An inventive collage of geography, history, myth, translation, lineage, erasure, journalism, and photography, THROUGH A RED PLACE builds a map between distances and lost stories to unearth and honor the past.
Rebecca Pelky's story-in-poems assembles the author's research into her Native and non-Native heritage in the land now known as Wisconsin. Through the poet's ancestors--and documented through text and image--this book relates narratives of people who converged on and impacted this space in myriad ways. Written in English and Mohegan, THROUGH A RED PLACE reshapes itself from page to page, asking what it means to navigate place as both colonizer and colonized. These poems seek the interior and exterior lives of beloved people and places, interacting with archives and visuals to illustrate that what is past continually interrupts and reinscribes itself upon the present. This collection embodies a refusal to go missing despite what's buried, erased, or built over, much like the ancient mound now covered by an ammunition plant. An inventive collage of geography, history, myth, translation, lineage, erasure, journalism, and photography, THROUGH A RED PLACE builds a map between distances and lost stories to unearth and honor the past.
"Using maps, drawings, pedigree chart, photographs, news clippings, Indian school records, redacted source material from Andrew Jackson's Message to Congress, and the wonderment of the English and Mohegan languages, Rebecca Pelky pieces together family history and the struggle for acknowledgement of heritage. 'Here I am. / ... I am certain. / I am genuine. / I am willing.' And I would add, 'I am writing.' A competent, lyric/graphic claiming place."--Diane Glancy, author of The Book of Bearings
"In THROUGH A RED PLACE, Rebecca Pelky writes, 'Nutôcimohkawô ihtôqat' (I am telling a story) and takes readers on a long drive across a span of land and daylight that is home to the red pine, peeping frogs, and mounds that mark all that we know both great and small. The fact that she has taken time to know the peepers as kopayáhsak is as important as the lesson she imparts by teaching readers that Eeyamquittoowauconnuck is Brothertown. Using both English and Mohegan, Pelky lingers over some of America's most difficult histories, allowing events and documents to speak for themselves. She reminds all of us that although it may not always be easy, we should look more often into the mirror and say, wômôsum (love me) as we begin and end our days."--Margaret Noodin, author of What the Chickadee Knows: Poems in Anishinaabemowin and English
"In THROUGH A RED PLACE Rebecca Pelky maps a history of colonial dispossession on Turtle Island, tracing a family lineage and examining how settler-colonial violence causes alienation from land, language, and history. Archival photographs, family trees, and Google Maps images appear alongside these poems, positioning Pelky's writing as an act of historical documentation that interrogates dominant settler-colonial narratives of Wisconsin's past."--Katherine DeCoste, Sundress Reads
