Ebook342 pages4 hours
Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this ebook
Mixing prose and poetry, ancient traditions and modern sensibilities, this brilliant, profane, and poignant coming-of-age story is a masterpiece of Native American literature
At a Thanksgiving party held in a Bureau of Indian Affairs gymnasium, the elders of the Meskwaki Settlement in central Iowa sip coffee while the teenagers plot their escape. Edgar Bearchild and Ted Facepaint, too broke to join their friends for a night of drinking in a nearby farm town, decide to attend a ceremonial gathering of the Well-Off Man Church, a tribal sect with hallucinogenic practices. After partaking of the congregation’s sacred star medicine, Edgar receives a prophetic vision and comes to a newfound understanding of his people’s past and present that will ultimately reshape the course of his life.
Set against the backdrop of the tumultuous 1960s, Black Eagle Child is the story of Edgar’s passage from boyhood to manhood, from his youthful misadventures with Ted, to his year at prestigious liberal arts college in California, to his return to Iowa and success as a poet. Deftly crossing genre boundaries and weaving together a multitude of tones and images—from grief to humor, grape Jell-O to supernatural strobe lights—it is also an unforgettable portrait of what it means to be a Native American in the modern world.
At a Thanksgiving party held in a Bureau of Indian Affairs gymnasium, the elders of the Meskwaki Settlement in central Iowa sip coffee while the teenagers plot their escape. Edgar Bearchild and Ted Facepaint, too broke to join their friends for a night of drinking in a nearby farm town, decide to attend a ceremonial gathering of the Well-Off Man Church, a tribal sect with hallucinogenic practices. After partaking of the congregation’s sacred star medicine, Edgar receives a prophetic vision and comes to a newfound understanding of his people’s past and present that will ultimately reshape the course of his life.
Set against the backdrop of the tumultuous 1960s, Black Eagle Child is the story of Edgar’s passage from boyhood to manhood, from his youthful misadventures with Ted, to his year at prestigious liberal arts college in California, to his return to Iowa and success as a poet. Deftly crossing genre boundaries and weaving together a multitude of tones and images—from grief to humor, grape Jell-O to supernatural strobe lights—it is also an unforgettable portrait of what it means to be a Native American in the modern world.
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Reviews for Black Eagle Child
Rating: 3.875 out of 5 stars
4/5
8 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Quite an amalgam of quasi-memoir, psychoactive drug trips, and traditional tale. Don't try to follow this linearly, but you realize at the end that you have a picture of young men's life from reservation through attempts to fit into the white culture in the 1960s. The words are broken into shortened lines on the page, which makes one think it must be poetry, and the descriptive power of the words certainly fits into poetic expectations. But if it is poetry it is a narrativ poem, and the layout doesn't interfere with the telling of the tale.
Book preview
Black Eagle Child - Ray Young Bear
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