Post by blackcrowheart on Jan 16, 2006 16:29:13 GMT -5
Windfall isn't always a blessing
U.S. government's cash given to Native Americans was 'termination policy'
DAN HAYS
January 15, 2006
Sometimes it takes a work of fiction to get at the truth and reveal the facts.
"Truth" and "fact," though, while they have meanings in common, are not the same thing.
The fact is that in 1961 the United States government offered each resident of the Klamath Indian Reservation in Southern Oregon $43,000 for giving up their million-acre reservation and ending their enrollment as a Native American tribe.
The truth behind those facts is that the payout was part of an ongoing "termination policy" by which the federal government hoped to reduce the number of enrolled tribal members and regain land that once was thought useless enough to give to Indians, but now looked much more attractive.
The payout destroyed lives.
That's the backdrop to Rick Steber's novel "Buy the Chief a Cadillac."
The novel illuminates the truth behind the facts.
Steber is suited to tell this tale. He was raised on the Klamath Indian Reservation and witnessed what the payout did to people.
"I had friends and acquaintances who took the government termination payout," he has written. "Nearly all were killed violently: dying at wild parties, wrecking cars, or slowly drinking themselves to death."
Steber, who lives in the Ococho Mountains near Prineville in central Oregon, founded a small company to publish and distribute his books -- 27 so far. The majority of those books are non-fiction.
But Steber chose to tell the Klamath story as fiction.
In 2005, he published it himself, as usual and then lightning struck twice.
First, "Buy the Chief a Cadillac" won the Spur Award, the top honor given by the Western Writers of America. Then a major publisher picked up the self-published volume and has issued it nationwide as a handsome trade paperback.
"Buy the Chief a Cadillac" focuses on three brothers and those who love them. Each reacts to the payout in a different way.
Truth is very much behind everything Steber does here. In his "Foreword," he is careful to let us know that what we about to read is fiction, though it is based on fact.
"There is no town named Chewaucan. There is no U.S. West Bank." Then he adds: "And there are no such things as greed, indulgence, tyranny, social injustice or racial prejudice."
The truth is a thorny issue.
Steber, however, doesn't back off from the thorns. His novel is relentless in its ability to burrow into the inner lives of its characters, to endear them, with all their flaws, to readers. And then it lets them walk their own paths while readers watch in sorrow, joy and sometimes horror.
The prose Steber uses here is simple and evocative:
"Inside on the table was an overflowing ashtray, a pencil that had been sharpened with a pocketknife and a book lying open. One of Lefty's lasting true pleasures had been reading two-bit westerns. The kind where there was a bad guy, a pretty girl and the hero always won. But those days were over, the print no longer held still, letters squirmed and wiggled without respect to words and lines and paragraphs. This upset Lefty more than anything, except maybe power saws."
In a way, that paragraph might be seen as a metaphor for the book itself.
Those who thought the story of the destruction of Native American culture ended in the 19th century will learn otherwise as they read this book.
"Buy the Chief a Cadillac" is one of the most honest novels to come along in while. There is no guile in it. Only truth. And those facts.
Dan Hays' Northwest Best recommends books written by a Northwest author or are about a Northwest subject. Write Hays in care of the Statesman Journal, P.O. Box 13009, Salem, OR 97309-3009.
U.S. government's cash given to Native Americans was 'termination policy'
DAN HAYS
January 15, 2006
Sometimes it takes a work of fiction to get at the truth and reveal the facts.
"Truth" and "fact," though, while they have meanings in common, are not the same thing.
The fact is that in 1961 the United States government offered each resident of the Klamath Indian Reservation in Southern Oregon $43,000 for giving up their million-acre reservation and ending their enrollment as a Native American tribe.
The truth behind those facts is that the payout was part of an ongoing "termination policy" by which the federal government hoped to reduce the number of enrolled tribal members and regain land that once was thought useless enough to give to Indians, but now looked much more attractive.
The payout destroyed lives.
That's the backdrop to Rick Steber's novel "Buy the Chief a Cadillac."
The novel illuminates the truth behind the facts.
Steber is suited to tell this tale. He was raised on the Klamath Indian Reservation and witnessed what the payout did to people.
"I had friends and acquaintances who took the government termination payout," he has written. "Nearly all were killed violently: dying at wild parties, wrecking cars, or slowly drinking themselves to death."
Steber, who lives in the Ococho Mountains near Prineville in central Oregon, founded a small company to publish and distribute his books -- 27 so far. The majority of those books are non-fiction.
But Steber chose to tell the Klamath story as fiction.
In 2005, he published it himself, as usual and then lightning struck twice.
First, "Buy the Chief a Cadillac" won the Spur Award, the top honor given by the Western Writers of America. Then a major publisher picked up the self-published volume and has issued it nationwide as a handsome trade paperback.
"Buy the Chief a Cadillac" focuses on three brothers and those who love them. Each reacts to the payout in a different way.
Truth is very much behind everything Steber does here. In his "Foreword," he is careful to let us know that what we about to read is fiction, though it is based on fact.
"There is no town named Chewaucan. There is no U.S. West Bank." Then he adds: "And there are no such things as greed, indulgence, tyranny, social injustice or racial prejudice."
The truth is a thorny issue.
Steber, however, doesn't back off from the thorns. His novel is relentless in its ability to burrow into the inner lives of its characters, to endear them, with all their flaws, to readers. And then it lets them walk their own paths while readers watch in sorrow, joy and sometimes horror.
The prose Steber uses here is simple and evocative:
"Inside on the table was an overflowing ashtray, a pencil that had been sharpened with a pocketknife and a book lying open. One of Lefty's lasting true pleasures had been reading two-bit westerns. The kind where there was a bad guy, a pretty girl and the hero always won. But those days were over, the print no longer held still, letters squirmed and wiggled without respect to words and lines and paragraphs. This upset Lefty more than anything, except maybe power saws."
In a way, that paragraph might be seen as a metaphor for the book itself.
Those who thought the story of the destruction of Native American culture ended in the 19th century will learn otherwise as they read this book.
"Buy the Chief a Cadillac" is one of the most honest novels to come along in while. There is no guile in it. Only truth. And those facts.
Dan Hays' Northwest Best recommends books written by a Northwest author or are about a Northwest subject. Write Hays in care of the Statesman Journal, P.O. Box 13009, Salem, OR 97309-3009.