The past few days have been very thought-provoking in many many ways...I spent the majority of my free time this weekend(work was a positive shitstorm on Friday and Saturday) ensconced in an entry for a poetry competition(we'll see), however, I also caught up on some episodes of LOST. LOST combined with this book that I just finished, M.T. Kelly's A Dream Like Mine, as well as listening to some of Keren's research results on Native American women's health and watching a very large protest against a new Bush administration bill on immigration, has made me think a lot about PEOPLE(yes, I know this is TYPICAL of me). LOST, the television show, seems to me to be an interesting study in human behavior...how people behave during stressful situations, when encountering people and things they are unfamiliar with, and of course dealing with their own demons. The people in LOST may have lost some of their literal luggage, but they are surely weighed down by plenty of their own mental baggage. M.T. Kelly's book is about a reporter who goes into the Ontario wilderness to write a light piece on Ojibway shamans...what happens is far beyond his expectations in a hellish sort of way. Much like the people of LOST he is trapped in a situation in which he has little control and which is constantly terror-filled. He becomes an unwilling accomplice in a plot of a Native American male who is taking revenge on all the white people who have done him and his people wrong...the male kidnaps the head of a paper mill whose company has polluted all of the local waters, according to him, killing his people, using him as a symbol as he avenges his people. Well, today(Monday, I haven't gone to bed yet, so even though this will post Tuesday, it's not Tuesday yet for me) I watched a protest in which approximately ten thousand people peacefully demonstrated against Bush and his policies. This guy Arthur(the Native American, the reporter remains unnamed throughout the book), takes matters into his own hands, very very brutally...leading the reporter and the paper mill man(Bud is his name, Bud Ricketts)on a canoe trip that is very reminiscent of another book that I read many years ago...Deliverance...the unnamed reporter even makes a comment in reference to that novel(ugh, I have a really hard time thinking about that book since it is soooo beautifully poetic, the author James Dickey is the poet laureate of Georgia, but it is so so violently nightmarish as well)...Arthur has every right to be pissed at white people, at his situation, and the reporter realizes this in a Patty Hearst kind of way, and of course so does the reader. One of the best lines(if not the best line) in the whole book is: "Every book I'd read on native people was a lie. Romantic cancer" (Kelly 61). Between Keren telling me about the overwhelming amount of Native American women who have been sexually abused both as adults and children and reading horror stories in this novel about the mistreatment of natives by first settlers and then present-day white men...I'd been exposed to a bit of this before in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, but that is a BEAUTIFUL, LYRICAL not so IN-YOUR-FACE kind of book about native people. M.T. Kelly's book is brief(156 pages), but I think it still makes a decent point...I did think there could have been more elaboration of plot, though: it seemed to jump right into action, not really giving enough development to me, and I felt like I was watching something violent unfold, without any real association to any of the characters...That is something Dickey's and Erdrich's books did very well, the attachment created towards the characters is very intense, so that when all the bad shit happens to them(of which there's plenty) you feel it so much more. However, Kelly's book is not without some poetic passages, like this quote, the final one I chose: "It must seem odd, putting despair, putting minor concussions, putting a dislocated knee into an historical context. But being a witness to torture, and the squalid reality of my discomfort, didn't stop for a single minute echoes of the past in all that I felt. We are victims of our own mythologies, and my incessant reading, and thinking, about native people had caught up to me, but it also let me see that what I'd imagined about the Iroquois, although real, was only part of the story" (Kelly 105). I grew up near reservations, I also went to a sort of liberal public school and learned all about the poor treatment of Native Americans. It gives me a little glimmer of glee to see them now running tribal casinos and taking money from the white man who has fucked them over for so long...it in no way will ever compensate for the genocide that was committed in the name of westward expansion, the destruction of a way of life, but at least it's using the almighty dollar, that which the white man holds so dear, as a small but thrifty weapon. The ruination of Native Americans is so sickening, demoralizing and humiliating. Kelly's novel reminds us of that all too well...and whatever I have to say about the shortcomings of the writing itself(which at times the book was a major ehhh...), its message is worthy of a prize if even one other person is left feeling regret, frustration, and aware, as I was, during the read and at the end. GG's-17, Pulitzers-15.