The Beadworkers

August 15, 2019
Hope and heartbreak abound in this debut collection set among Native Americans in the northwest. There is a moment early in the story "Katydid" where the narrator and her best friend are joking about what an Indian version of The Cosby Show might have looked like--the patriarch would have "a huge collection of loud ribbon shirts," they decide--when the narrator thinks to herself, "It's surprising how much material can be mined from making Indian versions of things." Piatote, who is Nez Perce and teaches Native American studies at UC Berkeley, has some of her most satisfying moments in this collection by doing just that. The narrator of "wIndin!" is an artist creating a Monopoly-esque board game based on contemporary Indian life ("Indian tokens or token Indians?" she wonders) while simultaneously navigating the loneliness of being single and the tangled love life of her gay best friend. The book's longest piece is a verse play called "Antíkoni" that revisits Sophocles' tragedy Antigone by setting it against the backdrop of museum treatment of Indian artifacts and remains in the age of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act: Piatote's Antigone, rather than burying her brother illicitly, steals his remains back from an unscrupulous museum director. All of Piatote's pieces, in fact, draw heavily on political and historical issues, from the Battle at Wounded Knee ("The News of the Day") to the Fish Wars of the 1960s and '70s ("Fish Wars"). Though some of the slighter pieces feel like mere vehicles for ideas, at her best Piatote balances the emotional complexities of her characters' lives with the political complexity of their relationship with an America all too eager to look away. A poignant and challenging look at the way the past and present collide.

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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.

September 1, 2019
Piatote is Nez Perce, and a Native American Studies professor at UC Berkeley. In this eloquent and elucidating debut story collection she brings the Native experience to life?from the long line of broken treaties and the tragic effect on Native tribes from coast to coast to contemporary repercussions from forced attendance at Indian boarding schools. In one tale, a young widow lives and works in a camp of Native laborers: migrant workers in their own land, a fact they accepted by day but questioned in their sleep. Another touching story portrays an auntie who is teaching her niece how to do beadwork, which has gotten her through some hard times. It's a theme Piatote explores repeatedly, the way aunts, uncles, and grandparents strive to keep their culture alive by passing it on to the next generation. Beading, fishing, drumming, shawl dancing, each is a part of their lives they don't want forgotten, even as depression or alcoholism threatens to eradicate them. Piatote draws the reader in with spare and perceptive language and resonate empathy for each struggling yet resilient character.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)