Initially written by author J. Stanion’s great-grandfather—an Indigenous educator and advocate for Native Americans whom aspects of key characters are probably based—MY PLACE AMONG THEM was passed down two generations to Stanion, who polished and published it. This provenance lends the novel an authenticity that sparkles throughout, particularly in its casual details about how people went about their days on the Northern Plains in the two decades between 1890 and 1911—from the practical (“We’d built an icehouse to store chunks of ice we cut from the creek and insulated with layers of straw”) to the romantic (“in the old days the courting robes were made of antelope skin tanned to a wonderful softness and sewn together with long fringes around the edges”).
Descriptions of the daily minutia of this era, including a wealth of regional flora and fauna imagery, offer welcome details and a richer understanding of this particular place and people. Unsurprisingly, though, the novel paints uglier pictures, too. An early scene depicts in heart-stopping action the massacre of Wounded Knee, in which U.S. soldiers killed 200 Indian adults and children without provocation over the course of an hour. The episode is viewed from the perspective of a terrified Lakota boy who survives by pretending to be dead in a shallow creek, next to the bodies of a woman and her infant child. Another harrowing scene describing a prairie fire that needlessly grows because of the local officials’ arrogance is both vivid in action and informative in historical detail. Other scenes of starvation, illness, and corruption occur throughout the story as well.
But many of the injustices portrayed are non-violent, and depicting these everyday instances is among the book’s great strengths. Stolen cattle, shortchanged rations (which typically comprise rotten meat and vermin-infested flour), night-time raids, vandalism, and the indignities of school indoctrinations (in which children’s hair is cut and their people’s language forbidden) are relentless reminders of the chronic abuses historically endured by American Indians.
Passive verbs, actions told rather than shown, and stretches of passages in which characters reflect on repetitive ideas and observations weaken the novel. Some of the Indian characters run on the too-good-to-be-true side, as almost no Indigenous characters reveal more than the shallowest of flaws. But strong, honest white characters abide as well, and the novel’s overall message about the imperative that Natives must learn to adjust and evolve in order to survive is both nuanced and welcome for modern-day readers in a polarized world.
MY PLACE AMONG THEM, an affecting narrative of the lives of Plains Indians at the turn of the 20th century was drafted by author J. Stanion’s great-grandfather. It entertains and saddens in turn, but is most powerful in its intimate stories of individuals and their day-to-day lives.
~Anne Welsbacher for IndieReader