Summary: Native Americans in Oakland struggle with identity and belonging, addiction and crime, life and death.
Rating & Recommendation: 4/5; recommend for those not easily made weary
Review: I’m completely shocked. I went into this absolutely hating the narration. I dislike shifting narrators, and I dislike shifting perspectives even more. I was so wrong. This is a must-read. I was sobbing at the end, because I could see how the story was being woven, and I started to dread what I knew was an inevitability. It’s fiction, but it’s not.
It’s about identity and being robbed of it, both as an individual and as a people. This book is about the people who inhabited this land long before we did, and how they’re still struggling to define and redefine themselves in the wake of what was done to them. It’s so painful because when a whole population is cursed, and they lose hope, it’s hard to build yourself back up. It’s especially hard to build on a foundation that someone else rotted out from under you, like quick sand. It’s doomed. That hope that you can rebuild? It’s part of white privilege. Calling it colonization is basically like going into their homes and reorganizing and repainting and knocking down walls, and then blinding the people who lived there first and kicking them out when they stub their toes and can’t find their way to the kitchen. That’s what colonizers did. Rob a people of their identity and their home and then got shocked when people got lost.
I understood this book not in my head or in my heart.
“I get it way down at that place where it hurts but feels better because you feel it, something you couldn’t feel before reading it, that makes you feel less alone, and like it’s not gonna hurt as much anymore.”
This is about striving to get back There, to wherever There was where it makes sense, and the devastation you feel when you discover that There isn’t there anymore. This goes up there with Pachinko and American Marriage and Born A Crime. It’s really for anyone who has ever felt an identity crisis. And if you’ve never felt that before, you need to read this and all those other books so that you can develop a sympathy for that kind of pain.
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