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This anthology of fiction, prose, and poetry celebrates the rich diversity of writing by Native American women today. Editors Heid E. Erdrich and Laura Tohe have gathered stories from across the nation that celebrate, record, and explore Native American women&#39;s roles in community. The result is a rich tapestry that contains work by established writers along with emerging and first-time authors. Contributors include Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Diane Glancy, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Allison Hedge Coke, LeAnne Howe, Roberta Hill, Kim Blaeser, Linda LeGarde Grover, with a foreword by Winona LaDuke.<br /><br />The writings included range from the personal to the political, from notions of romantic love to the realities of marriage, from finding a place in modern society to incorporating tradition in daily life. Whether it&#39;s Louise Erdrich&#39;s heartbreaking story &quot;The Shawl,&quot; Diane Glancy&#39;s tightly distilled poems, or Joy Harjo&#39;s elegant and fanciful &quot;How to Get to Planet Venus,&quot; all of these works explore both what it means to be a woman and how those realities are complicated by the Native American experience.<br /><br />The editors have divided these lively and thought-provoking pieces into four sections: &quot;Changing Women,&quot; which deals with the stages of a woman&#39;s life, awareness of female ancestors, and women&#39;s traditions of healing and making art; &quot;Strong Hearts,&quot; which shows Indian women enduring with love, defending with fierce judgment, and reaching out across history to protect the people; &quot;New Age Pocahontas,&quot; which reveals the humor and complexity of stereotypes and simplified images of Native American women; and &quot;In the Arms of the Skies,&quot; which explores the ways in which typical notions about romantic love and marriage are put to the test.<br /><br />Sister Nations also includes full biographies of all the contributors, commentary from many of the authors on their work, and a bibliography of relevant publications.

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With the art of a practiced storyteller, Ignatia Broker recounts the life of her great-great-grandmother, Night Flying Woman, who was born in the mid-19th century and lived during a chaotic time of enormous change, uprootings, and loss for the Minnesota Ojibway. But this story also tells of her people&#39;s great strength and continuity.

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A language carries a people&#39;s memories, whether they are recounted as individual reminiscences, as communal history, or as humorous tales. This collection of stories from Anishinaabe elders offers a history of a people at the same time that it seeks to preserve the language of that people.><br /><br />As fluent speakers of Ojibwe grow older, the community questions whether younger speakers know the language well enough to pass it on to the next generation. Young and old alike are making widespread efforts to preserve the Ojibwe language, and, as part of this campaign, Anton Treuer has collected stories from Anishinaabe elders living at Leech Lake, White Earth, Mille Lacs, Red Lake, and St. Croix reservations.<br /><br />Based on interviews Treuer conducted with ten elders&mdash;Archie Mosay, Jim Clark, Melvin Eagle, Joe Auginaush, Collins Oakgrove, Emma Fisher, Scott Headbird, Susan Jackson, Hartley White, and Porky White&mdash;this anthology presents the elders&#39; stories transcribed in Ojibwe with English translation on facing pages. These stories contain a wealth of information, including oral histories of the Anishinaabe people and personal reminiscences, educational tales, and humorous anecdotes. Treuer&#39;s translations of these stories preserve the speakers&#39; personalities, allowing their voices to emerge from the page.<br /><br />This dual-language text will prove instructive for those interested in Ojibwe language and culture, while the stories themselves offer the gift of a living language and the history of a people.

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In stark, haunting prose, first-time author Peter Razor recalls his early years as a ward of the State of Minnesota. Disclosing his story through flashbacks and relying on research from his own case files, Razor pieces together the shattered fragments of his boyhood into a memoir that reads as compellingly as a novel.<br /><br />Abandoned as an infant at the State Public School in Owatonna, Minnesota, Peter Razor is raised by abusive workers who thought of him as nothing more than &quot;a dirty Injun.&quot; Cut off from his family and his heritage, he turns inward, forced to learn about the world on his own. After failed attempts to run away from the orphanage, he is indentured by the state to an abusive, reclusive farm family. Beaten, poorly fed, clothed in rags, and worked like slave labor, he struggles to attend high school and begins to dream of another life. Razor&#39;s stark and often chilling story, devoid of self-pity, recalls with haunting clarity the years he, like the locust, patiently waited to awaken and emerge.

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