The stance of this blog is "fuck genocide"

Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Paiutes, their Wrongs and Claims is a somewhat controversial book and that's understandable. When it was published it was controversial because it was advocating for Native American rights; now it's controversial because of its advocacy for assimilationist rhetoric.

In spite of its flaws in that regard, the book is still a wonderful thing to hold up when racists claim that manifest destiny wasn't that bad or wasn't a genocide or that white people treated people better than other people did.

I don't have it in me to get super critical here, or to go into detail with this incredibly depressing subject. The settlement of the American West was a bad thing built on imperialism and genocide. There are clear victims of this settlement process and their people are still dealing with the repercussions of the genocide.

I happened to spend some time in Nevada and Oregon last year, when I had just started reading this book. One of the things I was curious about was the tremendous number of places I saw labelled as Paiute reservation land - where I'm from it seems like most tribal lands are fairly consolidated. You'll have a radius of maybe fifty miles, max, before you're out of that group's reservation areas.

The Paiute land stretched across hundreds of miles in a way that was strange to me.

Turns out that's because of forcible moves and multiple separations of the tribe and a whole bunch of other fucked-up shit.

Anyway, I can't recommend the book enough for people who are under the impression that white people settling the continent was somehow right or good.

Cheers,
     Alli

A warm family in a cold world

This book took a little while to get into (the first 15 pages or so were hard to push through for me) but once I was involved with the story I was glad that I'd made the effort.

Wole Soyinka does an amazing job of regressing the reader to his childish viewpoint while still telling his story in a way that adults can understand. As the book moves through itself, and as the narrator ages, the memoir moves from a more febrile, magical perspective to a touching recollection of his family during a very frightening time.

I loved experiencing the percolation of knowledge through the narrator as he grew up and began to recognize a world beyond the walls of his family compound and indeed beyond the borders of his country.

Every person described is interesting and complete and touching, even if they are described with dislike they're granted their humanity and the understanding that maybe they're an okay person, just someone with different motivations.

The book is transporting, the language is lush and beautiful and makes you see the streets where Wole walked as a child, and hear the sizzle of cooking and smell the rich foods he so desperately wanted to scrounge from the family pantry. It's a very sensory book for the first two thirds of the story, and then becomes a very intellectual book as Wole the baby becomes Wole the boy and starts to participate in the various intrigues and uprisings around him.

The tale of the Nigerian Women's Movement from this unique perspective is intensely moving and makes you want to charge up and take political actions of your own - makes you want to be something bigger and wholer than you are now.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Soyinka, Wole. Aké: the years of childhood. Vintage International. New York: New York.
     1989. (1981.)