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Home > Find > Children of the dragonfly : Native American voices on chi...

Children of the dragonfly : Native American voices on child custody and education
Xwi7xwa Library, University of British Columbia

2001
Book
Related School
Carlisle Indian Industrial School (PA)
Contributors
Bensen, Robert
Description
"Sometimes the losses of childhood can be recovered only in the flight of the dragonfly.

Native American children have long been subject to removal from their homes for placement in residential schools and, more recently, in foster or adoptive homes. The governments of both the United States and Canada, having reduced Native nations to the legal status of dependent children, historically have asserted a surrogate parentalism over Native children themselves.

Children of the Dragonfly is the first anthology to document this struggle for cultural survival on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. Through autobiography and interviews, fiction and traditional tales, official transcripts and poetry, these voices— Seneca, Cherokee, Mohawk, Navajo, and many others— weave powerful accounts of struggle and loss into a moving testimony to perseverance and survival. Invoking the dragonfly spirit of Zuni legend who helps children restore a way of life that has been taken from them, the anthology explores the breadth of the conflict about Native childhood.

Included are works of contemporary authors Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, Luci Tapahonso, and others; classic writers Zitkala-Sa and E. Pauline Johnson; and contributions from twenty important new writers as well. They take readers from the boarding school movement of the 1870s to the Sixties Scoop in Canada and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 in the United States. They also spotlight the tragic consequences of racist practices such as the suppression of Indian identity in government schools and the campaign against Indian childbearing through involuntary sterilization."--publisher's website

More Information

Holding Library
Xwi7xwa Library, University of British Columbia
ISBN
0816520127 (cloth : alk. paper); 0816520135 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Statement of Responsibility
edited by Robert Bensen.
Publication Information
Tucson : University of Arizona Press
Physical Description
xviii, 280 p. : ill. ; 24 cm
Contents
Contents : Part 1 : Traditional stories and lives
To say "Child" / Severt Young Bear (Lakota) and R.D. Theisz
The toad and the boy / Zitkala-Sa (Yankton Sioux)
Oshkikwe's baby / Delia Oshagay (Chippewa)
The seven dancers / Michele Dean Stock (Seneca)
Goldilocks thereafter / Mary Ulmer Chiltoskey (Cherokee)
Two stories / Marietta Brady (Navajo)
Part 2 : From Stiya : or, a Carlisle Indian girl at home / Embe (Marianna Burgess)
Who am I? / Black Bear (Blackfoot). As it was in the beginning / E. Pauline Johnson (Mokawk)
Black robes / Lee Maracle (Sto:lo)
The prisoner of Haiku / Gordon D. Henry, Jr. (White Earth Chippewa) The snakeman / Luci Tapahonso (Navajo)
The woman who fell from the sky / Joy Harjo (Muskogee)
Part 3 : Child welfare and health services
Problems that American Indian families face in raising their children, United States Senate, April 8 and 9, 1974
Five poems / Mary TallMountain ( Athabaskan)
Missing sister / Virginia Woofclan
Indian health / Lela Northcross Wakely (Potawatomi/Kickapoo). From : Indian killer / Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene)
The search for Indian / Milton Lee (Cheyenne River Sioux) and Jamie Lee
Part 4 : Children of the Dragonfly : I wonder what the car looked like / Peter Cuch (Ute)
A letter to my Grandmother / S.L. Wilde (Anishnaabe)
It goes something like this / Eric Gansworth (Onondaga)
Breeds and outlaws / Kimberly Roppolo (Cherokee/Choctaw/Creek)
Wetumka / Phil Young (Cherokee) and Robert Bensen
The long road home / Lawrence Sampson (Delware/Eastern Band Cherokee)
When the heron speaks / Beverley McKiver (Ojibway)
Meomor lane is the next street over / Joyce carlEtta Mandrake (White Earth Chippewa)
Lost tribe / Alan Michelson (Mohawk). The connection / Patricia Aqiimuk Paul (Inupiaq)
Pushing up the sky / Terry Trevor (Cherokee/Delware/Seneca)
Three dragonfly dream songs / Annalee Lucia Bensen (Mohegan/Cherokee).
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