The Boy Who Promised Me Horses
by David Joseph Charpentier
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Pub Date May 01 2024 | Archive Date Apr 30 2024
University of Nebraska Press | Bison Books
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Description
From the shock of moving from a bucolic Minnesota college to teach at a small, remote reservation school in eastern Montana, Charpentier details the complex and emotional challenges of Indigenous education in the United States. Although he intended his teaching tenure at St. Labre to be short, Charpentier’s involvement with the school has extended past thirty years. Unlike many white teachers who came and left the reservation, Charpentier has remained committed to the potentialities of Indigenous education, motivated by the early friendship he formed with Prairie Chief, who taught him lessons far and wide, from dealing with buffalo while riding a horse to coping with student dropouts he would never see again.
Told through episodic experiences, the story takes a journey back in time as Charpentier searches for answers to Prairie Chief’s life. As he sits on top of the sledding hill near the cemetery where Prairie Chief is buried, Charpentier finds solace in the memories of their shared (mis)adventures and their mutual respect, hard won through the challenges of educational and cultural mistrust.
Advance Praise
“Beautifully embodied by the people who inhabit the Northern Cheyenne community in southeast Montana, this journey is fraught with difference, ambiguity, and harm, historical and present, taking us into the shadows of our individual and national interiority and helping us acknowledge not only shadow but light.”—Shann Ray, American Book Award winner and author of The Souls of Others
“A beautiful tale of friendship, memory, and loss. Charpentier didn’t go to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation or make friends with Maurice Prairie Chief in order to write a book. He wrote the book because he had a story he needed to tell. The result is a look at reservation life that is achingly honest, both about the people he came to know and about himself.”—Ed Kemmick, author of The Big Sky, By and By: True Tales, Real People, and Strange Times in the Heart of Montana
“The most powerful and heartfelt stories are the stories we don’t see coming, about the people who live quietly at the edge of our lives and offer untold love and meaning. The Boy Who Promised Me Horses is a love story lit from within. Unexpected, powerful, and deeply moving.”—Debra Magpie Earling, author of The Lost Diaries of Sacajewea
“Not only a lyrical account of the narrator’s friendship with Maurice Prairie Chief. It is a haunting tragedy, a cross-cultural narrative that explores the mystery of friendship and the impossibility of ever really knowing another person. Dave Charpentier has crafted an indelible and unforgettable story.”—Tami Haaland, author of What Does Not Return
“David Charpentier’s The Boy Who Promised Me Horses is humble, wise, honest, full of wonder, and absolutely, devastatingly heartbreaking. Which is as it should be. The story of the American West is one of genocide, thievery, and forced assimilation—and that’s the historical legacy David Charpentier meets head-on as a young English teacher at a high school on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeastern Montana. Yet, too, in his time on the reservation Mr. Sharp begins to learn resilience and loyalty and a deep and sustaining culture. And most of all, he learns friendship. You’ll be thinking about Charpentier and Maurice Prairie Chief long after you turn the last page.”—Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781496238078 |
| PRICE | $24.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 324 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Educator 987175
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for letting me review this book. This was a book about a teacher and one of his students. How the teacher befriended and tried to help this student. Even when the odds were against him, he still tried to better his student’s life.
Thomas K, Reviewer
Dave Carpentier after struggling through science classes in college he changes his major from physical therapy to an English major with the prediction that he will teach English on a reservation in Montana. And this is just what does in 1990 he moves to the town of Ashland, Montana to be an English teacher for St. Labre Catholic School on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. Not long after moving into his new accommodations he meets a young man by the name of Maurice Prairie Chief, and they quickly develop a friendship. With Maurice not having much direction or role models to follow Dave becomes not only a teacher but like a big brother to Maurice. Much of the story follows their adventures around the area whether it is fishing, climbing or riding bikes or any adventure that includes a few cookies and soda. Along the way Dave learns about life both good and bad on the reservation and many of the traditions. You learn early on that there will be some sadness in this story but overall, this is a good read.
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