The Beadworkers: Stories

Counterpoint

ISBN 10: 164009427X / ISBN 13: 9781640094277

Published by Counterpoint, 2020

About this Item

Brand New! Not Overstocks or Low Quality Book Club Editions! Direct From the Publisher! We're not a giant, faceless warehouse organization! We're a small town bookstore that loves books and loves it's customers! Buy from Lakeside Books!

Seller Inventory # OTF-S-9781640094277

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Beadworkers: Stories
• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 164009427X
• ISBN 13: 9781640094277
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New
• Seller catalogs:
  • 0
  • VCF

About this title

Synopsis

Beth Piatote's luminous debut collection opens with a feast, grounding its stories in the landscapes and lifeworlds of the Native Northwest, exploring the inventive and unforgettable pattern of Native American life in the contemporary world

Told with humor, subtlety, and spareness, the mixed–genre works of Beth Piatote’s first collection find unifying themes in the strength of kinship, the pulse of longing, and the language of return.

A woman teaches her niece to make a pair of beaded earrings while ruminating on a fractured relationship. An eleven–year–old girl narrates the unfolding of the Fish Wars in the 1960s as her family is propelled to its front lines. In 1890, as tensions escalate at Wounded Knee, two young men at college—one French and the other Lakota—each contemplate a death in the family. In the final, haunting piece, a Nez Perce–Cayuse family is torn apart as they debate the fate of ancestral remains in a moving revision of the Greek tragedy Antigone.

Formally inventive and filled with vibrant characters, The Beadworkers draws on Indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life.

About the Author

Beth Piatote is an associate professor of Native American studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a PhD from Stanford University, is the author of numerous scholarly essays and creative works, and is the recipient of multiple awards and fellowships. She is Nez Perce enrolled with Colville Confederated Tribes and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her two children.