Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir

Having both white and Native American heritage creates unique tensions in life and bird watching in this conflicted memoir from Gannon (Skylark Meets Meadowlark). An English professor who is one-eighth Lakota Sioux, Gannon revisits a lifetime of racist experiences, including witnessing his mother’s anguish at being called a “squaw” by white people (including his violent, alcoholic father) and getting teased by both white and Native friends for his mixed ethnicity. He weaves these reminiscences around vignettes from his lifelong bird-watching hobby: seeing a mixed-breed bunting, he wonders, “Do these birds experience anything similar to the human torture of being a cross blood—of being shit upon by both sides?” When describing birding, Gannon’s prose is lyrical and evocative—“In some hidden rock cranny a few yards above the creek sang a Canyon Wren, unmistakable, a long un-birdlike trill simultaneously descending and accelerating into an aural climax”—but at other points, it can lapse into stilted academic soapboxing, or get tangled in chaotic crosscurrents, as when he castigates his mother for “projecting the pain of her internalized racism upon her kids,” then beats himself up for ingratitude. Gannon’s ruminations on his identity crisis hold undeniable power, but the unfocused presentation bogs them down. (June)