; You Choose Watson fakes illness to avoid the draft. Rick Overlooking Horse survives a horrendous injury. You Choose Watson escapes into drugs and alcohol and women, only intensifying his suffering.

The boys reach manhood and impact their world, each in their own way. Rick is at peace with a traditional way of life, a teacher of the old ways. You Choose struggles and lashes out. Both become involved with the American Indian Movement and the protest at Wounded Knee.

It is the context of the boy's stories that sets the novel apart: Fuller's awareness of the Lakota understanding of reality; the reminders that white society cut the native way of life at the root, leaving their people rudderless and lost in an alien reality, and suffering the homelessness of living where your people have always lived yet not able to recognize your own land.

Fuller's authorial voice is often heard, interjecting thoughtful insight into the Native American experience. In writing beautiful and eloquent, she charges the novel with emotional intensity and devastating revelation.

Fuller's previous books were memoirs and nonfiction. Her experiences in Africa inform her insight into the Native American experience.

"While she has not written anything overtly political, she says that everything we do is political from the decision we make to wake up in the morning to the clothes we put on our bodies, to the words we have the courage to speak.

"Africa is a great teacher," she has explained. "We're not a good example of much, but we're a terrible warning of power run amok and of the long, high price of oppression." 

http://www.barclayagency.com/site/speaker/alexandra-fuller

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Quiet Until the Thaw
Alexandra Fuller
Penguin Press
Publication June 27, 2017
$25 hard cover
ISBN: 9780735223349

Land of Enchantment by Liza Wieland

A moving and beautifully constructed novel, Land of Enchantment explores the relationship between art and life, mothers and daughters, women and men. After I had finished the book, I turned back to the beginning to study how the author developed the story and its themes. It's that kind of novel.

Brigid Long Night's language is color and form. After the tragic deaths of her Navajo/German parents she is employed by Georgia O'Keefe. New Yorker Julian Granger visits O'Keefe he and Brigid have a brief affair. Father Edgardo helps Brigid find a home for her baby and Brigid goes to New York City to start an art career that culminates in an installation at the World Trade Center.

Sasha Hernandez has lost her adoptive parents. She knows her mother is the famous artist Brigid Schulman. A film student in New York City, she captured the falling bodies from the World Trade Center on 9-11. She meets Rodney, a psychologist whose friend Henry Diamond has been searching for information about his sister Nancy who jumped from a collapsing building.

Wieland's book comes at the story from multiple viewpoints, utilizing first person and third person narratives, weaving the characters together in a complex interrelated web.

At times I was so moved I shuddered and turned away and inward, remembering that day, those images, the shock and resulting disassociation.

Art is compulsion for these characters: Brigid the painter, Sasha the film student, Nancy Diamond the playwright, Henry Diamond artist. It is how they process life.

I was greatly impressed by this book.

"We have art in order not to die of the truth." Frederich Nietzsche

Syracuse Press through NetGalley provided me the e-book for a fair and unbiased review.

Land of Enchantment
Liza Wieland
Syracuse University Press
Publication Date March 15, 2015
ISBN: 9780815610465
$24.95 hard bound

Trash Picking

I come from a long line of  trash pickers. We see potential usefulness in stuff others toss out.

When I was a little girl walking to Philip Sheridan Elementary School I remember seeing the trash out along Rosemont Avenue and every now and I saw something in the trash that did not belong there. I would fret and worry and wish I could save it.

My brother even decorates with trash. Like stuff he finds in the canal in back of his house. He pulls up some pretty good stuff!

My Grandmother Gohenour worked in the Goodwill store in Tonawanda, NY which gave her first pick. I wore old flannel nightgowns from the Goodwill when I was a girl because there was no heat in the upstairs bedrooms of the 1830s farm house.

A family friend worked for the school system and before he hauled the trash to the dump he'd stop by the house. I remember rummaging through the books and claiming what I wanted. One book I found was a 1929 edition of "The Cradle of the Deep" by Joan Lowell, the story of a girl growing up on her dad's "four-masted, windjammer rigged schooner engaged in the copra and sandalwood trade between the islands of the South Seas and  Australia." Oh the adventures she had! I also found "The Adventures of Benjamin Pink" illustrated by Garth Williams. I read that to my brother many times. It was about a rabbit lost at sea who becomes king of a monkey island.

Here is my greatest trash picking story.

Back in the 1970s a family friend found a picture in the Tonawanda, NY dump and gave it to my brother who was living with our folks in Clawson, MI. Dad put it in his basement Man's Cave, which had dark wood paneling, a bar, a pool table, and a dart board. The picture was still hanging there in a dark corner when Dad passed and I inherited the house. I brought it upstairs into the light and realized it was really cool! It was real ART and not a print. The matting was yellowed and stained. I asked my brother if he wanted it, and when he said no I took it to a frame shop.

The framer removed the back paper and removed the art from the frame. It was a pastel. Underneath the mat was handwriting. The artist's name was Alfred W. Holdstock and the painting was titled Lake des Allumettes. The detail is amazing.

When I got home I went online to research Holdstock.  Between 1850 and 1870 he painted First People around Montreal, the Ottawa River, and the Thousand Islands.

Holdstock was born in Bath, England in 1820 and educated at Oxford University.  Around 1850 he emigrate to Montreal and taught drawing at the Government National School. He died in 1901 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

The Isle Aux Allumettes in the Ottawa River was inhabited in ancient times. The Iroquois Indians exterminated the Algonquin tribe around 1650. The Algonquin chief Tessout was ambushed by the Iroquois near the Allumette Rapids. The island was uninhabited for 170 years. On 1836 there were still only a few families on the island. Holdstock wanted to capture a dying way of life.

The origin of the name Allumettes, meaning matches, is explained here:
http://www.isle-aux-allumettes.com/municipality/history.php?PHPSESSID=1f5055065e40f97ed57c4f6de148fe88

We had the pastel framed. And its now our favorite piece of  'trash'!