Clyde Bellecourt Tells His Story as Founder of the American Indian Movement

After reading The Apache Wars and The Sand Creek Massacre I was ripe to learn about the Native American civil rights movement that occured while I was in my late teens and early twenties. As if on cue, Edelwiss offered The Thunder Before the Storm, The Autobiography of Clyde Bellencourt, the founder of the American Indian Movement.

"We started a movement to take back everything that belonged to us: our spirituality, our hunting and fishing rights, our water rights, our gold and minerals, our sacred rites--and our children."

Starting with his childhood on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, Clyde Bellecourt (his colonial name; The Thunder Before the Storm, Neegonnwayweedun, is his Ojibwe name) relates a grim story. Clyde grew up hearing his father's stories of being taken from his family to be educated in a boarding school so hateful that he enlisted during WWI. Later he discovered the origin of his mother's limp: at boarding school her punishment for speaking her native language was to scrub floors with bags of marbles tied to her knees.

Clyde grew up without knowledge of his native culture, spiritual traditions, or language, which had been violently supressed for generations by a Eurocentric majority culture. He was deemed "incorrigable," a truant and runaway, resistant to the mission school authority, repeatedly in juvenile detention, and in solitary confinement in prison. His life mirrored that of many Natives on the reservations, with high rates of alcoholism and drug abuse resulted in a typical lifespan of 44 years.

While in prison Clyde became part of an Indian cultural program and an Indian Folklore Group. He learned his native language, ceremonies, prayer songs, and history.

"I was typical of the other Indians there: spiritually and emotionally bankrupt."

It was the beginning of Bellecourt's spiritual revival that lead him to becoming an activist, using "confrontaion politics" to demand the end of discrimination on the local and national level. European education, organized religion, and the Bureaus of Indian Affairs were the institutions that needed to change. He became the leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM). The goals included addressing immediate concerns in housing, youth, employment, education, communication, and citizenship. The long range goals included unification of the Indian people, participation in local affairs, and fostering economic equality. Bellecourt brought back the Sun Dance which had been banned.

AIM found friends in civil rights workers including Coretta Scott King, religious leaders such as Dr. Paul Boe of the America Lutheran Church, and local political leaders along the way, but they were also targeted as 'terrorists' by local police, the FBI, and the American government. AIM was besieged, spys infiltrated the group, including assasins, and members were murdered.

Like many visionary leaders, Bellecourt is not a paragon of perfection; he struggled with demons-- alcohol, drugs, and infidelity; he was imprisoned on drug related charges; and he survived assasination attempts.

I was glad to read about Bellecourt's work to remove racism from American sports, particularly the National Football League and the Washington Redskins name. It helped me to understand the associations of this kind of branding from the Native American viewpoint. "Redskin" was used to "denigrate and dehumanize" the natives, who believe the term refers to the bloody scalps taken by  bounty hunters. The "tomahawk chop" to Native Americans is a reminder of the weapons used to scalp their people.

I consider how I grew up with cowboy and Indian TV westerns and movies, the cliches and easy stereotypes, racism in the form of entertainment. We kids didn't know about the drive to exterminate First Peoples, the lies and broken treaties, and the continued supression of Native culture that was still ongoing. I had a cowboy hat and a holster, squinting my eyes as if always looking into the sun, a little blond-haired girl imitating what she saw on tv.

At college a friend told me about going to Pow Wows and of his interest in the Indian ways. It just seemed like a fad. And while I was working my husband through school, barely in my twenties, Wounded Knee seemed far away and alien.

I have been spending a great deal of time, now in my 'golden years', making up for the ignorance of my youth. It is frustrating to know that the entertainment industry still forms most of young people's historical knowledge. I know--the goal of public education is to make good citizens, and somehow that means supporting the image that America was always right. But I think that making good citizens should include the understanding that America has committed heinous crimes, but that we are continually learning to see the error of our past choices. Right now I am afraid that we may not be learning, as a culture, to recall history and resist making the same mistakes.

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

The Thunder Before the Storm: The Autobiography of Clyde Bellecourt as told to Jon Lurie
MNHS Press
Publication Novemeber 15, 2016
$27.95 hard cover
ISBN: 9781681340197

Brilliant Reimagining of Shakespeare's The Tempest: Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

Contemporary novelists reimagine Shakespeare's plays in the Hogarth Shakespeare series. I have read Anne Tyler's Vinegar Girl (The Taming of the Shrew) and Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time (A Winter's Tale) but have not yet read Howard Jacobson's Shylock is my Name (The Merchant of Venice).

I was particularly eager to read Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood's versions of The Tempest, because I'd read so many glowing reviews, and because I had read and enjoyed Atwood's last book The Heart Goes Last (my first time reading this author, which amazes me).

Hag-Seed is definitely my favorite in the series so far.

I won't concentrate on a plot synopsis since so many other reviewers have already done that. I'd rather address what aspects of the novel particularly impressed me.

I loved Hag-Seed's play within a play structure, so Shakespearean, where all the contemporary characters in the novel correspond to the original play and perform The Tempest while creating a live theater situation where the audience becomes a part of a play based on the Tempest.

I'll try to explain this again.

The protagonist, the brilliant and original artistic director Felix, was about to direct The Tempest when he was disposed from his job as artistic director by self-seeking men. Felix retreats to a primitive cabin in the middle of nowhere, his only companion the memory of his deceased daughter Miranda. After many years he takes a job under a false name and becomes Mr. Duke, literacy teacher in a local prison, teaching inmates Shakespeare through performance of the plays. When Felix learns his old enemies are now Ministers who want to end the prison literacy program he decides the time has come for him to take his revenge. The Ministers come to the prison to see a video of The Tempest performed by the inmates. But Felix and his prisoner actors plot a live theater experience that will bring his enemies under his power.

The intricate structure of the novel knocked my socks off. Additionally, as Felix teaches The Tempest to the prison inmates the reader is also educated about the play's themes and characters. And then at the end of the book the inmates offer reports on what happens to the characters after the events of the play. They offer original insights, such as Prospero's lack of oversight allowing Antonio to usurp him; a questioning of the strength or weakness of goodness; the theme of second chances; and theorizing that Prospero is Caliban's father. I also liked how the minor characters, the prisoners enrolled in Felix's course, have distinct personalities and back stories that relate to the roles they are assigned.

"The last three words in the play are 'set me free'," says Felix." Felix has identified nine prisons within the play, and so we understand how Atwood conceived of Hag-Seed.

Readers of this series don't have to be experts on Shakespeare's plays to enjoy the novels, although an understanding of the plays heightens the enjoyment. If you are rusty on the play, you can skip to the author's synopsis at the end and read it first.

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

Hag-Seed
Margaret Atwood
Hogarth Shakespeare
Publication Oct. 11, 2016
$25 hard cover
ISBN:9780804141291

For an interesting follow-up to this book read Shakespeare Changed My Life by Dr. Laura Bates, telling how teaching the Bard to prisoners impacted their lives.

All Between the Lines: The Eastern Shore by Ward Just

"A properly edited page was a thing of beauty," thinks Ned Ayre, the protaganast of Ward Just's new novel The Eastern Shore. Contemplating his life dedicated to the news, trying to write his memoirs, Ned feels like an archaelogist 'assembing fragments of a dead civilization." The man who worked magic with his blue pencil, editing other's stories, could not create order from the threads of his life, his 'Rosebud' moment eluding him.

Ned's love of the news is an obsession that divides him from his parents and his lovers, a love affair that ends badly as the newspapers decline and close, no longer valued or profitable.

In this introspective novel, Just probes the stories of our life: the fictions we weave, like Ned's Uncle Ralph and his WWI stories that never happened, but which he believes happened; the untold truth buried because it does not make good press; the stories that should never have been told and ruin lives.

I was left feeling mournful and contemplative by this novel. I understood Ned's longing to break out of his small town, a place of changeless comfort and sureity. And I mourned his inability to make sense of his life.

Some will say there is no plot action, too much of the story is shared through story telling. But I was compelled by the novel; it recalled to mind many who dedicate their lives to something they believe in only to find after 40 years that what they loved has become meaningless and unvalued. How could anyone live without the news, young Ned thinks in amazement. Yet he lives into a world where the news and the great stories are left behind. Change betrays us all.

Between the lines we come to understand what Ned learned the hard way: the paper-thin line between all the news we need to know and all the news; how factual reporting can cross the line into the sacred and the private.

I requested this book through Edelweiss because several years ago I read Ward Just's novel An Unfinished Season and it left a lasting impression on me. I am even more impressed with Just after reading this book.

I received a free ebook from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbaised review.


The Eastern Shore
Ward Just
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication October 18, 2016
ISBN-10 0544836588
ISBN-13 9780544836587

Eugene Gochenour's Memoirs: New York State Theme Parks of the 1950s

Santa's Workshop at the North Pole, 1957, New York State

The North Pole, New York State, 1957

This selection from my dad's memoirs recalls family vacations we took in 1956 and 1957. I recall these trips although I was only four and five years old: The North Pole, Frontier Town, The Land of Make Believe, and The Enchanted Village.  

Santa's Workshop at The North Pole, NY, 1957. Dad, me and Grandma Gochenour

"Once a year Joyce, Nancy and I would take a week’s vacation. Most years we went to the Adirondack mountains.

"Once we took Nancy to the North Pole to see Santa's Workshop.

Here I am at the North Pole. I remember there were goats
that followed me, chewing on my jacket, and I was scared of them.

"Then we went to Frontier Town where we rode on a stagecoach and were robbed by bandits. We also watched a gunfight on the main street of town. The stagecoach robbers were caught, and punished.

Frontier Town, New York State, 1957

I'm in jail at Frontier Town, 1957

And Mom in the pillory while Grandma Gochenour stands by. Frontier Town 1957.

Frontier Town, 1957

At Frontier Town surrounded by cowboys

"I always had a fishing pole along, and if we found a cabin by a lake or river I would spend the evening fishing. On some of our trips we went to Whiteface Mountain, Fort Ticonderoga, and the Au Sable Chasm, and took the ferry to Burlington, Vermont. While in Vermont we drove through the Green Mountains, then traveled the Taconic Trail. 

Au Sable Caverns 1957

Nancy, 1957

Howe Caverns 1957

I was only five years old but I remember this cabin. It was a lovely

retreat at the end of a busy day of sightseeing.

Dad preparing fish on our family vacation in 1957

"One year we went to Hyde Park, the home of President Roosevelt, then to the Howe Caverns, the Vanderbilt Mansion, and the Corning Glass works where there was a glass museum and a factory where we watched them blow glass objects. Nancy was always a good traveler. Most of our vacations were in New York State.

That's Mom and Me on the right at the foot of Paul Bunyan
the Enchanted Forest 1957

At The Enchanted Forest with Mom and Grandma Gochenour

The Enchanted Forest, 1957, talking to the Pumpkin Eater's wife

The Enchanted Forest apparently had an ark

At the Land of Make Believe 1957

The Land of Make Believe, 1957. Dad, me and Grandma Gochenour

The Land of Make Believe, 1957

Learn more about these attractions:

The North Pole, NY Santa's Workshop was the first theme park and featured the first petting zoo in America.

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/11577

Frontier Town in North Hudson, NY 1952-1999, Story Town which opened in 1954, The Land of Make Believe, and Santa's Workshop were all in the Adirondacks. Here is a brochure for the theme parks:

http://www.worldsfaircommunity.org/topic/12154-the-adirondacks-in-the-1960s/

The Land of Make Believe, Upper Jay, NY, 1954-1979, which sadly was flooded out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeJuueKDlI0

Story Town:

http://www.crazedfanboy.com/npcr10/fanboypcr542.php

The Enchanted Forest opened in 1956:

http://www.roadarch.com/fairyparks/ny.html

Mom and I feeding critters

The Rise and Fall of the Glass Armonica

Angelic Music by Corey Mean is the story of Ben Franklin's Glass Armonica, the invention that gave him the "greatest personal satisfaction."

When we lived in Philadelphia in the mid-1970s to late 1980s we saw the Glass Armonica at the Franklin Institute. And we had heard a man perform on musical glasses in several venues around the time of the Bicentenniel. So I had heard the ethereal, angelic music of the musical glasses.

I had not realized that the Glass Armonica was all the rage in the 18th c and early 19th c. Chamber music including the instrument was written by Mozart, Beethoven, and Handel. Vituosos toured Europe playing the music that made women swoon.

It gained a tarnished reputation in the early 19th c when people believed the music could drive one mad and cause illness, or summon the dead with magical powers. Mesmer used it in his seances.

As music changed from small ensambles to large symphonic orchestras in halls the Armonica fell out of favor, relegated to being a museum curiosoity. But in the last twenty years it has found a revival, electronically enchanced, and used in pop music, movies, opera, and chamber music.

I was fascinated by this book. Corey covers the rise and fall of the musical glasses, the development of glassmaking, early musical glasses, Franklin's musical background and development of the Armonica, the hey-day of the Glass Armonica, and Mesmer's career and his use of the instrument, including his comissioning an opera from Mozart, the decline and revival of the instrument.

When German glassblower Gerhard Finkenbeiner saw a Glass Armonica in a musem in 1960 it was a curiosity. He rediscovered how to create the glass and instrument and the instrument found a revival.

Today a few people are experts, including Dennis James whose collaboration with Linda Ronstadt on six CDs revived an interest in the instrument. A a boy he saw Franklin's instruemtent at the Franklin Institute; in music school he asked what it sounded like and his professor answered, "No one knows. It hasn't been played for two hundred years." Now he leads the world's first known glass music studies program at Rutgers University.

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

Learn more about the Glass Armonica:
http://glassarmonica.com/index.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEKlRUvk9zc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzJC1ENMdeI

The Glass Armonica
Corey Mead
Simon & Schuster
Publication October 2016
$28 hard cover
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8303-1

Artists of the Revolution and The Creation of an American Identity

In 1783 John Adams was in London and commissioned American expat John Singleton Copely to paint his portrait.

Adams was fresh from Paris where, along with John Jay and Benjamin Franklin, he had signed the Treaty of Paris. His accomplishments included obtaining recognition of America and negotiating a treaty with the Dutch, plus obtaining a Dutch loan to fund the American war for independence, and establishing the very first American embassy in Amsterdam. He was instrumental in the Provisional Treaty with Britain.

A man must be his own trumpeter Adams had written in a letter. Adams knew his place in history, even if at home and abroad Franklin was everyone's darling.  He deserved a portrait. Copley was to paint an eight-foot tall, full portrait of Adams, full of symbols designating  his place in history.

Art teaches values, Adams knew, and can be used as propaganda, promoting ideals that outlast personal memory.

Upon seeing the impressive portrait Adams realized the vanity of his desire. He left it behind.

Of Arms and Artists by Paul Staiti considers the lives of the great artists of the Revolution in context of their time. I was fascinated by the stories of the artists. Learning about the paintings was enlightening. For instance, on my last visit to the Detroit Art Institute I was thrilled to see Watson and the Shark by Copely. This is a painting often reproduced in books. Statai tells the story behind the painting.

The commissioned painting memorializes the experience of real life Brook Watson. The dramatic painting shows a man in the water reaching for a rope thrown from a boat while a sailor readies to harpoon a shark whose open maw is feet from the unfortunate boy.

The real Watson was a Tory politician who wanted the painting to create a personal identity, eliciting sympathy and connoting courage. He was a British spy who announced that slavery was "merciful and humane."

Americans will recognize famous paintings by these artists. They created the mythos of America.

Charles Willson Peale was an enthusiastic patriot who was a captain in the Pennsylvania militia. He was at the crossing of the Delaware and the Battles of Trenton and Princeton and the fall of Philadelphia to the British. Peale visited Valley Forge, painting miniatures of the officers--not as they were but cheery visions to send home to loved ones. He painted George Washington after the Battle of Princeton.

George Washington, Peale

John Singleton Copley left America to study in Europe. He endeavored for neutrality and painted portraits of Patriots and the British.

Paul Revere, Copley

John Trumbull captured pivotal moments in history. He witness the battle of Bunker Hill and served as an aide to Gen. George Washington. In Paris he was a go-between for Thomas Jefferson, delivering love notes to the married Maria Cosway. His paintings are in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol including the signing of the Declaration of Independence which places historical accuracy secondary to America ideals.

Trumbull, signing of the Declaration

Benjamin West left Pennsylvania for a 'grand tour' to broaden his knowledge of art. He stayed in London as the historical painter to the court of George III. His historical paintings included The Death of General Wolfe.   He painted his close friend in the allegorical Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity From the Sky.

West, Benjamin Franklin

Gilbert Stuart was a master in portraiture, painting over 1,000. He studied under Benjamin West in England. Constantly in debt, he spent the summer of 1789 in  the Marshalsea Prison. His painting of George Washington was saved by Dolley Madison when the British invaded the Capitol.

Stuart, George Washington

Having read a number of books on the Revolution was an asset to understand the historical events of the paintings created by these artists, but enough information is provided by the author for the general reader. I appreciated how the author brought these men to life.

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

Of Arms and Artists
Paul Staiti
Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication October 18, 2016
$30 hard cover
ISBN 9781632864659

The Poet, The World, and Everything: Songs of Myself by Walt Whitman

In 1969 I picked up a paperback copy of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. I still have the book, underlined and worn. For me, Song of Myself has always been one of Whitman's trickier poems to tackle and I have only read it in bits and pieces. I was excited to see this new volume of Song of Myself with commentary. It gave me an opportunity to read the poem in its entirety, with aids to help me sort it out.

In 2014 the University of Iowa offered an open, international online course, Every Atom: Walk Whitman's "Song of Myself." This book arose from that project. This is the first section-by-section reading of the poem.

The introduction, Reading Song of Myself, notes that the poem appeared in six editions from 1855 to 1881, and its meaning changed as did America, viewed as nostalgia, or as arising from the Civil War and later class and racial stress, or even as mystical. It's appearance as the main poem of Leaves of Grass never changed.

Folsom reminds us of the huge changes during Whitman's writing of the poem: The Civil War and Reconstruction; scientific advances that toppled humanity's concept of itself in relation to time and the universe; the breakdown of religious beliefs constraining scientific beliefs; the struggle for freedom for African Americans.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

In Song of Myself, Whitman was offering a paradigm for understanding the interconnectedness of all things, imagining an ideal Democratic society and setting forth its tenets. What he proposes is radical. We are called to rise above all conventional and group thinking to perceive the material reality. All perceived divisions are false. Atoms flow from one thing into another which makes all interrelated and one. The grass arises from the dead in a perfect circle of life.

A child said What is the grass?...And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves....What do you think has become of the young and old men?And what do you think has become of the women and children?They are alive and well somewhere,The smallest sprout shows there is really no death...

The poet embraces all humanity, identifying himself with every sort of person and every sort of human experience. Work, war, sex; slave and master, male and female; the innocent and the guilty, the quick and the dead; there is nothing alien. Boundaries, hierarchies, divisions are artificial. He shares all with everyone, and speaks for everyone.

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also. 

Whitman ends the poem with the lines "I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable/I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." Words can scare communicate what the poet wants us to understand. We may need to look for his body "under your boot-soles" but his "barbaric yawp" has endured, to "make of it what you will." Thankfully, this commentary has aided me and opened up a new understanding of America's greatest poem.

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

Song of Myself: With a Complete Commentary
Iowa Whitman Series
Walt Whitman with Commentary by Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill
University of Iowa Press
Publication October 15, 2016
$24.95
paper back ISBN 978-1-60938-465-4
ebook 978-1-60938-466-1