Book Review of "mother" written by m.s. RedCherries by Hunter Wienke

Question and Answer? A Book Review of mother by m.s. RedCherries

By Hunter Wienke

m.s. RedCherries’ collection, mother, is a landscape of questions. Questions about identity, place, family, and what it means to be Indigenous. The speaker, the characters, and the circumstances in which they exist offer questions to each other and the reader—sometimes answered, sometimes not. When one character looks for another, in this space, they ask around town for when they were seen last. Silences, just as much as shouts, beg questions of belonging and inheritance. More than anything, this collection—this STORY OF OUR HISTORY—asks…

mother,

                          can things be different? (82)

The speaker is an Indigenous child who is adopted out of her tribe, the Tsistsistas (Cheyenne), and raised by a non-Native family in a different state. The speaker’s family history begins the story and sets the stage for the circumstances of our speaker. Involuntary confinement in an insane asylum for Natives, residential school, the American Indian Movement (AIM), missing relatives, alcohol use disorder, and parents who hold all of this in their bodies and memory; this is what was meant to be the inheritance of the speaker.

I knew she had to do it, so as not to give up on her and me both. That’s why I had to leave… the start of my life had two beginnings: one with my mother, and one with my new family. And it wasn’t anyone’s fault (81).

What unfolds from this statement is a story about what results when a mother, in desperation and love, tries to break this cycle and protect her child from the way things have been—hoping, and praying, that they don’t have to be the same for her child.  What becomes of this child? What are the wounds they carry? And what does it look like to pick up the pieces of a life they were never supposed to have and try to form them into a firmly Indigenous identity? 

In “farther hellos”, a poem near the beginning of the collection, the speaker recounts what they can remember about life with their birth family. Each memory is of the tender moments they shared as a family. A Cheyenne prayer said when a family member is sick falls into place as naturally as the sound of the brother’s laugh. In this story, there is an argument about culture. Ceremonial life is culture, but so too is an all-encompassing, and yet intimately familiar experience. The smell of one’s favorite meal, or the way the wind scratches at one’s face when the air gets dry where one grew up. The little things that we do because our parents did them with us, and their parents before them. But the narrator remains questioning if these intimate moments are enough. If it’s authentic, and, with some despair of loss, if it had to be that way. The poem ends…

And when I dream, I remember. And when I remember, I dream,

wondering if it’s real—and why does it have to be. (9)

These are the kinds of questions and images that any reader of mother should expect to encounter. The kind that breaks your heart, and others that put it back together. Questions that make you angry, and sad, and hopeless, and strong; questions that force you to wonder who is to blame. With this question, m.s. RedCherries plays on the psychology of her readers and brings them to a place where we can’t help but begin to blame the mother herself. The father too, and their dysfunction and faults. When we empathize with the speaker, we readers are expected to feel an animosity that the speaker themself does not hold. Instead, the speaker makes an argument for where the blame and anger belong—America. Weaving through real historical events and imagined Indigenous futures, m.s. RedCherries makes a convincing argument for a radical understanding of the ways circumstances influence our lives. Demonstrating, with tact and artistry, the power of empathy and forgiveness.

america,

you’ve taken

more than you’ve given

marble blood

—short doubt in a god chat (117)

In “searching the middle for you”, the speaker visits the golf course where her maternal grandmother is buried. There is a sign there that reads…

ABSOLUTELY NO PLAY FROM CEMETERY

Along with a list of the names of some 120 Native patients who died while ostensibly in the care of the doctors. This is a real cemetery on a real golf course in South Dakota. It is the only remaining site associated with the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians (also known as the Hiawatha Insane Asylum). Operating between 1898 and 1943, the asylum forcibly imprisoned hundreds of Natives who, according to a BIA investigation, showed no signs of a diagnosable mental illness. In the story, the speaker’s grandmother was forced to become an inmate at the asylum after her children were stolen away and sent to residential schools. Reading her grandmother’s name, the speaker asks…

mother,

                          is this the end? (111)

And your heart breaks open. Suddenly there are no words in your mouth or thoughts in your mind, until finally they come rushing forth in a vengeance of this atrocity. I found myself questioning if this was the end of her search for a reason—a reason why the speaker was given up for adoption. I wondered if this question was a mournful rumination on the course and future of Native survival. Still, I found beauty, strength, and understanding in the speaker, essentially (if not literally) running to the arms of her mother in a moment of pain.

 With language that feels completely new, a new Indigenous voice working in a paradigm that is created by the poem, story, novel, and song, mother is an exceptional work of exploration. Finding questions that make us whole, and questions that will bring us forward in resilience. This work is likely to soon be regarded as one of the classic texts of a new movement of Indigenous storytellers. A movement that does not ignore history, but approaches the relationships of today, and the characters of our lives, with a perspective that breaks through and ignores the most immediate and simple lashings out of the heart. This story presents something new; a deeper and more healing vision. One which breaks from the limitations and preconceptions of genre to tell stories in the ways they have been told on this continent since time immemorial. I recommend everyone to buy this book, and to discover what it asks of you.

Hunter Wienke is a writer and student who lives in Bloomington, Indiana. He is Anishinaabe, a descendant of the Gakiiwe’onaning Ojibwe in Northern Michigan.  He is currently working on a novel set in Northern Wisconsin on the fictional First Sky Indian Reservation. He received his B.A. in English and Creative Writing at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on an M.F.A in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts.