The Nation is aware and awake

Be colorblind...open your heart to any child...and what is the worst that can happen? You can ignore the ignorant stares of strangers, but Taylor, a white mother with a Cherokee daughter, is approached by a Cherokee and asked to return this child to the Cherokee Nation. Just when she thinks she has met the biggest challenge of her life, taking in an abused and abandoned child and nurturing her, she gets a bigger one. If she is to keep little Turtle, she must defend her from the Cherokee people.

This book raises questions about race and identity. I coached a volleyball clinic for my niece's team, and as we met new people, she would tell her story. "I'm Mohawk," she would say, and clearly I am not. Another coach recommended this book. I took this child from the east coast and am trying to root her in California as a respite from family illness and turmoil. Every day I am convinced that I have done the right thing and every night I wonder.

So here is Taylor, trying to find her way. She wants what is best for this child, but she is not able to understand what that might be. She wonders, like the rest of white america, what might be left of native culture. The book will take you there and tell the stories of children who were ripped from their own culture and humiliated in another. My niece knows that her parents' generation went to a school where their hands were slapped with a ruler when they spoke their mother tongue. They have nearly lost their language.

Kingsolver knows native culture and history. She stages the dilemma early on, and lets you know the strength and weakness of each character. She can get you to take the mother's side, see the Nation's side, and bounce you back and forth between them. Through it all you also see the dilemma of making decisions for a child. Some sense of fairness makes you think that children should be part of this decision, yet the reality is that responsibility for that decision could haunt a child for the rest of their life. In the book, the child is pre-school and barely verbal. Taylor reads the child's body language and thinks she knows her, but the Cherokee woman taunts Taylor with truths about Turtle from understanding Cherokees.

There are several big questions here. Is assimilation a good thing, or is it a decimation of the native culture and heritage? If it were a good thing, would it be possible? If it is a bad thing, is it inevitable anyway?

I was fascinated by the book, and I think I would have liked it even if I didn't have native american relatives. The story moves along and involves the people from the sidelines, the people that you pass in life. Some parts of the romances seemed to ring quite true. If anything seemed contrived, it wasn't even that Turtle got on the Oprah Winfrey show--certainly a contrivance of major proportion. It was the coincidence that Taylor herself had family ties to the Cherokees. I was a little disappointed in the ending, not in how things came out, but the contrivance that pulled all the strings together so neatly.

Maybe I am just jealous. I don't think my own drama will play out so cleanly. My niece has a foot in both worlds, and at times it seems to be tearing her apart.