It is the late 1800s, and the U.S. Government has mandated native tribes send their youth to Indian schools where they are stripped of their native heritage by the people they think of as The Others. Otter and Sun Song are deeply in love, but when they are sent East to school, Otter, renamed Gideon, tries to adapt, where Sun Song does not, enduring brutal attacks from the school headmaster because of her refusal to so much as speak. Gideon, thinking Sun Song has spurned him, turns for comfort to Wendy Thatcher, the daughter of a wealthy school patron, beginning a forbidden affair of the heart. But the Spirits have different plans for Gideon and Sun Song. They speak to Gideon through his magical storyteller's bracelet, showing him both his past and his future. You are both child and mother of The Original People, Sun Song is told. When it is right, you will be safe once more. Will Gideon become Otter once again and return to Sun Song and his tribal roots, or attempt to remain with Wendy, with whom he can have no future?
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Smoky Trudeau Zeidel is the author of two other novels, The Cabin and On the Choptank Shores; a recently-released collection of stories, Short Story Collection Vol. 1; and Smoky's Writer's Workshop Combo Set, a newly released book containing both her writer's workshop book and collection of 366 writing prompts, previously published as separate books. She taught fiction writing and creativity workshops at community colleges and other venues in the Midwest for many years before packing up her daughter, dog, two cats, and guinea pig and moving to California, where she swears the climate is much more conducive to creative work and the men are, too. (She met her husband and soul mate, Scott, shortly after her move.) Smoky and Scott live with a menagerie of animals, both domestic and wild, in a ramshackle cottage in the woods overlooking the San Gabriel Valley and Mountains beyond. When she isn't writing, they spend their time hiking in the mountains and deserts, splashing in tide pools, and resisting the urge to speak in haiku. Smoky is, metaphorically speaking, the salmon who swims downstream, not up. When the invitation says black tie, she'll more likely show up in tie-dye. If there's a tree, she'll climb it. A rock, she'll scramble up it. A creek, she'll splash in it. When the neighborhood coyotes howl, she tends to howl back. Her husband calls her eccentric. She prefers the term quirky. But then, she's a writer, an artist. What else would you expect?
Smoky Zeidel is the author of three novels, "The Storyteller's Bracelet", "The Cabin", and "Redeeming Grace"; "Short Story Collection, Vol. 1", and "Smoky's Writers Workshop Combo Set", which contains her two nonfiction books on writing. She is also the author of "Observations of an Earth Mage", an enchanting collection of prose, poetry, and photographs celebrating the beauty and splendor of the natural world. Recently, she and her husband Scott Zeidel co-authored the book, "Trails." All her books are published by Vanilla Heart Publishing.
She also is author of numerous short stories that are available in eBook format, including "Breakfast at the Laundromat," which has been nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize, one of the most honored literary prizes in America. In her short autobiographical "In a Flash," she recounts the story of how she was struck by lightning and how the experience has affected her life in the more than two decades following the event.
Known to her many fans as the Earth Mage, Smoky lives her life honoring Mother Earth through her writing, visual art, and spiritual practice. She lives in California with her husband Scott, and a menageries of animals, both domestic and wild, in a ramshackle cottage in the woods overlooking the San Gabriel Valley and Mountains beyond. She and Scott each have a son and a daughter, all now young adults. Smoky swears she doesn't remember whose children are whose.
When she isn't writing, she spends her time hiking in the mountains and deserts, splashing in tidepools, and resisting the urge to speak in haiku.
The Storyteller's Bracelet takes the best of the creation stories of Native Americans and weaves them together into a tale offering a new universal truth. It is insightful and poignant, telling the story of the harsh realities of the Indian Schools of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Storyteller's Bracelet is the story of Otter and Sun Song, two members of the tribe who are deeply in love and who are being sent east to the Indian Schools. Neither one of them wants to go, they are both nearly adults and all they want to do is turn eighteen so they can be married. Sun Song's father is making her go East, just like he did to her brother before her. Sun Song does not care for the man her brother has become since he returned from school. Instead of growing into the fine Indian he was becoming, he now drives a broken down wagon and runs errands for the people of the village. He drinks too much and is no longer the brother Sun Song once knew.
Otter has always been away from the village when the white people come to collect the students to take back East, but this time there has been a protest made to his father about how he hides his son away like a pup in a den. This time there is no way his father can prevent it, Otter is going east too.
Arriving at the school the students are made to get rid of anything of Indian origin, including their clothes and shoes. The boys' hair is cut - something the members of the Tribe never do unless they are in mourning. Their hair is bathed in kerosene to get rid of nonexistent lice and they are humiliated. They are told they are to speak only in English from now on and not in their own language. They are assigned English names.... Sun Song refuses to say hers and in fact will face great difficulty ever speaking to people again, she does however remember the ways of her people and at night, she sneaks out a window and talks to the Grandmother Sycamore tree.
Otter has been given the name Gideon and he excels at school. The boys and girls are kept strictly separated at the school, still, he does not understand why Sun Song will not look his way, or answer the letters he sneaks to her. Rejected, heartbroken he finds comfort in the arms of a twenty-year-old white girl named Wendy. Alone, abandoned, Sun Song finds nothing but trouble and grief. Yet a plan has been made for Sun Song, and for Otter too, if he can find his way back to his Indian roots. A plan that will change things forever across three different worlds.
Smoky Trudeau Zeidel breathes life into these characters and those they encounter. She shows the existence of some people who truly care about the Indians and the existence of the majority who look down on them. She paints the difficulties of their lives so far away from all they know and love, subjected to scorn, inhumanity and illnesses that they simply can't fight off. She makes your heart ache for both Sun Song and Otter as they are caught in a world that is changing to quickly for their people to keep up, if they even want to.
Zeidel's plotting is superb easily keeping track of the various storylines in the novel and making each of them active, powerful and believable. I love that Zeidel, at least in the context of the novel believes in magic and the unusual ways it can interact with circumstances in the characters' lives. I like that she makes it mystical and powerful without overwhelming anyone with dogma. I like the way the main storyline is developed bit-by-bit beginning at the very start, although there are many interesting and unforeseen twists along the way.
I was absorbed in this book. I felt as though the truths Zeidel were speaking were the ones in my own heart. I felt as though her conglomeration of Native stories of life and creation rang truer than any story I had ever heard or read in any holy book. It was a tale of life, of community, of unity and togetherness. It touched me deeply and at the end of the book, I found myself saying, "Now this is how it should be."Read more ›
Frequent readers of my book reviews and creative writing are well aware of my belief that mythology, folktales, and multicultural tales, and storytelling in general, are an all-too-often missing and yet vitally important element of a healthy mind and well-functioning society, so when I got the opportunity to read and review this brand new book, I jumped at the chance. I was not disappointed. Smoky Trudeau Zeidel is not a Native American, as she tells us in the book's Afterword. And yet she captures the syntax, symbolism, and simple beauty of the Native American expression of human experience with an artistry that makes for almost hypnotic reading. The Storyteller's Bracelet is the story of two young people, Otter and Sun Song, from The Tribe (more on the nonspecificity of exactly which tribe later) who are sent East to an Indian School to be trained in the ways of the Others, the Whites. The history of the subjugation, the conquering, of the Native Peoples of North America is hopefully known to the reader of this review, so it will suffice to say that in the process of Education, there was no small amount of derision and humiliation directed at these students--forbidden to speak their language, to practice their rituals, to wear their traditional clothing--they were expected to Assimilate. There are countless other examples of this practice on the global scale--the English engineered this very thing against the Scots. Zeidel has done her research and has woven both Native and White practices seamlessly into her story. Having been a longtime student of Lakota practices and having participated in vision quests and sweat lodge, I can say with some confidence that Zeidel gets it right. And this accuracy undergirds the more mythological and magical parts of the story.... I hesitate to say too much about the story itself--I found myself surprised on more than one occasion by the twists and turns the story took, and I would hate to ruin them for another reader. Instead, I'd like to spend the rest of my allotted space talking about some of the larger thematic issues at work in The Storyteller's Bracelet. It is clear that Zeidel's decision to pull traditions and myths from numerous tribes instead of focusing on a specific group was an excellent one. It gives her freedom to combine the strongest elements available to reinforce her story and it guards her against offending or otherwise misrepresenting any given group. It is also then easier for the reader to get inside the symbols and freely swim around inside of them. Zeidel also does a fine job of telling the story with balance and multiple viewpoints. As she says in the Afterword, not all Indian Schools were the vicious, disrespectful, and dangerous place as this book's Oak Tree School is, but in the pursuit of telling an engaging and edgy story that will keep the reader's attention (especially in our desensitized, visually and aurally overwhelmed modern world) this "heightening and compressing" (as writing theory calls it), is both appropriate and necessary. The Whites and Native Peoples represent a broad spectrum of beliefs and actions. Zeidel has confidence enough in the tale she wants to tell to let the circumstances speak for themselves. Because all points of view are given equal weight in the core story, there is no agenda on the author's part, and that is to be applauded. Agenda-ism is killing healthy dialogue in modern America, to our collective peril. The notion of the bully within the educational system is an important one to examine, again falling under the umbrella of agenda-ism. What version of History or Science is being taught? How are our other social institutions, such as churches, feeding into and shaping the curriculum? How does socioeconomic status and ideas of the Privilege of the Wealthy shape our society? An albeit rare yet connected element of this is the privileged predator in a position of power who targets children through sexual abuse. There is a character in The Storyteller's Bracelet that is chillingly close to the recently convicted Jerry Sandusky. All of these pressing social issues aside, though, The Storyteller's Bracelet is first and foremost about our collective experiences and histories as a single, whole Humanity, no matter our color, our gender, our religious beliefs, or our socioeconomic status. It is here that our Myths are most important and most resonant. When we consider that the Hopi word for the moon is the Tibetan word for the sun and vice versa, and that all ancient peoples assigned one of four colors--white, red, black, and yellow--to the four cardinal directions in their own unique patterns, then it is hard to rationalize our pervasive attitude of Other, for it seems we all started from the same central point, the Axis Mundi, as philosophers, anthropologists, and comparative mythologists call it. I applaud Smoky Trudeau Zeidel for keeping story and myth alive and radiant in our darkened modern world, and for doing it with such splendid skill, craft, and heart.Read more ›
