Birding While Indian
A Mixed-Blood Memoir
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- $349.00
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- $349.00
Descripción editorial
Winner, 2024 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize
“A fascinating search for personal and cultural identity.” —Kirkus
Thomas C. Gannon’s Birding While Indian spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author’s life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, Dickcissel: such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannon’s traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mother’s devastation at racist bullying from coworkers, and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the people and other animals indigenous to the United States.
Birding has always been Gannon’s escape and solace. He later found similar solace in literature, particularly by Native authors. He draws on both throughout this expansive, hilarious, and humane memoir. An acerbic observer—of birds, the environment, the aftershocks of history, and human nature—Gannon navigates his obsession with the ostensibly objective avocation of birding and his own mixed-blood subjectivity, searching for that elusive Snowy Owl and his own identity. The result is a rich reflection not only on one man’s life but on the transformative power of building a deeper relationship with the natural world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Having both white and Native American heritage creates unique tensions in life and bird watching in this conflicted memoir from Gannon (Skylark Meets Meadowlark). An English professor who is one-eighth Lakota Sioux, Gannon revisits a lifetime of racist experiences, including witnessing his mother's anguish at being called a "squaw" by white people (including his violent, alcoholic father) and getting teased by both white and Native friends for his mixed ethnicity. He weaves these reminiscences around vignettes from his lifelong bird-watching hobby: seeing a mixed-breed bunting, he wonders, "Do these birds experience anything similar to the human torture of being a cross blood—of being shit upon by both sides?" When describing birding, Gannon's prose is lyrical and evocative—"In some hidden rock cranny a few yards above the creek sang a Canyon Wren, unmistakable, a long un-birdlike trill simultaneously descending and accelerating into an aural climax"—but at other points, it can lapse into stilted academic soapboxing, or get tangled in chaotic crosscurrents, as when he castigates his mother for "projecting the pain of her internalized racism upon her kids," then beats himself up for ingratitude. Gannon's ruminations on his identity crisis hold undeniable power, but the unfocused presentation bogs them down.
