THE GRASS DANCER by Mona Susan Power

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

“Medicine pulsed within me, shot through my veins, and I don't mean the kind a doctor pumps into the body. I didn't practice good medicine or bad medicine, or a weak magic summoned by poems; I simply had potent blood inherited from my grandmother's sister, Red Dress. And there were times when it pained me like a fire, or froze me like a rock, and any weaker person would have crawled toward death.”

TITLE—The Grass Dancer

AUTHOR—Mona Susan Power

PUBLISHED—1994

PUBLISHER—GP Putnam’s Sons

GENRE—literary Indigenous historical fiction

SETTING—Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Sioux) lands colonized as North & South Dakota

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—Indigenous worldview, landscape, & cosmology, Sioux, Dakota, Menominee rep, culture, & history, intergenerational memory & stories, Yupiwi medicine, traditional grass dancing & other dances, intimacy & knowing, finding one’s way & the old ways again, ancestors, elders, tragedy & grief, reservation life, dreams & visions, the conflict bw strength of spirit & weakness of will, oppression & repression, ghosts, healing, forgiveness, & redemption, soldiers & warriors, Fear & Faith, Spirit justice, empathy, pity, & compassion, finding what is lost

“I prefer to watch the present unravel moment by moment than to look close behind me or far ahead. Time extends from me, flowing in many directions, meeting the horizon and then moving beyond to follow the curve of the earth. But I will not track its course with my eyes. It is too painful. I can bear witness to only a single moment of loss at a time. Still, hope flutters in my heart, a delicate pulse. I straddle the world and pray to Wakan Tanka that somewhere ahead of me He has planted an instant of joy.”

Summary:

A collection of intertwining stories reaching back through 100 years worth of generations of two family lines incorporating elements of Sioux & some european settler ancestry.

My thoughts:

I had sort of resigned myself to not reading this one with the group (Indigenous Reading Circle bookclub on IG) in May because I already had a packed tbr for the month & was having trouble finding a copy. Then I serendipitously stumbled across a copy of it at a library booksale I was browsing about a week into the month so I took it as a sign that no actually I do need to read this book right now so I did. 😆

And yes I did need this book right now. This book was the perfect follow-up read to Debra Magpie Earling’s PERMA RED & Linda Hogan’s SOLAR STORMS, as well as a really beautiful segue into Violet Kupersmith’s BUILD YOUR HOUSE AROUND MY BODY & NS Nuseibeh’s NAMESAKE (which I read right after). 

First & most of all I absolutely loved the structure of the books & how the stories were sort of told circularly starting with the “present” & then working backwards to Red Dress’s & Ghost Horse’s stories & then coming back again to continue Charlene’s & Harley’s stories. Seeing all the different character arcs sort of go in reverse & then come back to complete their circles was really powerful. In this way the ending isn’t really an ending but a beginning which is also a really cool representation of Indigenous conceptions of time & history.

I thought it was really interesting how Power explored the way that western ideologies (i.e. ideas about chastity, purity, sin, etc.) served to isolate individuals from their culture, their communities, & themselves as a form of internalized imperialism (something Nuseibeh talks about in NAMESAKE).

I also appreciated Jeannette’s character arc—how she never stopped being an insufferable white woman but that she was also a complex & by the end at least somewhat sympathetic character even if she never truly lost her cringe. Especially with her baby & what Herod said about the child needing to be told “two stories.” That felt really special to me.

I loved Harley’s story that he told to Jeannette in class. Moonwalk was my favorite chapter. My heart absolutely shattered for Lydia. And Anna Thunder—I was so heart broken to see how she got so eaten up with her anger. I of course loved all the fairy tale elements, references, & vibes. And Red Dress & Spotted Dog were my favorite characters.

“Margaret had recovered an old faith from her youth, from the days when there was magic, before the concept of sin had washed over Dakota people, just as the Oahe Dam had flooded their reservation with stagnant water.

     “I have been defeated by guilt, Margaret had decided. And that is when she had her grandson, Harley Wind Soldier, bury her cedar rosary in the dirt yard. ‘Maybe something useful will grow,’ she told him. She took to praying to Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit of her childhood, who had not been a jealous God, she thought, but had waited patiently for her to honor Him again.”

Another fantastic selection by the #IndigenousReadingCircle bookclub. 🫶🏻 I’m definitely going to check out Power’s newer book, A COUNCIL OF DOLLS which the bookclub read last year & was also a favorite of theirs.

I would recommend this book to readers who like epic, saga-like, yet intimately told, literary historical fiction novels about multiple generations of dual families with spiritual & Indigenous realities & themes. This book is best read on audiobook for the correct pronunciation of the Dakota names & terms in the book. Power reads it herself & while she’s not a performer it’s always interesting imo to hear the author read their work themselves.

Final note: I found it helpful to sort of sketch a family tree in the back of the book as I read so I could follow the stories & see the points of connection a bit clearer. But don’t look one up beforehand because it’ll have spoilers!(I also had to do this for Kupersmith’s BUILD YOUR HOUSE which I read right after this one so that’s another funny parallel between those two books… 😆)

“ ‘What about the medicine hole? Will I ever find it?’

     “The spirit warriors smiled, and one of them raised his hand, palm outward; it flashed like a mirror. ‘You are the medicine hole,’ he said.”

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

CW // racism, genocide, death, murder, alcohol, ptsd, abuse

Season: Summer

Music pairing: “Savage Daughter,” by Ekaterina Shelehova

Further Reading—

• A COUNCIL OF DOLLS by Mona Susan Power—TBR (Apparently it also uses the same structure too!)

• SOLAR STORMS by Linda Hogan

  • Read my review for SOLAR STORMS here.

• PERMA RED by Debra Magpie Earling

  • Read my review for PERMA RED here.

• LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE by Laura Esquivel

  • Read my review for LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE here.

• BUILD YOUR HOUSE AROUND MY BODY by Violet Kupersmith

  • Review coming soon!

• NAMESAKE by NS Nuseibeh

  • Read my review for NAMESAKE here.

• TRACKS by Louise Erdrich—TBR (Chronological book one in her LOVE MEDICINE series)

• THE NIGHT WATCHMAN by Louise Erdrich—TBR

• PRACTICAL MAGIC (film, 1998)—interestingly enough, Hoffman did blurb this book:

  • “A talent like Susan Power comes along once in a lifetime, and lucky for us she's arrived. Here is a debut so stunning, so extraordinary in its depth and passion, you will swear there's a miracle on every page.”

• PREY (film, 2022)—Red Dress & Spotted Dog in Power’s book reminded me of the MCs in this film

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