CALLING FOR A BLANKET DANCE: This Ponca’s Review by Cliff Taylor
If you haven’t heard already, this year has been just about the best year for cool new Native books in recent recorded history. They’ve been breaking the internet, inspiring class rooms, healing the hard-bitten, making elders smile, and profoundly changing the game. It’s been a feast. Too many to actually read them all, to keep up with. One of the latest is Calling For A Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah (Cherokee/Kiowa/Mexican). I’ve decided to share a little review about that novel here because it’s probably my favorite new Indian novel I’ve read in the past few years.
Calling For A Blanket Dance is the story of Ever Geimausaddle, a boy and then man of mixed Native/Mexican heritage, as told through the eyes of his family, each chapter a progressing slice of his life witnessed by his grandma, his cousin, his mom, his sister, a troubled youth he takes in, and more. It’s a slightly non-traditional way to tell Ever’s story but it works fantastically, causing you to connect with and sometimes even love the person telling their piece of his story as much as you continue to relate to and grow your feelings for Ever over the years and then decades. This format winds up creating a beautifully real multi-generational portrait of one big interconnected Kiowa, Cherokee, and Mexican family down in Oklahoma and Mexico, and it made me think of so many of my own family members: almost successes, those gone wrong, proud fathers, culture-carriers, the kind, the trauma-wrapped, those gone, those I saw just last week. To me, this book painted us modern Natives and our families about as good as any and better than most. It’s a gift to those of us who yearn to see our own Native families and relatives rendered in language and storytelling capable of capturing where we really come from, our culture today, our true beauty.
The novel revolves around Ever, tracks him, follows him as he is a terror, causes trouble, lives without a father, carries that life-wrecking anger just about all of us know only too well, as he joins the military, marries the wrong young woman who maybe ultimately was the right young woman, has kids, struggles, finds meaning and purpose, and struggles some more. We need to spirit along and see where Ever’s going because he’s composed of so many shards of ourselves and we need to see how the great story of his life somehow has hope and the blessings of the ancestors, so that we can perceive the same in our own lives. Each chapter deepened my care for this brother, made me cringe and squint sometimes, made me root for him always. Like Reservation Dogs, which is also set in Oklahoma, the moments of his life were almost too much, too located in my own biography. I’m thinking of one scene where he’s reunited with his absentee Mexican father, watching him get drunk at a wedding even though he’s on dialysis and dying because of his alcoholism already, indulging himself, neglecting his kid, not even trying to make things right with young Ever. Ever sits in his father’s car, opting out of the wedding, watching his father go further and further into the revelry, and eventually, after barfing up some of the wedding food that a cousin brought out to him, he gets out of the car, punches the window, sees a cinderblock and goes and gets it and smashes the car window completely. What are we to do with some of these cards we’re dealt when we’re young Natives? How do we accept and get through all of the manifold horrors?
As hard and as realistic of a contemporary Native story as it is, Calling For A Blanket Dance is not a bleak book, a book with inescapable looming darkness waiting for Ever at the end. No, it’s actually a book that shows how nothing can go right and still a Native can find a good life, have beautiful children, a home, and get help from the people around them who really love them. In Ever’s case, so many judge him but even they love him, and love him more than they judge him. And as time goes on, his character begins to take on the better qualities of his Kiowa/Cherokee/Mexican cultures. He becomes a single dad able to hold down a job, working with troubled Native youth. It’s heartbreaking work, heartbreaking to read how hard it is for him to provide for his four kids; but over time, it becomes clear that it’s heart-making work too, heart-making for him to care for his kids through everything, and to put his days of bad, anger-born decisions behind him. Ever is healing, making way for healing to come to his kids and the kids he works with, is a pinprick but potent portal for the healing medicines that appeared in the various chapters of his life: the handmade quilts with family designs, the ceremonial Booger masks, the Kiowa Gourd Dance regalia, the generosity of his relatives at the titular blanket dance. Ever becomes the path forward the best of us all try in our own way to embody and pass on, the path forward through all of the dark parts of this world we might still spend a lifetime trying to understand. And that’s a story our bookshelves need, maybe a relative of yours needs, maybe you need.
We all have that thing inside of us that tells us when we’ve read a book that’s really for us and our lives in all of our particularness. Such books are not always the easiest to find when you’re an Indian, a Native, Indigenous. But this year, with the sweet avalanche of beautiful Native books that have come out, this has surely changed for many. For me, Oscar Hokeah’s Calling For A Blanket Dance left me satisfied, represented, moved, and empowered. After I turned the last page, that thing inside of me was full of tears and joy. And I mean, what more could a Native reader want?
By Cliff Taylor
Cliff Taylor is an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska. He is the author of The Memory of Souls, a memoir about the Sundance and his life/walk with the little people. He can be reached through his website @ www.cliffponca.com