on the prairie diamond

Between workshop sessions at Returning the Gift, Brenda Child (Ojibwe author of Boarding School Seasons) and Daniel Justice (Cherokee, author of Our Fire Survives the Storm) are caught on-camera talking about who they’re rooting for in this year’s tight race. I bet you thought I was going to say, Obama or Clinton. Nope, I meant Joba Chamberlain or Jacoby Ellsbury.

Related: Deadspin’s Baseball Season Previews of the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Do we look happy? I’ll tell you why. I’ve just been accepted into Richard’s SOS society! Next time you go to a Richard van Camp reading, ask him to tell a sacred organism story. You’ll die. You’ll just die. Well, you won’t actually die, but . . . . Better yet, ask him if you can join his Sacred Organism Society. These are stories written by Natives, IP’s, AI’s, [Indigenous Persons, American Indians] that are not about rage, not about remaining victims of oppression, but are stories about love! At the 2008 Returning the Gift Conference at Michigan State University, March 13-15, Richard van Camp enthralled us with his SOS stories. He also read from his newest book: Welcome Song for Baby: A Lullaby for Newborns. It’s a must have. I also highly recommend The Lesser Blessed. Get it. Read. Laugh. Cry. Love.

Bonus: Be sure to read Richard’s story, Show me Yours, in the November 2007 issue of The Walrus Magazine.

Pitching for UNK’s Native Literature classes: the famous-fab duo, Susanne Bloomfield and Allison Hedge Coke.

Second hour Native American Literature class at UNK. They had just finished reading Miko Kings in Susanne Bloomfield’s class, and wanted details of the love story, number theory, and whether Hope’s hands had indeed been cut off, since he was able to turn back time with his famous in-shoot!

I just returned from the University of Nebraska, Kearney, where Joba Chamberlain, Ho-Chunk, began his college studies. Poet Allison Hedge Coke (who brought me to UNK, a great poet and teacher and author of Dog Road Woman, Blood Run, and recent memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer) tells me that Joba was picked up by University of Nebraska, Lincoln because of his baseball prowess. From UNL, the Yankees snagged Chamberlain, and, as the old saying goes, the rest is history.

The Ho-chunk pitcher grew up in Nebraska where the Sandhill Cranes migration happens every year as it has for 44 million years. Incredible as it sounds that is what the scientists tell us about the cranes. The oldest bird species. Who can ponder 44 million years? Beginning around Feb 16, through April 15, the cranes fly in up and down the Platte River.

This is a picture of one of the Sandhill Crane blinds at the Rowe Sanctuary, just outside of Kearney Nebraska. We gathered at 5:30 in the morning and quietly walked out to one of this crane blind and witnessed the swarming of some 500,000 Sandhill cranes at sunrise. An incredible site, the sound is as loud as the loudest freight train.

Another connection for me is that my colleague, Richard Powers, won the 2006 National Book Award for The Echomaker, and it’s set in Kearney, Nebraska. Powers teaches the graduate fiction workshop in the MFA program at Illinois:

Again there is only here, now, the river’s braid, a feast of waste grain that will carry these flocks north, beyond the Arctic Circle. As first light breaks, the fossils return to life, testing their legs, tasting the frozen air, leaping free, bills skyward and throats open. And then, as if the night took nothing, forgetting everything but this moment, the dawn sandhills start to dance. Dances as they have since before this river started.

Credit: Allison Hedge Coke

It was my pleasure to read from Miko Kings at the Richard Oakes Multicultural Center at San Francisco State University on February 13, 08. Richard Oakes is a hero to many of us — someone we greatly revere for his fight for social justice for American Indians during the 1960s. I also want to thank Jim Fortier for taking these pictures. Jim is best known for his documentary film, Alcatraz is Not an Island, about the events that led up to the death of Richard Oakes. You can also catch Jim’s latest documentary film, Bad Sugar, that’s slated to air nationally in April as part of the PBS series Unnatural Causes…Is Inequality Making Us Sick? My thanks also to Joanne Barker, Director of SFSU’s American Indian Studies; assistant professor Rob Collins; and professor and poet Matthew Shenoda for their support making this reading possible.

Video clips from Alcatraz is Not an Island, including Richard Oakes reading from a letter of demand to the federal government, 9 Nov 1969.

Happen to live near a place they like to call Chambana?* LeAnne will be reading from her latest novel, Miko Kings, at our very own Pages for All Ages in Savoy this coming Saturday, March 1 from 1 until 2pm. If you’re in the area, please join us!

*if that sounds more “odd, tropical fruit” than “geographic location,” you’re possibly somewhere warmer. or more urban. or with a ready access to some good pashofa that isn’t just at LeAnne’s house.

The radio dial, that is. LeAnne will be a guest tomorrow, Wednesday February 27, 1-2pm Eastern, on the national call-in program Native America Calling to talk about their book of the month, Miko Kings. To find stations in your area, click here, or to listen to the show live online, click here. Be sure to tune in!

During a reading of Miko Kings at the Martin Luther King Library in San Jose, California, on February 11, a handsome man, about 25 or 26, walked into the room wearing a baseball shirt and pants, and ball cap. He carried his well worn, but belov’d baseball glove, and a ball that had been signed by his heroes. I couldn’t help but wonder what he was looking for when he came into the library that evening. Maybe a story about the purity of the game? I was reading from my novel about Indian baseball players in 1907, the men trying to hold onto something wholly theirs against the oddsmakers: the gamblers and saloon keepers of their day. But after reading last Sunday’s New York Times story on Roger Clemens: his alleged steroid use, (human growth hormones), what they do to a body’s mind, poor Clemens sullied reputation, and Baseball’s management’s sub-text: money. Anyway, I think I figured why this man came in from the cold dressed in his player’s uniform. He wanted to escape baseball’s headlines news and hear a story about the players old-fashioned love of the game. After all, “it is what it is,” to quote Bud Selig.

LeAnne Howe will be reading from and discussing her new novel, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story, at four events in the Bay Area this week. All events are free and open to the public.

February 11, 2-4pm
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Ethnic Studies
30 Stephens Hall
Berkeley, CA

February 11, 7pm
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library
Cultural Heritage Center
5th Floor, Room 525
San Jose, CA

February 12, 7:30pm
Modern Times Bookstore
888 Valencia St. (near 20th)
San Francisco, CA

February 13, 2-3:30pm
San Francisco State University
The Richard Oakes Multicultural Center
Terrace Level of the Cesar Chavez Student Center
San Francisco, CA
Sponsored by the American Indian Studies Department

Previously on “On the Prairie Diamond”

LeAnne Howe will be reading from her new novel, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story, at two events in Minnesota this week.

Minneapolis, MN
January 23, 7pm
Amazon Bookstore Cooperative
4755 Chicago Ave S

Northfield, MN
January 24, 4pm
Carleton College
Gould Library Athenaeum

more events