Reservation Nation - Hardcover

Cook, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1893448045 ISBN 13: 9781893448049

Publisher: Boaz Publishing Company, 2007

Synopsis

A powerful tale of great rhythm and grace, David Fuller Cook's Reservation Nation is a complex portrait of life on a North Carolina Indian reservation. The story is told by Warren Eubanks, a young man who struggles to unlearn the lessons of his childhood on the reservation. Eubanks' imperative to uncover truth takes him down Reservation Road to the American Indian Movement and tribal politics. This journey is punctuated by land grabs, oil and mineral rip-offs, murders, and betrayals — a litany of long-nurtured grievances that pit Indian against Indian.

Take David Fuller Cook's trip to Reservation Nation and you'll find a remarkable people and come to know an unforgettable young man who stays true to his tribe while he learns to look the world in the face.

About this title

About the Author

David Fuller Cook lives near the Eno River, in North Carolina, and his love for the river has led him to preserve the oral history of the Eno in stories and songs. As a naturalist and educator Cook cofounded, in 1989, the bio-regionally based Schoolhouse of Wonder, an environmental education organization with programs for children. He taught for several years in the field of gifted education, recently returning to the Schoolhouse of Wonder as its program director. Cook is the author of Piedmont Almanac: A Guide to the Natural World. Reservation Nation is his first novel.

Reviews

The Uwharrie of North Carolina came up against the controversial Indian termination policy of the 1950s and '60s, which sought to mainstream Native Americans. Warren Eubanks, whose Uwharrie name means the Seed, grew up under the care of his grandparents in the 1950s, and narrates troubled reservation life as an older man looking back at his childhood and Vietnam-era younger adulthood, witness to a besieged community that has had to figure out how to continu[e] to be Indian. Warren moves back and forth between different periods in the past, telling of conflict between the old ways, as followed by elders such as great Aunt Ida, who could read minds, and Grandmother, a weaver and singer, and the ruinous ways of the Kowache, or white people, to which Chief Billy Farmer is drawn. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, the American Indian Movement and various corporations all play in as Warren slowly narrates how the reservation lands are handled, all the while staying close to people like the motorcycle riding Joe Bad Crow and Sun Susie, a horse trainer daughter whose mysterious death haunts these pages. In channeling Warren, Cook's beautifully modulated, speechlike cadences give his debut novel a quiet power. (Nov.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Boaz Publishing Company
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1893448045
• ISBN 13: 9781893448049
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208