From Booklist
In the words of indigenous scholars, community activists, and artists, this unique collection of essays and poems presents the last 500 years of American history from the Indian viewpoint--not the "white-washed, academic-tainted, hypothetical . . . history" found in most textbooks. Paula Gunn Allen addresses the myth of the colonists coming to an empty continent, when in fact the acknowledged number of Native Americans at that time is 10 million and rising. Others elucidate the special problems confronted by indigenous women, from those who lost children to the smallpox brought by the initial waves of white settlers, to those marched to "removal reservations" in the 1830s, to incarcerated Native American women today who are denied the opportunity to practice their religious rites. Perhaps the most compelling essays are those chronicling the decimation of entire tribes, such as the Choctaws, dispossessed of their land through a series of 14 treaties, and the Powhatan and Monacan tribes of what is now Virginia. This substantial and meticulous collection supports all who are breaking the "great silence" surrounding the reality of American expansion.
Deborah DonovanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Product Description
As you walk out of your front door tomorrow morning, look down. Look to your left and to your right. Touch the earth: the concrete, the sidewalk, or whatever surrounds you. Undoubtedly you will be touching the layered coverings of the remains of indigenous peoples. Not arrowheads, not broken pieces of pottery — but the very DNA of the first peoples of this continent. For five centuries — from Columbus's arrival in 1492 to the U.S. Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s, to the renewed assault in the 1970s — our continent's indigenous people endured the most massive and systematic act of genocide in the history of the world. In Eating Fire, Tasting Blood, twenty established and up-and-coming American Indian writers from disparate nations and tribes offer stirring reflections on the history of their people. This is not a collection of essays about Native Americans but rather a collection BY Native Americans — the story of native holocaust on a tribe-by-tribe level as told by those few who have been fortunate enough to survive. Included are original essays by Vine Deloria Jr., Paula Gunn Allen, Linda Hogan, and Eduardo Galeano.
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