HERstory revisited in new book

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Messengers of the Wind:

Native American Women Tell Their Life Stories

Edited by Jan Katz

317 pages, $32 (h.c.)

Random House

For too long, the stories of Native women have been distorted, our voices silenced. A new book, Messengers of the Wind, confronts this imbalance and provides a glimpse into the histories and present-day realities of a diverse group of Native women within what is now called the United States.

The chapters, grouped into six main categories with titles such as "Daughters of the Dispossessed" and "Mending the Tears, Weaving and Strands," provide a loose framework for the stories ? tales of tradition, oppression, healing and home.

The stories of the older women are among the most compelling. Fran James, a Lummi (or Coast Salish) from north of Seattle, speaks of cedar longhouses, dugout canoes and smokehouses, reflecting a 75-year-long relationship with the land. A traditional basket weaver, James illustrates how completely self-sufficient her people once were: they had fruit trees, collected gull eggs, hunted ducks, fished for cod and dug for clams. They carried water and wood, and made everything they needed from what the earth provided. It is a life not many people remember, and it was, James says, a time when "people cared about one another."

Rose Bluestone, a Dakota from Mdewakanton, Minn., who died before the book was published, manages to tell her story with the emotional control one so often seen in old people. In 1862, 303 Dakota men were imprisoned and sentenced to death for the alleged murder of several white settlers. Over 1,600 of their relatives were put in chains and driven from their land, with 300 dying of malnutrition and illness during the forced march.

Thirty-eight men were ultimately hanged, and the surviving men kept in prison in Iowa for three years, after which the government gave the Dakotas land in Nebraska. Bluestone's grandmother witnessed the hanging of her own father.

"From my grandmother I learned about sadness," Bluestone said.

There is also Virginia Poole, a Seminole/Miccosukee "trail Indian" from the Florida Everglades who describes how grandmothers and maternal uncles are responsible for teaching and disciplining the children in their strongly matriarchal society. There is Lois Steele, an Assiniboine doctor originally from Montana; grandmother Rose Mary Barstow, a White Earth Ojibway/Chippewa who also died before the book was finished; and Ingrid Washinawatok, a Menominee writer and filmmaker now living in the city of New York. The women in this book, in telling their stories, act as interpreters of Aboriginal history. Their stories convey the heritage of our people.

It would be a mistake, however to assume that Native women inhabit only one world. Our present-day (and past) realities share common threads but are amazingly varied. Messengers of the Wind successfully addresses this diversity and puts to rest the tired stereotypes that have arisen out of the dominant society's attempt to fit Aboriginal culture into the European patriarchal model.

Emmi Whitehorse, a Navajo artist from Sante Fe, speaks for many women: "Everything my grandmother stood for I now hold sacred."