Mohawk
Trail by Beth
Brant
This book gathers poetry, essays, memoir, and
fiction by Native American writer Beth Brant. Brant uses these
genres to examine various kinds of family: blood parents and
children, siblings of like-minded politics, the mother-sister
patter that informs lesbian couplings. She is especially wise
about the necessity to re-create family in cultures such as her
own, which other cultures have tried to eradicate.
From 500
Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen
Beth Brant is Degonwadonti whose father is Joseph of the Mohawk
Turtle Clan from the Bay of Quinte Theyindenaga reserve in
Ontario. Degonwadonti is Beth Brant whose mother is Hazel of
Irish/Scots ancestry from Michigan. Mohawk Trail is a
collection of singing stories that remember and honor it all. In
the first section, called "Native Origins," we hear the
legends of the grandmothers' birth traditions in the Longhouse
with the fire that must not go out, "the smell of wood smoke,
sweat and the sharp-sweet odor of blood," and the whisper
"Don't forget who you are." "Detroit Songs"
sings stories of people in their own sweet, sad voices:
"Daddy" talks about work - "it was every minute you
thought about a job, about feedin' your family." In
"Garnet Lee," Beth's maternal grandmother tells about a
Kentucky mining town, housekeeping jobs, black lung, and mine
explosions. "Terri," Beth's
Chippewa/"Pollack," friend relates why she dresses up
sexy to dance for tips in a lesbian bar on the weekends;
"Danny" tells how he loved wearing dresses and why he
had to kill himself; and "Mama" talks about taking care
of "all those kids." The last selections, "Long
Stories," describe two mothers living one hundred years apart
whose children were stolen, and show us the life of a
"half-breed" growing-up girl in Detroit. Each story a
song, each song a poem, each poem a story, Mohawk Trail
reverberates with the rhythmic strength of courageous and enduring
love.
Food
and Spirits by Beth
Brant
The plot devices in these eight short stories
sometimes seem taken from a notebook for the politically correct:
disenfranchised Native Americans, a young man returning home to
die of AIDS, a battered wife, a lesbian alcoholic mother who loses
custody of her child. Never mind. Author Brant, a Mohawk and
Canadian who has lived much of her life in Michigan, avoids the
traps she's set for herself. She has a deft feel for that hardest
of arts to master: characterization. Her people, revealed to us
through subtleties of dialogue and action, become so real it's
impossible to regard them as metaphors. Brant's strength is not
for dramatic action and the two stories that rely on it 'Wild
Turkeys " and "This Place" suffer for it. The
strongest stories here play to the author's strength: a talent for
capturing the shining moments of ordinary life. In "Home
Coming" a dying heron serves as the burning glass in which
past and present meet. In 'A Death in the Family, " a young
girl struggles with lipstick and hairbrush to make her mother as
beautiful in death as in life. In "Swimming Upstream " a
former alcoholic watches a battered salmon leap from rock to rock
and glimpses her dead son's face in the magic glide of dark
waters. Simple language, powerful. images, good work.
