"The Round House"

[fiefoe]

In the second half, I was still concentrating on the characters (my favorite is Mooshum) and almost lost the plot. For instance, what happened to Mylar's baby?? I also found what happened to Cappy too trite.

• in such painful numbers that it was hard to remember them all without uttering, as my father did sometimes as he read local history, and the white man appeared and drove them down into the earth, which sounded like an Old Testament prophecy but was just an observation of the truth.
• So that’s how we finally saw Alien—standing at the window behind the young priest we suspected of an unspeakable crime.
• The heart of our hated foe’s impregnable fortress. The challenge: impossible. Our resolve: unflagging. Our courage: quitless. Our audience: Linda Wishkob.
• When you are little, you do not know that you are screaming or crying—your feelings and the sound that comes out of you is all one thing.
• I experienced a strange skip of apprehension. /sitting in the welling gloom downstairs
• But the woman had called herself, simply, mother. My brain had perfectly taped the words she said.
• A dreadful array of feelings yawned. Which should I elect to overcome me first?
• She would have to have turned her fury at herself, her shame, on someone else—the child she’d chosen.
• I asked what I was representing. Reservation-based free market enterprise. People are watching us.
• on our particular reservation Bjerke’s presence was a statement of our toothless sovereignty.
• become an impenetrable undergrowth of names and liaisons.
• It gave him the sensation that he was tottering on the tip of a flagpole. He was poised on circumstance.
• those snapping turtles science tells us are unchanged for over 150 million years—a form of life frightful but perfect.
• This Arion got a notion to travel to Corinth and hired a boat sailed by Corinthians, his own people, whom he thought trustworthy, which just goes to show about your own people,
• Of course, once the storm had passed, Nanapush found that he was frozen against the buffalo’s ribs. He was held fast by solid blood.
• On what land? Was it tribal land? fee land? white property? state? We can’t prosecute if we don’t know which laws apply.
• record of old brutality that hadn’t yet bled itself out
• I only convinced him to wait by telling him that when his pecs swelled from his workouts, the letters could be bigger.
• That’s Indian Law. I nodded and looked at the edifice of knives and silverware on top of the sagging casserole.
• Marshall vested absolute title to the land in the government and gave Indians nothing more than the right of occupancy, a right that could be taken away at any time. Even to this day, his words are used to continue the dispossession of our lands.
• Oliphant v. Suquamish. He shook the fork and the stink wafted at me. Took from us the right to prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes on our land.

<<