The history of indigenous people in the Americas is rife with abject violence. Horrors reached their height when Native Americans encountered white Europeans beginning in the 16th Century. The Native Americans most often came in peace, but were soon tricked, fooled, displaced, and slaughtered, their way of life forever destroyed. The next step was placement in tribal reservations where much was promised, but only neglect and disparity were delivered.

There were always natives who fought to maintain language, stories, customs, and traditions. These elders would do their best to pass knowledge on to younger generations, trying their utmost to offer these tenets as an alternative to lives of retributional violence, addiction, abuse, and neglect. A big part of this effort took the form of maintaining communal gatherings centered on dance.

The central figure in Oscar Hokeah’s wonderful debut, “Calling For a Blanket Dance” is Ever Geimausaddle. A product of a mixed Mexican/multi-tribe Indian marriage, we follow his trajectory from two generations before birth. We witness the earliest signs of Ever’s propensity to violence driven by systemic societal neglect and abject poverty. We meet good people who are bound to make bad choices, believing in false love that only leads to premature pregnancy, birth, ill health and inadequate care, dangerous living conditions, aborted education, and limited employment opportunities, inevitably perpetuating the cycle.

Ever’s heritage and development is told in a series of first person narratives, though not until the final segment by Ever himself. There is little reason to believe that Ever will be the one to break through, but there is always hope. Hokeah is gentle with the reader in sharing his vast knowledge of Cherokee tradition and reality. The Family Tree at the beginning is highly useful. A Glossary may also have helped, but it just made me think harder, which was for the best. It’s a cold, cruel world out there, but Native tradition and culture flows deep. There are pathways to success where community embrace can pay forward and pay back.

Thank you to Algonquin Books and Netgalley for the eARC.

The very first thing that I’d like to do is enthusiastically applaud author Oscar Hokeah for the unique story structure of his debut novel. I have never before encountered a fiction work where a character’s life was told almost entirely through the eyes of several other characters, much less such a work where every one of said characters is a relative of some sort. Of course, absolutely key to such a setup is making sure that each individual narrator is a fully fleshed out character in their own respective rights. Otherwise it’s much too like general first person narration with name swaps. Fortunately, Hokeah is very successful on this front. The book’s multi-generational portrait of its main character, Ever Geimausaddle, carries a fantastically rich complexity by both capturing him in different points of his life and also telling his tale through a range of different perspectives filtered by each narrator’s unique relationship history with him.

I also very much enjoyed the story’s Oklahoma setting. Lately I’ve been consuming quite a lot of contemporary Native American and First Nations fiction, but have inadvertently ended up reading titles specifically set in the upper midwest and written from an Anishinaabe perspective. So I was very much appreciative to receive my first opportunity to read a book written with a mix of Cherokee, Kiowa and Comanche voices (amongst many others).

Hokeah's first appearance on the literary stage is definitely an impressive one. I am already looking forward to seeing what he has next in store.