Get The Light People Edited By Gordon Henry Jr. Issued As Version

Henry Ojibwe is a master of prose, He has multiple narrators flowing into multiple narrations, There is humor and sorrow in the book as Oskinaway learns about his tribal heritage, There is also lots of laughs in the chapter Requiem for a Leg you have to read this book it is like no other.
I met Gordon Henry at the Native American Literature Symposium this year, He is an incredibly kind and intelligent individual, Absolutely amazing novel: Inventive, original, thoughtprovoking, and wise,

Each chapter adds on to the previous one like a turtle beneath a turtle the links seem to reach as far as the cosmos until midspan, in which the novel begins to retreat back on itself and new resolutions become apparent.


What's more, some of the chapters have Vonnegut, John White kinds of satire esp, the trial scene over who owns the rights to Moses Four Bear's severed leg, The concluding chapter where Oskinaway tries to teach a crow to speak but succeeds only as far as "We the People" carries immense ponderables.


In my view, this is a minor classic and should be read by intelligent, sensitive seekers.
There's so much going on in this book that I can't begin to do it justice, Structurally, Henry maps out the importance of kinship, history, and storytelling by connecting one chapter to the next, working backwards in time to explore what it means to be Ojibwe on the Fineday reservation.
Thematically, he turns over the idea of Christianity, schooling, treaties, politicians, higher education, traditional healing, and art, not just as the subject matter of particular chapters, but in his prose, slipping into haiku, into the legaleze of lawyers and judges, into the selfcongratulatory, academicspeak of anthropologists.
Time passes, but the passage of time is not always important places change in meaningful ways, often reflecting environmental destruction from outside the rez, but trees and prairie and water have their own stories.
The Vietnam war intrudes death and dying occur in a dozen

different ways,

It's masterful, and I'll be thinking about it for a long time, unpacking the imagery and poetry, thinking through the lingering birdsong of 'we the people' at the end.
I read this book for a Native American Novel course I'm taking for my major, and my class was lucky enough to video chat with the author, Gordon Henry, to discuss his work.


I thought this novel was especially thoughtprovoking, particularly the format and the repetitive inclusion of the letter X as a marker of a presence and an absence at the same time very clever.
While it was a complex work with a complicated family tree, it was an interesting process, attempting to find the link in all the stories as the chapters went on.
Stories within stories abound. The structure the story by itself was interesting, An unexpected piece of NativeAmerican literature, This is a Native American tapestry of memories within memories, stories within stories, and myths within myths that are interwoven with slyly humorous portraits of government bureaucrats, museum administrators, tribal elders, and the crosscultural phenomena of contemporary Native American life.
This said, the novel actually relates the deeply personal quest of Oskinaway for his parents, spanning decades and encompassing the dizzying complexity of rapidly changing tribal life as it does.
We meet shamans old, young, and wannabe as well as tribal politicos willing to cancel bingo in order to ensure full turnout for dignitaries coming from Washington "to commemorate the quincentenary of Columbus' arrival in North America and who want this rez i.
e. , reservation to be part of a nationwide celebration, " The cast of characters also includes such unlikely members as Four Bear's lost leg, which ends up in a museum case, and the "prisoner of haiku," a sculptorsaboteur incarcerated for setting politically motivated fires that are famous for their beauty, "for the sabotage was never performed without the grace and idealism of the artist.
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