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Catch Colt (American Indian Lives)

Name: Catch Colt (American Indian Lives)
Author: Sidner Larson
ISBN: 9780803229082

by Sidner Larson

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Overview

“I was born with pierced ears,” writes Sidner Larson, “something Grovons believe signifies the rebirth of a very old Indian.” Larson was a catch colt—a child born to an unmarried Gros Ventre woman. In this rapid and candid autobiography Larson describes his youth in Montana, in apartments and ranch houses. He lived at various times with his mother, his aunt, and his grandmother, but always without his father, whom he wondered about for years. Eventually Larson found his father, but he first found himself, and that took more time and trouble. Along the way he experienced schools that didn’t like Indians and career counselors eager to diminish his expectations. He also found friends to box, to play baseball with, and to drink with. By keeping his head and sense of humor he got along. He bought a bar and protected it with his fists. He went to the University of Minnesota law school and became a lawyer, seeing the law from the other side and not liking it any better from there. He returned to university studies for a doctorate in American literature, feeling at last closer to work that touched him. Cheerful, appreciative, and clear sighted, Catch Colt is a romp through modern American Indian life, told by someone who knows both its thrills and its bruises.

About the Author, Sidner Larson

Sidner Larson, an assistant professor of Native American Literature in the Department of English at the University of Oregon, has published essays in American Indian Culture and Research Journal and other journals. Catch Colt is his first book.

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Editorials

Joy Harjo

“The ongoing tale of the mixed-blood Indian in this country can be convoluted and difficult. Sidner Larson’s version of the paradox is honest and compelling, a coming of age story from the northern plains unlike anything else I have read.”—Joy Harjo

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A ``catch colt,'' in the words of the Gros Ventre Indians, is an illegitimate child, and Larson, son of a Gros Ventre mother and a white man, considers his life-including his pursuit of ``a life of the mind''-full of illegitimacies. Unfortunately, this diffuse collection of autobiographical reminiscences contains too much awkward prose, hampering the narrative. Larson, who teaches English at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho, does capture some scenes well, limning teenage rebellion (``the light and space of Montana had zapped me in certain ways''), a time spent running a rugged bar in a Montana town that historically ``treated Indians like dirt'' and his awkward meeting, at the age of 32, with the father he never knew. The author outgrew a career as a lawyer and left a marriage before specializing in Native American literature and concluding that people must return to their ``place of origin.'' (May)