mother (Penguin Poets)

In what many call “Education for Extinction,” 523 church-run boarding schools took Native American children from their families and attempted to indoctrinate them away from their culture. About 35,000 children were schooled in this way.

This poetic narrative details one such child who was raised by a Baptist family away from her Cheyenne family. The longing for the distantly remembered mother is in every page of this book. It is a slim volume, but nevertheless, the reader will find it slow going due to the rumination evoked by these memories.

The narrator reunites with her mother, sister and brother. The family tries to fill her in on daily family live and the interconnectedness of the tribe. The narrator muses on what it means to be Indian and where she fits in any category. The author is unsparing in her look at the good and disfunction of such a life. What comes through, however, is the very human need to refine our true home.