The Light People: A Novel - Softcover

Henry, Gordon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 087013664X ISBN 13: 9780870136641

Publisher: Michigan State University Press, 2003

Synopsis

The Light People is a multi-genre novel that includes a series of nested stories about a tribal community in Northern Minnesota. Major themes include Oskinaway’s search for his parents and the legal wrangling over the possession of a leg that has been removed from a tribal elder. Each story is linked to previous and successive stories to form a discourse on identity and cultural appropriation, all told with humor and wisdom.
     Taking inspiration from traditional Anishinabe stories and drawing from his own family's storytelling tradition, Gordon Henry, Jr., has woven a tapestry of interlocking narratives in The Light People, a novel of surpassing emotional strength. His characters tell of their experiences, dreams, and visions in a multitude of literary styles and genres. Poetry, drama, legal testimony, letters, and essays combine with more conventional narrative techniques to create a multifaceted, deeply rooted, and vibrant portrait of the author's own tribal culture. Keenly aware of Eurocentric views of that culture, Henry offers a "corrective history" where humor and wisdom transcend the political. 
    In the contemporary Minnesota village of Four Bears, on the mythical Fineday Reservation, a young Chippewa boy named Oskinaway is trying to learn the whereabouts of his parents. His grandparents turn for help to a tribal elder, one of the light people, Jake Seed. Seed's assistant, a magician who performs at children's birthday parties, tells Oskinaway's family his story, which gives way to the stories of those he encounters. Narratives unfold into earlier narratives, spinning back in time and encompassing the intertwined lives of the Fineday Chippewas, eventually revealing the place of Oskinaway and his parents in a complex web of human relationships.

About this title

About the Author:

Gordon Henry is Professor of English at Michigan State University and Director of the Native American Institute, in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Michigan State University. His poetry and fiction have been published in The Black Warrior Review, Mid-American Review, Stories Migrating Home, and North Dakota Quarterly, as well as numerous other journals and anthologies. The Light People, his first novel, won the American Book Award in 1995.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Cleverly nesting stories within stories and commingling literary forms, literature professor Henry (Michigan's Ferris State) offers a complex, multifaceted view of contemporary Chippewa life through the device of a boy searching for his parents: a lyrical, if somewhat overwrought, debut. Young Oskinaway, living on the reservation in Minnesota with his grandparents, one day asked them to find his mother, who ran off with a trader years before. The elders contact Jake Seed, tribal medicine man, who sends his helper Boozhoo, whose story as he introduces himself triggers a chain of marginally related tales involving a painter, a painted stone, the amputated leg of Four Bears that was lost but found again, an incarcerated Indian who spoke and wrote only in haiku, and a youth who hopped on a horse and skidded into a wintry marsh with the horse dead on top of him, there to be joined by a woman trapped in her car by her massive, dead brother. Of these stories, the one about the leg gains particular prominence; the leg is discovered years after its loss, wrapped in dry ice and hanging in a Minneapolis museum. A lawsuit, pitting the outraged family against white representatives of property and science, ensues before the limb can be returned to the reservation for proper burial. After a few more spins of the storyteller's wheel, however, the focus returns to Oskinaway, who learns much about his heritage when Seed finally takes to the vision path to answer his questions. A determinedly nonlinear narrative--a mix of drama and academic discourse--in which the kaleidoscopic effects appeal even in moments when the artifice is especially noticeable. Ultimately, however, the parts prove more substantial than the whole. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 087013664X
• ISBN 13: 9780870136641
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 236