CARRY

Debut memoir from a Native author enmeshed in the American way of violence, alienation, and death.

Jensen, who teaches writing at the University of Arkansas and the Institute of American Indian Arts, is Métis, a descendant of mixed European and Native American ancestors. Of a childhood friend who professed to being part-Native, she writes memorably, “Of course, I objected to the language, the ‘part.’ Which part? The back of the left knee? The curve of the right ankle? The crook of an elbow? How many ways do we carve ourselves up and portion out our parts, our bodies for other people’s comfort?” The string of onrushing questions is typical of Jensen’s rhetorical stance, which is urgent and occasionally scattershot. When she lands on a target, she does so effectively: Her on-the-ground reports from the Bakken shale country, near the Standing Rock Reservation and its pan-Native protests against resource extraction, are illuminating, and her visceral reaction to the thought that students on her campus are now allowed to carry concealed weapons—even after so many school shootings—makes for a powerful rejection of a culture that has always been grounded in violence and intimidation. Jensen also looks back on an encounter with a mentally ill and potentially murderous student in Kingman, Arizona, where she taught for a time while looking at Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s old haunts. That terrorist act, she observes, caused the most number of civilian casualties in this country until 9/11. She pointedly adds, “you don’t have to leave the state of Oklahoma to find other examples, though,” such as the massacre of African Americans in Tulsa in 1921 and “the 8,700-17,000 Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Seminole people who died during the Removal Era.”

Mostly on point and sure to interest those opposed to a world of angry men and their guns, bulldozers, and writs.