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Overview
A consummate storyteller and writer in both Mesquakie and English, Ray A. Young Bear is a noted poet whose skills are evident in these intricate, finely woven stories that balance encounters and experiences with religion, myths, dreams, poverty, and injustice with the love and support offered by family and friends. In Black Eagle Child Young Bear recreates his life within the fifties, sixties, and seventies circumstances of a familiar American history of racism, Vietnam, drugs, the Doors, and Castaneda's cults. But always central to these honest, imaginative vignettes are Young Bear's exits from and returns to his home on Iowa's Mesquakie Settlement, the lands his great-great-grandfather, Ma mwi wa ni ke, helped obtain on behalf of the tribe in 1856. Through the eyes of Edgar Bearchild, a member of the Black Eagle Child Settlement, we meet such enduring characters as Ted Facepaint, Junior Pipestar, Brook Grassleggings, the Hyena family, Pat "Dirty" Red Hat "the ugliest man in Big Valley", and Claude Youthman "the Cantaloupe Terrorist". From Edgar's introduction to the faith of his tribal elders, to his childhood delight in grape Jell-O, to his years at a California university, his journey to adulthood is a fascinating one. Like the astonishingly beautiful and intricate Mesquakie beadwork, this autobiography combines aspects of the dominant white culture with elements from Red Earth history and tradition. In Black Eagle Child Ray A. Young Bear has created a distinct and dazzling vision that will speak to all who will heed its voice.Synopsis
A classic of Native American literature, Black Eagle Child uses a rich mix of verse, prose narrative, and letters to tell Edgar Bearchild's journey to adulthood. Although the backdrop of much of Young Bear's novel may be familiar — the conflicts over race, drugs, Vietnam and others that gripped America in the fifties, sixties, and seventies — Bearchild recounts his coming-of-age story from a distinct vantage point, as a member of the Mesquakie nation. From his childhood delight in Jell-O to his induction into the faith of his elders, Bearchild's journey is a uniquely American one.
Library Journal
This wonderful volume of stories, told in both prose and poetry, floats between memoir and fiction, history and storytelling. To tell his story, Young Bear creates a fictional counterpart to Iowa's Mesquakie Settlement, where he is an enrolled, lifelong resident, and the fictional persona of Edgar Bearchild. Bearchild's account of childhood to young manhood, from the Fifties through the Seventies, mixes the common history of drugs, Vietnam, and The Doors with the racism and injustice of Native American experience. Interwoven through this personal story are tales told by other speakers, sometimes elegiac, often comic. Effectively the book is as much an autobiography of a community as it is the history of a singular life. This is recommended for most collections.-- Brian Kenney, St. John's Univ. Lib., Jamaica, N.Y.