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A review by kachina
Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
I don’t wanna give this a bad star rating but idk I felt like I had some qualms w this book.
As a fellow white Indigenous (and Oceti Sakowin) relative, I just felt like so much of this book played into strange colonizer stereotypes.
Something in the spirit of it felt...off. I think there’s a lot of nuanced discourse around whiteness and Indigeneity, and a lot of uncomfortable learning, too.
So much of this felt like a white Native pity fest. Not to dismiss the nuances of the particular pain of being ostracized from your own community, I know that pain well, but it feels so centered in this book in a weird way that implicates other non-white or white passing Natives in a way that feels like something an author of this age should’ve grown out of by now.
I also felt like there was some weird lateral oppressive stereotype deployment in terms of how Latinx folks were portrayed but that’s a whole other can of worms.
In all; I wanna support fellow Indigenous creators and writers, but outside of my work this book has really put to the forefront for me how much I don’t think I’ll be reading cishet, white male stories in the future.
As a fellow white Indigenous (and Oceti Sakowin) relative, I just felt like so much of this book played into strange colonizer stereotypes.
Something in the spirit of it felt...off. I think there’s a lot of nuanced discourse around whiteness and Indigeneity, and a lot of uncomfortable learning, too.
So much of this felt like a white Native pity fest. Not to dismiss the nuances of the particular pain of being ostracized from your own community, I know that pain well, but it feels so centered in this book in a weird way that implicates other non-white or white passing Natives in a way that feels like something an author of this age should’ve grown out of by now.
I also felt like there was some weird lateral oppressive stereotype deployment in terms of how Latinx folks were portrayed but that’s a whole other can of worms.
In all; I wanna support fellow Indigenous creators and writers, but outside of my work this book has really put to the forefront for me how much I don’t think I’ll be reading cishet, white male stories in the future.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Alcoholism, Animal death, Blood, Violence, Racism, Racial slurs, and Physical abuse