Doubters And Dreamers (Volume 67) (Sun Tracks),New

Doubters And Dreamers Opens With A Question From A Young Girl Faced With The Spectacle Of Indian Effigies Lynched And Burned In Jest Before Uc Berkeleys Annual Big Game Against Stanford: Whats A Debacle, Mom? This Innocent But Telling Question Marks The Girls Entre Into The Complicated Knowledge Of Her Heritage As A Mixedblood Native American Of Koyangkauwi (Concow) Maidu Descent. The Girl Is A Young Janice Gould, And The Poems And Narrations That Follow Constitute A Remarkable Work Of Sustained And Courageous Selfrevelation, Retracing The Precarious Emotional Terrain Of An Adolescence Shaped By A Mothers Tough Love And A Growing Consciousness Of An Ancestral And Familial Past.In The First Half Of The Book, Tribal History, Gould Ingeniously Repurposes The Sonnet Form To Preserve The Stories Of Her Mother And Aunt, Who Grew Up When Muleback Was The Customary Mode / Of Transport And The Spirit World Was Presentstories Of Old Ways And Places Claimed In Memory But Lost In Time. Elsewhere, She Remembers Her Mothers Ferocious, Upright Anger And Her Unexpected Tenderness (Like A Miracle, I Was Still Her Child), Culminating In The Profound Expression Of Loss That Is The Poem Our Mothers Death.In The Second Half Of The Book, It Was Raining, Gould Tells Of The Years Of Lonely Selfmaking And Unfulfilled Dreams As She Comes To Terms With What She Has Been Told Are Her Crazy Longings As A Lesbian: Its Been Hammered Into Me / That Ill Be Spurned / By A Real Woman, / The Only Kind I Like. The Writing Here Commemorates Old Loves And Relationships In Language That Mingles Hope And Despair, Doubt And Devotion, Veering At Times Into Dreamlike Moments Of Consciousness. One Poem And Vignette At A Time, Doubters And Dreamers Explores What It Means To Be A Mixedblood Native American Who Grew Up Urban, Lesbian, And Middle Class In The West.