"Strong Medicine" Speaks
A Native American Elder Has Her Say
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling author of Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years comes the inspiring true story of Marion "Strong Medicine" Gould, a Native American matriarch, and the Indian way of life that must never be forgotten.
Amy Hill Hearth's first book, Having Our Say, told the true story of two century-old African-American sisters and went on to become an enduring bestseller and the subject of a three-time Tony Award-nominated play. In "Strong Medicine" Speaks, Hearth turns her talent for storytelling to a Native American matriarch presenting a powerful account of Indian life.
Born and raised in a nearly secret part of New Jersey that remains Native ancestral land, Marion "Strong Medicine" Gould is an eighty-five-year-old Elder in her Lenni-Lenape tribe and community. Taking turns with the author as the two women alternate voices throughout this moving book, Strong Medicine tells of her ancestry, tracing it back to the first Native peoples to encounter the Europeans in 1524, through the strife and bloodshed of America's early years, up to the twentieth century and her own lifetime, decades colored by oppression and terror yet still lifted up by the strength of an enduring collective spirit.
This genuine and delightful telling gives voice to a powerful female Elder whose dry wit and charming humor will provide wisdom and inspiration to readers from every background.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hearth, best known for her oral history of the Delaney sisters Having Our Say, captures the voice of 83-year-old tribe matriarch Marion "Strong Medicine" Gould as she looks back on her life as a Lani Lenape Indian. A once- powerful tribe ranging across New Jersey and parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware, the arrival of Europeans would eventually turn the Lenape into "a hidden people": says Gould, "We kept quiet in order to survive." With great care, Gould describes the challenges of 20th and 21st century Native Americans and her significant role in her southern New Jersey tribe's transforming way of life. In many ways, Native Americans' modern struggle is for a public identity, especially apparent during the civil rights movement: "All of a sudden, we aren't dark enough.... Indian was not black. We were totally left out in the cold." Gould locates the source of her strength and the tribe's-the Indian way-in the extended family, and suggests that many people's problems today stem from a lack of "kinfolk to lean on." Poignant moments of love and loss bookend the tale, and in between Hearth works almost invisibly to craft a graceful, sustained look into the quiet struggles of contemporary Native Americans.
