The Beadworkers

This compelling audiobook introduces Piatote's debut collection of stories in prose and verse. It's sprinkled with the Nez Perce language and concludes with a reimagining of Antigone as Antikone. Piatote has a fine conversational style. Hers is a storyteller's voice, and her delivery has striking transparency. When her narrator is an 11-year-old, she sounds 11. In "Beading Lesson," she provides a spellbinding portrayal of a native speaker, inhabiting her in tone, diction, and cadence and performing a remarkable dramatic monologue. She splendidly does the roles of the Aunties in "Antikone," the play that ends the collection. A Nez Perce tribal member and a Native American studies professor at UC Berkeley, Piatote has crafted an exceptional work in multiple genres. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

August 26, 2019
Piatote’s debut collection mixes poetry, verse, and prose to form an impressive reflection on the lives of modern Native Americans. Piatote, a Nez Perce enrolled with the Colville Confederated Tribes, fits much nuance and profundity into stories that often reflect on the ways in which contemporary mainstream American culture continues to erase the identities and traditions of indigenous groups. In “Beading Lesson,” the narrator teaches a girl how to make traditional beaded earrings, noting how fewer and fewer people have been learning the skill in recent years. In “wIndin!,” two friends work on a piece of political art, a board game that comments on systemic oppression of Native Americans throughout history. A woman reunites with an old friend and considers the ways their relationship to each other and their families have changed in “Katydid.” The most impressive and longest, “Antikoni,” is a reimagining of Antigone, complete with a chorus of Aunties. In Piatote’s version, Antikoni strives to rescue the remains of her ancestors from the museum where they have been interred by the “White Coats” and “White Gloves”—“We were born into this suffering. That our own/ blood would be divided/ from us, that our mourning could never come to an/ end, for it can never/ properly begin.” The Nez Perce language is featured throughout the verse passages, and Piatote includes many explanatory footnotes. This beautiful collection announces Piatote as a writer to watch.