Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives

by Ray A. Young Bear

Overview

A candid, poetic account of childhood and young manhood through the eyes of a Native American, this vivid narrative is destined to become a central moral text for our time. Through the persona of Edgar Bearchild—a member of the Black Eagle Child Settlement—Ray A. Young Bear takes readers on an unforgettable “journey of words” as he documents grief and anguish countered by an abundance of humor, pride, and insight.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587292576
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	03/01/1992
Series:	Singular Lives
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	281
File size:	788 KB

About the Author

 Poet, novelist, and performing artist Ray Young Bear is a tribal member of the Meskwaki Nation of central Iowa. He is the author of Winter of the Salamander, The Invisible Musician,Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives (Iowa, 1992), and Remnants of the First Earth.

Table of Contents

Contents Foreword by Albert E. Stone The Well-Off Man Church Gift of the Star-Medicine Afred E. Neuman Was an Arsonist The Introduction of Grape Jell-O The Precociousness of Charlotte Brook Grassleggings Episode A Circus Acrobat on the Grass The Year of the Jefferson Airplane The Human Parchment Period How We Delighted in Seeing the Fat The Supernatural Strobe Light The Ugliest Man in Big Valley Ask the One Who Blesses the Roots Junior Pipestar: The Destiny Factor Black Eagle Child Quarterly The Man Squirrel Shall Not Wake Afterword

What People are Saying About This

Louise Erdich

"Ray A. Young Bear's gives us the gift of an anguished imagination marked with grace and humor. His writing ultimately washes and heals, but always instructs from a deep vision of the world."

Editorial Reviews

This wonderful volume of stories, told in both prose and poetry, floats between memoir and fiction, history and storytelling. To tell his story, Young Bear creates a fictional counterpart to Iowa's Mesquakie Settlement, where he is an enrolled, lifelong resident, and the fictional persona of Edgar Bearchild. Bearchild's account of childhood to young manhood, from the Fifties through the Seventies, mixes the common history of drugs, Vietnam, and The Doors with the racism and injustice of Native American experience. Interwoven through this personal story are tales told by other speakers, sometimes elegiac, often comic. Effectively the book is as much an autobiography of a community as it is the history of a singular life. This is recommended for most collections.-- Brian Kenney, St. John's Univ. Lib., Jamaica, N.Y.

Library Journal