The Women's Warrior Society (Sun Tracks) - Hardcover

Beardslee, Lois

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0816526710 ISBN 13: 9780816526710

Publisher: University of Arizona Press, 2008

Synopsis

The Women’s Warrior Society is a remarkable gathering of characters and voices used to expose truths about Native American life. In tightly woven prose, Lois Beardslee tells stories about people from all over North America and from either side of the line between abused and abuser. Both individual and archetypal, Native and non-Native, male and female, her characters take up arms against widely accepted stereotypes about Native people. The women warriors in these tales have lived through a variety of mishaps, experiencing the consequences brought on by misinformation and the misguided efforts of institutions and individuals. Armed with this experience, they gather in unlikely “sweatlodges”—from kitchen tables to public libraries—transforming into she-wolves who, lips curled, snarl at their own victimization and assert that hope for future generations is maintained through creativity, determination, and the preservation of traditional values. This is political writing at its most h

About this title

About the Author:

Lois Beardslee (Ojibwe/Lacandón) is the author of Lies to Live By, Rachel’s Children: Stories from a Contemporary Native American Woman, and Not Far Away: The Real Life Adventures of Ima Pipiig. She lives in Michigan, where she continues to practice rare traditional art forms, including quillwork and sweet grass basketry.

From Booklist:

Hard to describe in a few words is this thought-provoking, moving, and confrontational collection of stories by Beardslee, an Ojibwa-Lacandon artist, author, and teacher. In a simultaneously lyrical and brutally honest style, she elucidates the Native truths kept alive by the Women’s Warrior Society—truths “you didn’t read about in Anthropology 101”—which seeks to relegate Indian stereotypes to the trash bin. Making use of resonant metaphors—Native women as she-wolves, tribal libraries as sweat lodges—Beardslee dramatizes the lives of seasonal workers making $7.05 per hour packing cherries in Michigan, the struggles of mothers to instill Native culture in their children to replace the self-loathing resulting from racism they experience in an all-white educational system, and the ingenious way in which a savvy mother teaches her child the intricacies of grammar while at the same time passing along a traditional Native fable. These powerfully imagined “women with attitude and women with histories of malcontent . . . who sing like wolves” prod us to amend our own actions; their ringing words are meant to be savored, then shared. --Deborah Donovan

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0816526710
• ISBN 13: 9780816526710
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160