Calling for a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah

A moving and deeply engaging debut novel about a young Native American man finding strength in his familial identity, from a stellar new voice in fiction. Told in a series of voices, Calling for a Blanket Dance takes us into the life of Ever Geimausaddle through the multigenerational perspectives of his family as they face myriad obstacles. His father’s injury at the hands of corrupt police, his mother's struggle to hold on to her job and care for her husband, the constant resettlement of the family, and the legacy of centuries of injustice all intensify Ever’s bottled-up rage. Meanwhile, all of Ever’s relatives have ideas about who he is and who he should be. His Cherokee grandmother urges the family to move across Oklahoma to find security; his grandfather hopes to reunite him with his heritage through traditional gourd dances; his Kiowa cousin reminds him that he’s connected to an ancestral past. And once an adult, Ever must take the strength given to him by his relatives to save not only himself but also the next generation of family. How will this young man visualize a place for himself when the world hasn’t given him a place to start with? Honest, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting, Calling for a Blanket Dance is the story of how Ever Geimausaddle found his way to home.

Normally I'm not keen on multiple POVs or family sagas especially not ones that span generations but Hokeah made it work really quite beautifully. Calling for a Blanket Dance is a story of not just the hurt but also of the love and hope that gets passed down the generations and of the short moments that alter the course of life, it's sad and heavy but also hopeful and I really enjoyed it.

“Time, like masks, could make us reclaim the best of who we were and purge the worst of what we'd become.”

During my masters program to become a librarian, one of my early classes touched on the struggling existence of tribal libraries and what made them such a challenge to operate and maintain. Within the expected problems of not enough money (even less than your average public library) were problems unique to the culture. The idea took root in my head and never really left (I wrote an entire class's worth of papers on the topic).

This book follows the life of one person, Ever Geimausaddle, through the eyes of all of his many family members. They're a blended family of Native Americans and Mexicans, and the book follows various members of the family as they try and scratch out an existence while maintaining the strong familial bonds that really hold them together. Each chapter tells a bit more about Ever Geimausaddle through a different point of view, and I thought that really lent something to the book. One person never sees everything there is to see about another person, after all. There's a lot of familial trauma, struggling through generational poverty, and a real look at what it means to be Native American in today's society.

There's many points of view here and quite a large cast. Each chapter focuses on someone new, giving this a bit of a short story anthology feel even as they all tell another side of the same person. Lots of threads you didn't think were important in the moment come back later on in the book, which was a nice touch. The book really lends itself to a re-read or two just to pick up on it all and really get a feel for the family. I'm not sure I can really capture what made this book such a great read for me, but this was an easy 5-star read for this year's list.