Synopses & Reviews
The dream of a broken field is to bear crops. The dream of a broken history is to create meaning, to find among the fragments a way to tell the story of a life. It is this dream that Diane Glancy pursues here, through essays on writing, faith, family, teaching, and retirement. Blending a poets vision and a storytellers voice, the result is at once a virtuoso work of creative nonfiction and an exploration of that genres outer limits by one of the foremost voices in Native American literature today. Uneasily and yet firmly balanced between European and Native cultures—English and German on her mothers side, Cherokee on her fathers—Glancy continues to search for a language that articulates the Native experience with both the fullness of tradition and the lapses inherent in a broken heritage. Accordingly, The Dream of a Broken Field offers a narrative that pauses and circles, connects and changes direction and travels great distances with grace only to stop sharply for a startling insight. Writing of weekend trips and long journeys, of natural landscapes and burial mounds, of Native American cosmology and a Christian upbringing, of Native American boarding schools and indigenous writers in American universities, Glancy captures the opposing demands of a hurried life and the timeless reflections of a history forever unfolding.
Review
and#8220;Diane Glancy inhabits a world of images that breathe life and voice for the voiceless men, women, and children. . . . No simple history lesson, this, as Glancy examines how language is both captor and savior, another means of imprisonment and also liberation.and#8221;and#8212;Gina Ochsner, author of The Necessary Grace to Fall
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and#8220;This book is mesmerizing and will stay with you for lifetimes.and#8221;and#8212;Jackie Old Coyote, Apsaalooke Nation, former director of education and outreach at the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
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and#8220;The survival of Indian people represents one of the most important subjects in American history. Glancy creates a multilayered narrative about the Kiowa, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Arapaho Indians, who became prisoners of the United States government during the late nineteenth century. She invites readers to contemplate the bleak realities and the difficult choices presented by historical circumstances.and#8221;and#8212;Brad Lookingbill, professor of history at Columbia College of Missouri
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"Glancy's is a major voice in the continuing process by which the complex interrelationship of American Indian culture to the broader American culture is working itself out, and The Cold-and-Hunger Dance must be read by everyone to whom that subject matters."and#8212;World Literature Today
Review
"'I am a marginal voice in several worlds,' explains Glancy in this collection of essays and poems that interweave her mixed-blood Cherokee heritage with her strong Christian beliefs. Her writing, she emphasizes, provides the matrix that makes the disparate parts of her life one story. Through the work gathered here, the reader is allowed to examine the life of the 'other' that Glancy has forged for herself as a writer."and#8212;Library Journal
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"The Cold-and-Hunger Dance . . . moves on the double piston of acceptance and rejection. Like words in her stories, she finds her identity in the dialogic relationship between presence and absence. She embraces words and adds voice to many voices to condone the way she has been treated as a 'mixed-blood' Cherokee, Christian woman writer. One must say, Glancy, in her effort, surely has earned a place in the boat where every indigenous person of the continent shivers from a common cold and needs to participate in a revitalizing dance."and#8212;Red Ink
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"This is a rich, satisfying book, full of wisdom."—Choice
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"Glancy is a major voice in Native America today. Claiming Breath is a refreshingly honest depiction of contemporary life and an important step in American Indian literature. Non-Indian readers can learn much from Glancys text, which presents an Indian worldview complete in its holistic complexity and integrity."—American Indian Culture and Research Journal
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"An important addition to the literature of white-Indian cultural interrelationships."—World Literature Today
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"A probing, honest tale."—Kirkus Reviews
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"An engaging novel that deals with the issues of present and past among Native peoples and of Spirit in those who have embraced Christianity."—Library Journal
Review
andquot;Glancy is not only an insightful historian but a gifted storyteller. The craft, creativity, and imagination with which she renders this amazing text powerfully draw the reader into the world of the Fort Marion prisoners. Few texts to date have portrayed their experiences with the upheavals of a changing world with such intimacy and humanism.andquot;andmdash;Steven Williams, American Studies
Synopsis
At the end of the Southern Plains Indian wars in 1875, the War Department shipped seventy-two Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Caddo prisoners from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. These most resistant Native people, referred to as and#8220;trouble causers,and#8221; arrived to curious, boisterous crowds eager to see the Indian warriors they knew only from imagination.
Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education is an evocative work of creative nonfiction, weaving together history, oral traditions, and personal experience to tell the story of these Indian prisoners.
Resurrecting the voices and experiences of the prisoners who underwent a painful regimen of assimilation, Diane Glancyand#8217;s work is part history, part documentation of personal accounts, and a search for imaginative openings into the lives of the prisoners who left few of their own records other than carvings in their cellblocks and the famous ledger books. They learned English, mathematics, geography, civics, and penmanship with the knowledge that acquiring the same education as those in the U.S.and#160;government would be their best tool for petitioning for freedom. Glancy reveals stories of survival and an intimate understanding of the Fort Marion prisonersand#8217; predicament.
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Synopsis
The Cold-and-Hunger Dance is an imaginative and honest account of Diane Glancy's journeys to and from the margins of memory, everyday life, and different cultural worlds that combine her Cherokee heritage and her Christian faith. Along the way, familiar images and concepts are juxtaposed to create a literary terrain that is both engaging and unsettling: the Bible and Black Elk Speaks converse; Glancy's dispute with a local bakery is played out as if on a world stage of warring nations; eggs and cultural identity implicate each other; and lost Native languages speak powerfully through their silences to modern Native writers. The creative twists and darting metaphoric excursions engendered by this journey provide an intimate glimpse into the process and problematics of language for modern Native authors.
Synopsis
In this innovative novel, a librarian of Cherokee ancestry rekindles and reinvents her Native identity by discovering the rhythm and spark of traditionally told stories in the most unusual places in the modern world. Ada Ronner, a librarian at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, hears books speak and senses their restless flow as they circulate. The same relentless energy and liberation of the story is also felt by Ada as she roller-skates at the Dust Bowl, a local skating rink, floating far ahead of her husband, Ether, a physics professor.
Hearing "the old Cherokee voices" when she skates and works in the Manuscript and Rare Book room in the library, Ada grows increasingly aware of the continuing power of Cherokee tradition today. Coming from a culture based in oral tradition, Ada discovers the potentially liberating role of the written word, and she finds her own empowerment as its promulgator and reinventor in the twenty-first century.
Designs of the Night Sky moves between the turbulent history of a tribe and the experiences of the survivors of that history still caught in turmoil. Rolling from past to present and present to past, Diane Glancy's story provokes and illumines while it invites us to reconsider the form and effect of Native American stories in today's world.
Synopsis
Like poets of legend, Diane Glancy has spent much of her life on the road. For years she supported her family by driving throughout Oklahoma and Arkansas teaching poetry in the schools. Claiming Breath is an account of one of those years, what Glancy calls “a winter count of sorts, a calendar, a diary of personal matters . . . and a final acceptance of the broken past. . . . Its a year that covers more than a year.”
About the Author
Diane Glancy is an emerita professor of English at Macalester College and is currently a professor at Azusa Pacific University in California. She is the author of numerous novels, including Claiming Breath (Nebraska, 1992), Designs of the Night Sky (Nebraska, 2002), and The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha.
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