A beautiful work of post-colonial criticism in the form of cartography.
In this full-color atlas, Nelson (Toli, 2016, etc.), a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, relates the history of that Native American people through maps drawn by them and others.
The Chickasaw Nation—whose members formerly lived in the woodlands of what are now Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee and now reside primarily in Oklahoma—has a long history of mapmaking. As Nelson puts it in his introduction, an early deerskin map, credited to Chickasaw Fani’ Minko’ and drawn in 1723, looks like “a fantastic backyard-football play diagram or a primitive, whimsical star chart,” but it is, in fact, an accurate map of an area in the Carolinas. It’s appropriate that the Chickasaw people have continued to be respected mapmakers into the 21st century considering how much of their history has been shaped as maps of North America have changed—drawn by agents of other powers and interests. Nelson’s collection documents this history, including a 1593 map from the Aztec Codex Quetzalecatzin and charts of would-be conquerors, such as Spanish explorer Alonso de Santa Cruz, who, in 1572, drew a map marking Native settlements along the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. There are dozens of charts from the 19th century that, in order, seem almost like a flip book of U.S. government policies of forced relocation. As the maps shift to counties and municipalities in Oklahoma, the full scope of what was lost becomes disturbingly clear. Nelson includes brief chapter introductions as well as informative captions that alert readers to notable features of each map. However, the charts often speak quite well for themselves, as in an 1805 map of Chickasaw lands that the French mapmaker labels, in large letters, “Country Quite Inhabited.” With more than 150 maps covering several centuries, this book offers a remarkable visual representation of the arbitrary nature of borders and the massive impact that they can have on defining—or erasing—entire civilizations. It’s a haunting reflection on the dynamism of culture and geography. “Maps have always been alive and changing,” Nelson reminds readers. “And so are Chickasaws.”
A beautiful work of post-colonial criticism in the form of cartography.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-935684-68-8
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Chickasaw Press
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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