BOOK REVIEWS: Children of the Dragonfly Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education

My autobiographical essay is published in the newly released book, Children of the Dragonflly, U of Arizona Press.

The editor, Robert Bensen, writes at p. 176:

In "The Connection," Paul reverses many of the conditions that governed her early life as an adoptive child, by (with her adoptive parents' blessing) finding the dispersed members of her birth family through exhaustive searching, adopting a birth cousin's child, marrying into an American Indian family, and becoming a lawyer working for indigenous rights.

Children of the Dragonfly
Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education

"Lifts us up and encourages us to believe that human courage and ingenuity may keep alive our finest human values."  --  Carter Revard

available at www.amazon.com
http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/books/
 

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Children of the Dragonfly
Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education
Robert Bensen, ed.

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250 pp. / 6 x 9 / 2001
In Press.Paper (0-8165-2013-5) $19.95
Cloth (0-8165-2012-7) $45.00s
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"Lifts us up and encourages us to believe that human courage and ingenuity may keep alive our finest human values." Carter Revard

Sometimes the losses of childhood can be recovered only in the flight of the dragonfly.
 

Native American children have long been subject to removal from their homes for placement in residential schools and, more recently, in foster or adoptive homes. The governments of both the United States and Canada, having reduced Native nations to the legal status of dependent children, historically have asserted a surrogate parentalism over Native children themselves.

Children of the Dragonfly is the first anthology to document this struggle for cultural survival on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. Through autobiography and interviews, fiction and traditional tales, official transcripts and poetry, these voices Seneca, Cherokee, Mohawk, Navajo, and many others weave powerful accounts of struggle and loss into a moving testimony to perseverance and survival.

Invoking the dragonfly spirit of Zuni legend who helps children restore a way of life that has been taken from them, the anthology explores the breadth of the conflict about Native childhood. Included are works of contemporary authors Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, Luci Tapahonso, and others; classic writers Zitkala-Sa and E. Pauline Johnson; and contributions from twenty important new writers as well. They take readers from the boarding school movement of the 1870s to the Sixties Scoop in Canada and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 in the United States. They also spotlight the tragic consequences of racist practices such as the suppression of Indian identity in government schools and the campaign against Indian childbearing through involuntary sterilization.

The custody and upbringing of children is one of the most urgent issues that Native Americans have ever faced. Children of the Dragonfly shows that Native children as well as their families and descendants are both victims and victors in the crucial struggle for cultural and personal survival. Like the dragonfly of lore, this book can lead us all toward a better understanding of adopted children everywhere.
 
 
 

CONTENTS
Part 1. Traditional Stories and Lives
Severt Young Bear (Lakota) and R. D. Theisz, To Say "Child"
Zitkala-Sa (Yankton Sioux), The Toad and the Boy
Delia Oshogay (Chippewa), Oshkikwe's Baby
Michele Dean Stock (Seneca), The Seven Dancers
Mary Ulmer Chiltoskey (Cherokee), Goldilocks Thereafter
Marietta Brady (Navajo), Two Stories
Part 2. Boarding and Residential Schools
Embe (Marianna Burgess), from Stiya: or, a Carlisle Indian Girl at Home
Black Bear (Blackfeet), Who Am I?
E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk), As It Was in the Beginning
Lee Maracle (Stoh:lo), Black Robes
Gordon D. Henry, Jr. (White Earth Chippewa), The Prisoner of Haiku
Luci Tapahonso (Navajo), The Snakeman
Joy Harjo (Muskogee), The Woman Who Fell from the Sky
Part 3. Child Welfare and Health Services
Problems That American Indian Families Face in Raising Their Children, United States Senate, April 8 and 9, 1974
Mary TallMountain (Athabaskan), Five Poems
Virginia Woolfclan, Missing Sister
Lela Northcross Wakely (Potawatomi/Kickapoo), Indian Health
Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene), from Indian Killer
Milton Lee (Cheyenne River Sioux) and Jamie Lee, The Search for Indian
Part 4. Children of the Dragonfly
Peter Cuch (Ute), I Wonder What the Car Looked Like
S. L. Wilde (Anishnaabe), A Letter to My Grandmother
Eric Gansworth (Onondaga), It Goes Something Like This
Kimberly Roppolo (Cherokee/Choctaw/Creek), Breeds and Outlaws
Phil Young (Cherokee) and Robert Bensen, Wetumka
Lawrence Sampson (Delaware/Eastern Band Cherokee), The Long Road Home
Beverley McKiver (Ojibway), When the Heron Speaks
Joyce carlEtta Mandrake (White Earth Chippewa), Memory Lane Is the Next Street Over
Alan Michelson (Mohawk), Lost Tribe
Patricia Aqiimuk Paul (Inupiaq), The Connection
Terry Trevor (Cherokee/Delaware/Seneca), Pushing up the Sky
Annalee Lucia Bensen (Mohegan/Cherokee), Two Dragonfly Dream Songs

Robert Bensen is coeditor of Iroquois Voices, Iroquois Visions: A Celebration of Contemporary Six Nations Arts and has authored numerous essays on Native literature and child custody. He is Professor of English and Director of Writing at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, where he also teaches American Indian law and literature.
 
 

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