Bad Banana

FRESH AIR INTERVIEW👆  Finding Your Ancestors in the Archives PHOTO: Author Joseph Lee. (Photo/Aslan Chalom) By  Shaun Griswold |  July 19, 2025   Yahoo News Summer memories of running with cousins in Zuni mud — all the weekends I spent at my Auntie Paula’s home on the Zuni Pueblo — return as I read Joseph Lee’s book  Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity .  A mixture of memoir, reportage and commentary, it documents Lee’s family history, describing how land and ancestry forged strong links to his Aquinnah Wampanoag home on Martha’s Vineyard. Lee’s stories echoed my own rez dirt memories, layers of loving Indigenous relationships with foundations deeper than any historical record. [Editor's Note: This column  originally appeared  in "High Country News. Used with permission. All rights reserved.] Lee spoke with  High Country...

I am rereading Pointing with Lips!  If you have not read it, grab a copy TODAY!... Trace Here is a review: Transmotion Vol 1, No 1 (2015) Lone Hill, Dana. Pointing with Lips: A Week in the Life of a Rez Chick . Greenfield: Blue Hand Books, 2014. ISBN: 978-1-4959-4529-8. 326 pp. https://www.createspace.com/4670234?ref=1147694&utm_id=6026 Humor. There is much one can say about this important first novel by Dana Lone Hill, Pointing with Lips: A Week in the Life of a Rez Chick , but humor is at the forefront of her work.  On nearly every page there is something to make the reader smile, chuckle, or tear up with laughter.  To be sure there are serious issues dealt with in the novel, but humor sustains the reader through the work, as humor sustained the author growing up on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the setting for Pointing with Lips .  In Custer Died for Your Sins , Vine Deloria , Jr. argues, "One of the best ways to understand a people is to know w...

 COMING THIS FALL 2025  Carson Faust Growing up in Wisconsin, Carson Faust didn’t know much about the Native American side of his family from South Carolina until his grandmother showed him a box of papers that laid out the family’s genealogy. The box, which also contained interviews with tribal members and non-Native townsfolk, became the origin for If the Dead Belong Here (Viking, Oct.), Faust’s haunting mystery about a missing Native American girl. “It was almost like an anthropological study,” says Faust, an enrolled member of the Edisto-Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina . He spent hours poring over the documents in his grandmother’s attic and began writing a story, interspersing sections that mirrored these archival documents, until he lost interest in the “idea of outsiders describing my culture in the form of affidavits or census records.” He explains that “it became important to me to center the voice of a commu...

Why The Windows Have To Be Open When Writing Poetry Writing as Craft Amanda Wells July 18, 2025 Aaron John Curtis | The PEN Ten The restorative and revelatory journey in Old School Indian, the debut novel by Aaron John Curtis , explores the impact that culture, community, and history have on an individual. Two decades after leaving the reservation where he was raised, Abe Jacobs, now a part-time poet in Miami whose marriage is about to collapse, is diagnosed with a rare disease that doctors believe will kill him. Returning to the Rez, where he grew up, Abe agrees to undergo traditional healing by his Great Uncle Budge despite his skepticism, and finds a new path forward with writing, healing, his family, and his relationship. (Zando – Hillman Grad Books, 2025) In conversation with Digital Safety & Free Expression Program Coordinator Amanda Wells for this week’s PEN Ten, Curtis explains the importance of oral histor...