Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past / Edition 1

by Diane Wilson

Overview

A child of a typical 1950s suburb unearths her mother's hidden heritage, launching a rich and magical exploration of her own identity and her family's powerful Native American past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780873517652
Publisher:	Minnesota Historical Society Press
Publication date:	08/01/2009
Edition description:	1
Pages:	232
Sales rank:	193,404
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Diane Wilson (Dakota) is a writer, speaker, and editor who has published two award-winning nonfiction books, as well as a novel and numerous essays. She received a 2013 Bush Foundation Fellowship as well as awards from Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the East Central Regional Arts Council. Wilson is the Executive Director for the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, a national coalition of tribes and organizations working to create sovereign food systems for Native people. She is a Mdewakanton descendent, enrolled on the Rosebud Reservation.

Editorial Reviews

"With graceful, clear-eyed prose, Diane Wilson writes her way home. Spirit Car is a generous honor song, raised in celebration of ancestors history too often forgets."
—Susan Power, author of The Grass Dancer and Roofwalker

"This is a moving and poignant tale about the anguish of colonialism and the insidious way it has worked to separate Indigenous Peoples from our roots. Yet within this devastating account also emerges a powerful and uplifting story about returning home."
—Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, author of Remember This! Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives

"Diane Wilson had to convince her relatives to tell these moving stories, and now she is determined that they not be forgotten, for 'we are the sum of those who have come before us.'"
—Booklist

Winner of the 2007 Minnesota Book Award.
Selected for the 2012 One Minneapolis One Read program.

From the Publisher

This moving narrative recounts Wilson's attempt to trace her Dakota heritage, sparked by her usually reticent mother's story of having been left for two years at a mission boarding school on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Though her own family stories have been forgotten or repressed, Wilson relies on carefully researched historical accounts and her own imagination to depict how her Native American ancestors survived the Dakota War of 1862. Rosalie, the wife of a French-Canadian and a mother of seven, exemplifies the anguish of her family members forced to defend themselves from Dakota relatives bent on killing whites and their "half-blood" children. When the conflict ended, upwards of two thousand Dakota people, mainly women and children, gave themselves over to the U.S. government, marching over 150 miles through Minnesota to reach a camp where more than 130 would perish from exposure to cold and disease. In the most moving passages, Wilson returns to participate in a commemorative march in her ancestors' footsteps. Though she can get mired in explaining various familial ties, Wilson convincingly asserts that "our daily lives are only the tip of the mountain that rises above hundreds of years of generations whose experience, acknowledged or not, has everything to do with the people we become." 18 b&w photos. (Aug. 1) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Participation in the first-ever Dakota Commemorative March in 2002, honoring the Dakota elders, women, and children who were forced to walk 150 miles from the Lower Sioux reservation to a prison camp at Fort Snelling, MN, after the 1862 war, is the basis for this family memoir. Wilson and her younger brother walk with 40 other people and share discussions of their family history with the strangers they meet. While the walk covers the opening and closing sections of the story, the center contains historical details of Wilson's bonds with the Dakota. The book emphasizes how Native American people use family relationships to acknowledge ties to their ancestors. This compilation is ideal for genealogists and Native American collections. Lovely writing, solid research, and moving content make this a worthwhile addition to collections in larger regional public and academic libraries. Joyce Sparrow, Juvenile Welfare Board of Pinellas Cty., Pinellas Park, FL Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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