Native State

A captivating, deeply affecting memoir chronicling a journey from a Hollywood childhood as the son of a fading show business figure to a bohemian life in Europe and back to his native state of California, where the author must face the man who had driven him away. Summoned from abroad to attend to the ninety-four-year-old father he’s never been close to, writer and musician Tony Cohan finds himself reliving his own peripatetic life—a kaleidoscopic odyssey from California’s sunny postwar promise through the burnt end of the 1960s to the final days of the last century. An engrossing investigation of memory and identity, love and desire, art and fate, Native State vividly portrays the author’s attempts to escape the confines of a celebrity-filled, alcoholic family through music, writing, and travel. His descent into the colorful milieus of musical and literary geniuses and lowlifes, divas and crooks, fortune tellers and culture gods in Paris, Tangier, London, Copenhagen, Barcelona, San Francisco, Kyoto, and Los Angeles coalesces into a distinctive, intimate depiction of a pivotal cultural era. Throughout, Cohan brilliantly interweaves and contrasts his past experiences with his present-day reflections on the universal youthful desire to flee home and family, and the simultaneous “undertow of origins” urging a return. The result is a work that combines unusually rich storytelling with extraordinary literary quality. Poignant, elegantly crafted, and often funny, Native State is an indelible portrait of the artist as a young man, and—as son and dying father grope toward acceptance—a coming-to-terms with self, family, origins, and the elusive American idea of home.

In his sixth book of poetry, Todd Davis, who Harvard Review declares is “unflinchingly candid and enduringly compassionate,” confesses that “it’s hard to hide my love for the pleasures of the earth.” In poems both achingly real and stunningly new, he ushers the reader into a consideration of the green world and our uncertain place in it. As he writes in “Dead Letter to James Wright,” “You said / you’d wasted your life. / I’m still not sure / what species I am.” To that end, Native Species explores what happens to us—to all of us, bear, deer, mink, trout, moose, girl, boy, woman, man—when we die, and what happens to the soul as it faces extinction—if it “migrates into the lives of other creatures, becomes a fox or frog, an ant in a colony serving a queen, a red salamander entering a pond before it freezes.” He wonders, too, “How many new beginnings are we granted?” It’s a beautiful question, and it freights, simultaneously, possibility and pain. These are the verses of a poet maturing into a new level of thinking, full of tenderness and love for the home that carries us all.

"Contents"--"List of Illustrations"--"Acknowledgments" -- "Introduction" -- "1. Inhabiting Tribal Communities" -- "2. Inhabiting Indianness in White Communities" -- "3. The Meaning of Set-tainte -- or, Making and Unmaking Indigenous Geographies" -- "4. The Art of Native Space" -- "5. The Space of Native Art" -- "Afterword: Reclaiming Indigenous Geographies" -- "Bibliography

One of the most popular misconceptions about American Indians is that they are all the same-one homogenous group of people who look alike, speak the same language, and share the same customs and history. Nothing could be further from the truth! This book gives kids an A-Z look at the Native Americans that shaped their state's history. From tribe to tribe, there are large differences in clothing, housing, life-styles, and cultural practices. Help kids explore Native American history by starting with the Native Americans that might have been in their very own backyard! Some of the activities include crossword puzzles, fill in the blanks, and decipher the code.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Euro-American citizenry of California carried out mass genocide against the Native population of their state, using the processes and mechanisms of democracy to secure land and resources for themselves and their private interests. The murder, rape, and enslavement of thousands of Native people were legitimized by notions of democracy—in this case mob rule—through a discreetly organized and brutally effective series of petitions, referenda, town hall meetings, and votes at every level of California government. Murder State is a comprehensive examination of these events and their early legacy. Preconceptions about Native Americans as shaped by the popular press and by immigrants’ experiences on the overland trail to California were used to further justify the elimination of Native people in the newcomers’ quest for land. The allegedly “violent nature” of Native people was often merely their reaction to the atrocities committed against them as they were driven from their ancestral lands and alienated from their traditional resources. In this narrative history employing numerous primary sources and the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on genocide, Brendan C. Lindsay examines the darker side of California history, one that is rarely studied in detail, and the motives of both Native Americans and Euro-Americans at the time. Murder State calls attention to the misuse of democracy to justify and commit genocide.

Publisher description

“I think because of the racism that existed on the reservations we were continuously reminded that we were different. We internalized this idea that we were less than white kids, that we were not as capable,” says Chris Meyer, part of Upward Bound’s inaugural group and the first Coeur d’Alene tribal member to receive a Ph.D. Based on more than thirty interviews with students and staff, Teaching Native Pride employs both Native and non-Native voices to tell the story of the University of Idaho’s Upward Bound program. Their personal anecdotes and memories intertwine with accounts of the program’s inception and goals, as well as regional tribal history and Isabel Bond’s Idaho family history. A federally sponsored program dedicated to helping low-income and at-risk students attend college, Upward Bound came to Moscow, Idaho, in 1969. Isabel Bond became director in the early 1970s and led the program there for more than three decades. Those who enrolled in the experimental initiative--part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty--were required to live within a 200-mile radius and be the first in their family to pursue a college degree. Living on the University of Idaho campus each summer, they received six weeks of intensive instruction. Recognizing that most participants came from nearby Nez Perce and Coeur d’Alene communities, Bond and her teachers designed a curriculum that celebrated and incorporated their Native American heritage--one that offers insights for educators today. Many of the young people they taught overcame significant personal and academic challenges to earn college degrees. Native students broke cycles of poverty, isolation, and disenfranchisement that arose from a legacy of colonial conquest, and non-Indians gained a new respect for Idaho’s first peoples. Today, Upward Bounders serve as teachers, community leaders, entrepreneurs, and social workers, bringing positive change to future generations.