Fiction by Americans of color.

So this is kind of a post about writing, although it's mostly about the state of the publishing industry, and I am probably the wrong person to be making these comments. But here we go anyway!

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I recently finished reading Shutter by Ramona Emerson. Let me say upfront that I liked it a lot. It's a police procedural/mystery/thriller with a side of woo-woo. I don't read a lot of police procedurals, but as alert hearth/myth readers know, I do enjoy the woo-woo. (Also, it was recommended to me by a former co-worker whose brother attended the Institute of American Indian Arts with the author.)

The main character is Rita Todacheene, a young Navajo woman who works as a forensic photographer for the Albuquerque Police Department. She gets sent out to take photos of crime scenes, including those of fatal accidents and murders. The Navajo are superstitious about death; do the wrong thing and you can attract the attention of a ghost, which then can attach itself to you and make your life a living hell. Unfortunately, Rita is sensitive to seeing dead people, and during the course of the novel, several ghosts attach themselves to her, insisting that she find justice for them. The most obnoxious is Erma; her death is ruled a suicide by the detective on the scene, but Erma insists that she was murdered and that Rita needs to find her killer. That search gets Rita involved with a drug cartel and nearly causes her to lose her job, because anyone who claims to see ghosts is crazy, right? On top of that, her grandmother is frightened of what all this exposure to evil is doing to Rita. She wants Rita to quit her job and come home to the reservation. But Rita decides to see it through. 

Emerson is Diné, which is what the Navajo call themselves. The book was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award in fiction. I didn't know how the awards work, so I looked it up: ten books in each award category are longlisted each year, five of those are named finalists, and then one is named the winner. Being named to a top-ten list like that, out of all the books published in one year, is significant.

As I said, I liked it a lot. But the writing is kind of pedestrian, and if it hadn't had the Native American cultural angle, I think it would have been received a lot like any other thriller.

That brought to mind the movie American Fiction, which I reviewed when it came out a couple of years ago. The film's main character is a Black academic from an upper-middle-class family who is on the verge of losing his professorship because his books aren't selling. To prove a point, and because he needs the money, he writes a novel with all the tropes of Black fiction that the White publishing world considers hard-hitting and real -- drug deals, poverty in the ghetto, and all the rest. He gets a huge advance and book award nominations, of course. It's complicated (and funny) in his case by his agent's insistence that he pretend to be a murderer who's on the lam, but it still frustrates him that White publishers are only interested in celebrating one view of minority life.

Of course, that's because the gritty stuff is what sells. And the publishing game is all about the money.

I'm not saying Shutter won recognition solely because its author is Diné. It's a good book, and I'm going to read the sequel. It just made me go "hmm", that's all.

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And yeah, I'm going to shut up about it now.

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Until the next time, probably.

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These moments of going-hmm blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Slaves in New Spain.

There's a room in the 17th century placita at El Rancho de las Golondrinas called "el cuarto de cautivos" -- the captives' room. It's a small room that contains a fireplace, a couple of wooden bins, and a Navajo loom. It's meant to depict the sort of accommodations that Spanish settlers would have provided for their captives at the ranch in the 1600s.

The room is usually gated -- that is, you can look in, but there's typically no one inside to explain what it's about. Slavery is difficult to discuss. But here's one fact: the captives held by settlers here, in the northernmost outpost of New Spain, were not Black. They were Native American.

How is it that 17th century Spanish settlers held Native Americans in bondage, but in much of the rest of America, slaves were imported from Africa? 

Tinnakom | Deposit Photos

During volunteer training for our upcoming season, we heard a presentation from Jon Ghahate (Laguna Pueblo/Zuni Pueblo), an educator for the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, CO. Ghahate explained that slavery was not unknown in the Americas before the coming of the Europeans; after all, people are people everywhere, with the same urges to be both bad and good to one another. What was different among the Europeans was the Catholic Church. Christianity teaches us to be kind to other people -- with the emphasis on people. If the creature in front of you isn't a person, then no matter how you treat that creature, it won't keep you from getting into heaven. In essence, the church indemnified those who held slaves. And just as the church allowed Christians to see Africans as less than human, it also gave them the same excuse when it came to Native Americans. (Not-so-fun fact: The United States didn't grant citizenship to Native Americans until 1924.)

The year 1492 was a big one in the history of what was to become Spain. Ferdinand and Isabella married and combined their kingdoms into one, Castile and Aragon. Pretty much immediately, they set about kicking the Moors out of Andalucia in southern Spain and taking the land for themselves. And in that same year, they gave their okay to Christopher Columbus to sail west in search of a more direct, and less fraught, trade route to Asia. But Ferdinand and Isabella didn't grant the funds to Columbus outright -- they gave him a loan that he was supposed to pay back with the spoils he gained from his adventuring. (The later conquistadors got the same deal, which explains why they were so hot to find gold here.)

Columbus never made it to continental North America. His ships landed on the island of Hispaniola, which today is split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. People were living there when Columbus arrived, but very little of their DNA survives today, for a very good reason: Columbus and his men basically slaughtered them. We know this because among the Spaniards who traveled to the New World with Columbus was Bartolomé de las Casas, who chronicled the treatment of the Natives at the hands of the explorers. De las Casas petitioned Charles V of Spain to grant the Natives some rights. 

But all this meant that there weren't enough workers for the plantations that were beginning to be set up in the West Indies. So de las Casas got a bright idea: why not bring in Africans?

Eventually he realized what a bad idea that was, in terms of human rights, but by then the damage had been done. And that's how the idea was planted to bring Africans to the New World ... by any means necessary.

By the time the Spanish made their way north to New Mexico, they had "perfected" their system of dealing with the Natives. In 1510, the church approved a document that was to be read to any Indians the conquistadors met, advising them that they were now subjects of the Spanish crown and of the Pope, and they had better behave as set forth herein or they could be forced to behave. Of course, this document, the Requeremiento, was in Spanish, which the Natives had no way of understanding. (The text at the link is in English.) 

One begins to understand why the Pueblo Indians rose up and drove the Spaniards out of New Mexico in 1680. It didn't last -- the Spanish returned in 1692 -- but the Pueblo Revolt remains, as stated on the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center's website, "the only successful Native uprising against colonizers in North America."

In practice, Ghahate told us, the Spaniards didn't so much take slaves as they impressed Natives to work for them. But they required tribute -- food and supplies, as well as a guide to show them where that gold was -- and forced the Natives to convert to Christianity. In that sense, the system of slavery here in the Southwest was different than that practiced by plantation owners in the Deep South. Also here, some slaves were more like indentured servants and could eventually buy their freedom. They and other outcast people -- Jews and poor Spaniards who came to the New World to find their fortune but never did -- were known as genizaros and lived apart, in their own villages. Intermarriage with Mexican settlers was common, though. Eventually the Mexican government declared all citizens equal, including the genizaros and others of mixed race -- but in society, as you might expect, prejudice lingered. Even today, Hispanic folks here will say they're Spanish, even if their DNA tells a different story. 

DNA is causing a lot of trouble everywhere, am I right?

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On a completely different topic: The Social Security Administration this week that it's making big changes in the way it claws back overpayments from recipients. This comes after news reports indicated that the existing draconian system was impoverishing some people -- even causing them to lose their homes. The two biggest changes: 1) Instead of taking 100% of a recipient's benefit until the overpayment is satisfied, the reduction will now be capped at 10% per month -- and the SSA is instituting a longer time frame for people to pay the overpayment back; and 2) instead of forcing recipients looking for relief to prove why they need it by providing a boatload of financial information, the burden is now going to be on the government to prove why the recipient needs to make reimbursement.

The changes are coming too late to help me -- I finished my penance this month -- but I'm very glad to see that others won't have to go through the same thing I did.

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One more update, and then I swear I'm done: Surprising absolutely no one, Congress took the latest budget brouhaha down to the wire, approving the final six continuing resolutions yesterday. The approval technically came after the Friday night deadline, but the several-hour delay created no damage (other than to Americans' faith in government working for us and our reputation overseas and all the rest). Immediately after the vote, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GQP-Georgia) moved to remove Speaker Mike Johnson because he, y'know, had to get help from the Democrats to keep the government running through the end of September. It's unclear whether her motion will go anywhere when the House comes back from yet another freaking recess -- but Johnson, apparently having decided that Greene has done her worst, reportedly plans for the House to take up funding for Ukraine when it returns to work after Easter.

That sound you hear is tens of thousands of pairs of eyes owned by rational Americans rolling so far back into their heads that they can see their brains.

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These moments of indentured blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

That old Cherokee princess legend.

Last week's post stirred up more interest than it had any right to, particularly on the subject of Native ancestry. So this week, I'm going to try to explain why you may not have an Indian great-grandma, after all. 

Purely for illustrative purposes! Don't @ me!
JosefKlopacka | Deposit Photos

For starters, let's talk about the Cherokee. Ancestry.com says that "so many people falsely claim to have a Cherokee great-grandmother that it’s been deemed an anthropological phenomenon." In a 2015 article for Slate, Gregory D. Smithers said this is particularly prevalent in the South, and there are a few reasons why. First, the Cherokee tried hard to accommodate White settlers in their lands during the 17th and 18th centuries, and one of the ways they did that was to allow intermarriage: "we know that Cherokees viewed intermarriage as both a diplomatic tool and as a means of incorporating Europeans into the reciprocal bonds of kinship." So it's not outside the realm of possibility for a White person today to claim Cherokee heritage. 

But: Southerners fighting for the preservation of their own way of life --yup, that would be slavery -- kind of came to admire the Cherokee, after they'd been forcibly moved to Oklahoma via the Trail of Tears, for the way they had resisted leaving. Smithers again: "Throughout the South in the 1840s and 1850s, large numbers of whites began claiming they were descended from a Cherokee great-grandmother. That great-grandmother was often a 'princess,' a not-inconsequential detail in a region obsessed with social status and suspicious of outsiders. By claiming a royal Cherokee ancestor, white Southerners were legitimating the antiquity of their native-born status as sons or daughters of the South, as well as establishing their determination to defend their rights against an aggressive federal government, as they imagined the Cherokees had done. These may have been self-serving historical delusions, but they have proven to be enduring."

They're also racially suspect. So if you don't want to be a racist jerk, how do you prove your family legend? 

A lot of folks think DNA testing is the answer, but it's not guaranteed to give you the result you're looking for. That's mostly because of the way DNA is inherited. As Gregor Mendel discovered in his genetic experiments with pea plants, children don't inherit all of their parents' DNA -- they get half, more or less, from each. And the farther back in your family tree you go, the less of each grandparent's DNA you inherit. So even if you do have Native ancestry, you may not have inherited a segment of DNA that expresses it.

Also, commercial DNA testing services might miss your Native DNA. Ancestry explains it this way: "The AncestryDNA test surveys over 700,000 locations in your DNA, but there is still a chance that we missed evidence of Indigenous American DNA. This is because you may have inherited genetic markers that AncestryDNA does not use to identify Indigenous American ethnicity. Additionally, some Native American communities are underrepresented in genetics research. This is largely due to tribal communities being rightfully distrustful because of centuries of extractive and exploitative research practices."

That underrepresentation brings us to the odious "blood quantum". Between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. government instituted a system for determining membership in a Native tribe that was based on how much "Indian blood" you possessed, and that was determined by which of your ancestors, if any, were enrolled members of the tribe at the turn of the 20th century. Not that the feds cared, but Natives count their kin differently; they don't necessarily use direct descent. Moreover, the reason the government instituted the system was to dismantle the reservations. The thinking went that by giving each enrolled family an allotment of land of their own, it would free up more land for White settlers and, as a bonus, force the Indians to become more, y'know, "civilized". So you can see why some Native Americans wouldn't want to have their DNA tested.

So how can you prove you have Cherokee ancestry?

I have for you a link to an article called "So Your Grandmother Was a Cherokee Princess?" It was published by the Cherokee Cultural Society of Houston in 1995, and it outlines a series of steps you can take to locate your ancestor. I had to go to the Wayback Machine to find it. Here you go:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160114120349/http://www.powersource.com/cherokee/gene.html

Good luck!

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As for my own supposed Native roots: I haven't heard back yet from the Canadian government, and it likely won't matter anyway. After reviewing a number of additional hints from Ancestry, I realized I was researching the wrong bunch of Terwilligers. Moreover, my third-great-grandmother was married twice; my second-great-grandmother was from her first marriage, and that guy's last name was Fobare, or maybe Fobear or Forbear. The original name was probably Foubert, and I think he was from what's now Quebec. The name changed when they immigrated to Michigan.

The area where they settled -- Oceana County, Michigan -- was Odawa territory, so I could be Odawa. But if the Native connection happened in Quebec, I could be Huron or Cree or Algonquin. Or something else. 

I may never know. But I still have a few leads to follow up on. I'll let you know if any of them pan out.

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These moments of "Indian princess" blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe! And happy Father's Day!

Sometimes family legends check out.

 

shepherd302 | Deposit Photos

As you may remember from a couple of weeks ago, after several nudges (either subconscious or Otherworldly, take your pick), I succumbed and signed up for a membership to Ancestry.com -- whereupon I found out, almost immediately, that my brother had died last year. 

Of course, once you find out something like that, you wonder what else is going on in your family tree that you didn't know about. So instead of canceling after the free trial, I've gone on to flesh out some other details. In particular, I've been trying to confirm some family legends.

It's been easier to find stuff on my father's side of the family. (Mom's parents came from what's now Czechia -- back then, it was Bohemia, a province of the Austrian Empire.) For one thing, I've already seen a family tree developed by a distant cousin who was adopted young, went looking for his birth family, and found out he was a Cantwell. (We got acquainted when he called my parents' house, asking whether we had a Lawrence Cantwell in the family. He didn't want my brother; he wanted my grandfather, whose given name was Lawrence, although he went by Tug, and who died when my dad was nine years old.) So I already had a general idea of the Cantwells' migration: from Delaware to Michigan where my dad was born, with stops in Maryland, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Indiana, and Wisconsin.

I remember hearing from Dad three family stories pertinent to this part of the tree: we were Irish, two brothers had married two sisters, and we had an "Indian princess" in the family whose maiden name was Terwilliger. 

About being Irish: That family tree I mentioned earlier (there's a copy in the Library of Congress -- ol' Henry Cantwell did it right!) traces us back to the first Cantwell in America, Capt. Edmund Cantwell, who came with the British fleet in 1664 to capture New Amsterdam from the Dutch. (New Amsterdam is now known as New York City.) The Brits were successful, and Capt. Cantwell stayed in the New World, marrying a Dutch girl born in New Amsterdam, and went on to have a successful career as high sheriff of what became New Castle County, Delaware. Anyway, the point here is that our first Cantwell wasn't technically Irish; he was born in Berkshire, England. He may have had Irish relations, and his immediate family might have emigrated from Ireland after Cromwell kicked them out. But there were also other Cantwells in England at the time. Bottom line: I don't know whether Capt. Cantwell was Irish. But if he wasn't, then which ancestor was?

I direct your attention to this snippet of a page in the 1870 census for the town of Rock, Wisconsin. 

On line 22 is William H. Cantwell. He's my great-grandfather. My grandfather, Daniel, is on line 26; he was just three years old in 1870. But just below William is his wife Margaret. Take a look at where Margaret was born. Ha! There's our Ireland connection!

It gets even more interesting. Skip over the Caughlins and go down to line 32. There's another Cantwell -- William's brother, James. See his wife Jane? She was also born in Ireland, right? 

I know from other sources that Margaret and Jane's maiden name was Lynch. And here on lines 38 and 39 are their parents, Timothy and Hanora Lynch, both born in Ireland.

In the 1880 census, James and his family are still in Wisconsin, but my great-grandparents are living in Marcellus, Michigan. I have no idea why they moved. But I've got two of my three family legends confirmed: we're Irish, and two brothers married two sisters.

The third one, about our Native ancestry, is proving trickier. See, there's a record of Daniel having married a woman named Mary Fobare in Holland, Michigan, in 1887. Her people were supposedly French. But what about the Terwillegar connection? There's a family of Terwillegars who lived north of Holland, in Bear Lake, Michigan, and who emigrated from Canada. Through them, I traced the last name of Weir. And there's a birth record for a Mary Weir in Ontario that says the father is "John (of the Nation) Weir". Does "of the Nation" mean he was a member of a First Nation? I don't know, but it seems worth checking out. 

I have a request in to Indigenous Services Canada for a genealogy search. Even that may not be definitive; he may not have been part of a registered tribe. But we'll see.

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If you've read this far, you must be a genealogy buff. I can't imagine all this would be that interesting to anyone besides me.

Still, it would be cool to find that my interest in Native American mythology -- the springboard for my Pipe Woman Chronicles novels -- comes from somewhere other than just idle curiosity.

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These moments of bloggy historical investigation have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell, who really can trace her ancestry back to colonial America. Stay safe!

Two more days.

I'm sure you've heard by now -- even if you don't live in the US -- that this coming Tuesday, Americans will be going to the polls. (I'm pretty sure everyone in the galaxy has heard. We've certainly been making enough noise about it.)

This is a midterm election -- it happens halfway between the four-year Presidential elections -- and even though we're voting on candidates for every Congressional seat and one-third of those for US senators (as well as a ton of state and local offices), the current occupant of the White House wants everyone to believe that he's on the ballot again this time. In a way, he is; a lot of Americans are disgusted with the way he has conducted himself so far and with the way his fellow Republicans in Congress have refused to make any meaningful moves toward reining him in. There's been a lot of talk about a "blue wave" coming, and a fair amount of hold-your-breath hopefulness about the percentage of early ballots being cast around the country.

So here we are, two days out. And FiveThirtyEight, a polling aggregator that has a reputation for being pretty even-handed and maybe even a little conservative, gives the Democrats a 6 in 7 chance of capturing the House, and Republicans a 5 in 6 chance of keeping the Senate.

But polls can only tell you so much. Two days before the last Presidential election, the polls had Hillary Clinton as the winner. A lot of Democrats still aren't over that abrupt loss -- and they're trying hard not to get too excited right now, lest it happen again. As the saying goes, he who expects nothing shall not be disappointed.

The suspense is getting to me, too, a little. I had planned to be out of town this coming week, so I got an absentee ballot and mailed it in several weeks ago, and now I'm ready for the votes to be counted and the hoopla to be over.

The process of voting by mail was easy and painless. I don't know why more states -- including Virginia -- don't allow everyone to vote by mail.

Wait. Yes, I do.

Once upon a time, or so I've been told, Republicans in Virginia Beach tried to get more involvement in the city's elections. Now at that time, the Virginia Republican Party used the caucus system to select their candidates, and the party officials in Virginia Beach wanted more people to show up to their local caucus. So they hired a consultant, and he came up with a whole bunch of ideas for increasing turnout. I can't remember what they were, but let's just say they involved things like holding the caucus at a more convenient time for working people. To which the horrified officials responded: "But if we did that, just anybody might show up."

That spirit is alive and well today. That's how you get dumb rules like the one that requires Native Americans in North Dakota to present an ID with a street address in order to vote, when state officials know good and well most folks who live on reservations don't have street addresses. It's also how you get Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp throwing out tens of thousands of African-American voters' registrations on a technicality because he's running for governor against a black woman. After a judge slapped his wrist for it, he then charged his opponent's party with hacking and launched an investigation despite having zero evidence.

Aside from that, there's the gerrymandering that both parties have engaged in. And hey, the Russians are still out there playing their own games with our electoral system, and nobody in charge seems to be too concerned about stopping them.

The odds are long that our election will be 100% fair. But we can overwhelm those odds if we all just show up to vote.

Tuesday. Mark your calendar. Show up. Vote.

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This bloggy get-out-the-vote exhortation has been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Street team news! And Native nativities.

We're getting ready for Yule here at La Casa Cantwell. The tree is up, the gifts are (mostly) bought, and the cookie baking leviathan is cresting the hill and picking up steam on the downhill run. (Which is to say that I made three batches of cookies this weekend.)

But I've also taken a few minutes to get the Woo-Woo Team up and running. I've set up a Facebook group, which you can join by clicking here. I've got the group permissions set to "closed", which means that you'll be able to see that it exists, but your friends won't be able to see what we're posting unless they join. (Muahaha....) Ideally, my team members will read my books and post reviews of them. But really, I'm thinking of the group as just one more tool to help you guys find out about my newest work. And team members will get perks now and then. And maybe we'll create a little community along the way. It's been known to happen.

If you've got a blog, feel free to grab the team badge, too. Hope you'll join us!

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I was poking around on teh intarwebz the other day (probably in lieu of something I should have been doing instead -- the circumstances are a little hazy now) and ran across some photos of Native American nativity sets.

Now I know you guys realize that Native Americans don't all live in tipis and aren't all godless heathens. But apparently a lot of people don't know that. And folks are sometimes surprised to learn that many Native Americans are Christian, even if they also honor the spirits that are important to their tribe.

The Native nativities come out of the tradition of the storyteller figurine, which Pueblo artists were making as early as the 1870s. By the early 1960s, Cochiti potters including Helen Cordero were making "singing ladies" or "singing mothers": a woman with her mouth open in song, as children clung to her. Cordero was commissioned in 1964 to make a male figure in a similar pose. She called it a storyteller. Artists from other tribes took the idea and ran with it. Today, you can find storyteller figurines just about anywhere that sells Native American-style pottery; in fact, I have one that I hang on the tree every year.

Anyway, given that Christianity is as widespread among Native Americans as it is among the general population, it's not surprising that potters make nativity sets. And some of them go for big money. The Field Museum in Chicago is selling one on its website right now for $585.

But it's not just the price tags that struck me about these nativity sets. It's that all the major figures have their mouths open. They're all singing. They're all telling the story of Jesus' birth.

I bought my storyteller ornament because of the obvious-to-me connection -- I'm a mother and I tell stories. But now that I've seen these nativity sets, I wonder whether it's supposed to be Mary with the baby Jesus. And here I am, a Pagan, putting it on my Yule tree. Ah well -- it doesn't matter. There are many, many routes to Spirit, after all, and plenty for all of us to sing about.

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These moments of bloggy storytelling have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.