First Line: Calling For A Blanket Dance

November is National Native Heritage Month. If you are looking for a good book to read by an indigenous author I would recommend Calling For a Blanket Dance. The first line of Calling For a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah is:

"I always told Turtle when I was raising her, "If a man acts like a child, then send him back to his ae-jee and let her straighten him out."

 Goodreads offers the following summary:

 

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 soldier through a myriad of difficulties: his father's sudden kidney failure and subsequent disability, his mother's struggle to hold on to her job and care for her husband, the constant resettlement of the family, and Ever's own bottled-up rage at the instability all around him. 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 the state to find security; his dying 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.
 

It is a book worth reading.