Mending Skins

by Eric Gansworth

Welcome to the Seventh Annual Conference of the Society for Protection and Reclamation of Indian Images. Expect to find, amid all the refined cultural observations, academic posturing, and political maneuvering, an Indian who defies anyone to protect, let alone reclaim, her image. This is Shirley Mounter, a Tuscarora woman and the chief storyteller among the acerbic, eloquent, and often hilarious speakers who overflow the pages of this latest novel by the noted Onondaga writer Eric Gansworth. A lecture on Indian stereotypes by Shirley’s daughter, art historian Annie Boans, calls forth Shirley’s recollections, whose outpourings deposit us in the turbulent yet restorative waters of modern Iroquoian reservation life, always flowing and eddying around kin.

 

Indeed, Shirley’s house and land are now, after a long and bitter fight, forever lost to her in the construction of a water reservoir that feeds the government’s hydroelectric plant. The story of this battle is the story of Shirley’s generation and the faltering generation that follows—of violent love and losses, of children turning away only to find themselves forever negotiating the nuances of identity, of popular culture in jarring juxtaposition with the sometimes even more incredible realities of Native life. Weaving a complex narrative illustrated with his own paintings, Gansworth creates a rich, wry, and multifaceted tapestry of the intricate twists and turns of coincidence, memories, and stories that bind Native families together.

Genres: Fiction, Indigenous, Native American

166 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Gansworth is an enrolled citizen of the Onondaga Nation; however, he grew up in the Tuscarora Nation as a descendant of one of two Onondaga women present among the Tuscarora at the foundation of the nation in the 18th century. Gansworth originally qualified in electroencephalography, considered a profession useful to his nation; however, he went on to study literature and to continue a lifelong interest in painting and drawing.

Gansworth has written five novels, including the award-winning Mending Skins (2005) and Extra Indians (2010). In all his novels, illustrations form an integral part of the reading experience. His most recent novel, If I Ever Get out of Here is his first Young Adult novel, and deals with the 1975 friendship between two boys, one a resident of the Tuscarora Nation, the other living on the nearby Air Force base. In a starred review, Booklist stated that the book succeeded in "sidestepping stereotypes to offer two genuine characters navigating the unlikely intersection of two fully realized worlds."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Ga...

Reviews

[Brooke · Rating 5 out of 5]

The modern trend in literary fiction is to tell the story through multiple perspectives. Gansworth does this, but in a way that dives deeper into perspective and makes the technique really work. This novel truly makes you consider, "what is a true Indian/ is that even correct?". Really great characters and spectacular prose. Great read.

[Amy Gay · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the better books I've read in a while! I love having the story come from multiple perspectives, across generations, with various connections to one another. I also enjoy hearing about life for those living nearby my hometown, trying to find who they are between two different worlds they are raised in.

[Brenda Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The novel is uniquely structured and tells a compelling story of a couple generations of Native American characters trying to overcome the traumas of their lives. I enjoyed the voices of the different characters and the realistic depiction of Native Americans today.

[Stan Golanka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good book set mainly in the Tuscarora reservation near Niagara Falls.

[christopher]

i read a story by alice munro once and i was supposed to talk about it, or something about it, and so what i ended up talking about was that alice munro does a lot in her writing that if written by someone else might seem bad but shes able to do this thing when she takes something that could be really bad and transforms it or uses it or whatever to make something really good in a way that is unexpected and good.

i think this was in reference to some abstraction that she used that i thought if i had read that anywhere else i would have thought it was stupid, but i thought that it was really good there. i also said this about her use of time and some language things. i referred to it as like the concept of "mastery" or something

reading this i thought something similar, in the moments where i think that it comes really close to being "bad".

i remember the class that i took where i had to read this i thought my professor didnt like me. i thought this mostly because we had to do responses to readings that she would assign, and in one of my responses i said something about it being interesting or strange when someone wrote an article in the style of a non-fiction article about being sick, or someone being sick, and then a bird flies in and starts talking to the character (or the writer/person who is sick?) and its actually their grandmother, and then the bird flies away and then later the grandmother said like "yep im the bird". i said it was interesting or something about the blur between fiction and non-fiction or something along these lines, and my professor got mad, i think, and said something about white people thinking kafka was real, or the bible. i wasn't really sure why she was upset.

i think my perspective has changed since then, in thinking about race/ethnicity etc., and i think that i feel theres more essential meaning i guess to it, than i would have thought before. in terms of like, there is something important in that ethnicity of a work, in terms of its essential meaning, its perspective, etc. or can be.

in a class dedicated to studying these works by primarily looking at their ethnicity, i think it's not a great idea to say something like "ethnicity can be important but there are more important and exciting things to think about" - i think i know this now and as a result i could probably do better in the class now, with this perspective, than i did before.

im trying hard to think of a way to say something like "i really liked this book, i liked specifically how [ethnic] it was" without it seeming bad. not that i would say this (specifically about this book) but like trying to reconcile a sentence like that into my worldview.

[Dfunky1 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book gives a glimpse into contemporary Native American life. Unfortunately, the characters are not well-differentiated from one another. It's easy to be reading one person's point-of-view and think you're reading another's. Also, one character is an art history graduate student, yet she's dealing with popular visual stereotypes of the Native American. Thus, she would probably be writing a dissertation in American Studies, Cultural Anthropology, or Film Studies rather than Art History.

[jeanette · Rating 5 out of 5]

I met Eric Gansworth at NALS this year (2008) and he is the coolest guy. I really like the character Fred Howkowski and his next novel is supposed to be about him.

[Paul Tatum · Rating 2 out of 5]

Depressing.