The next meeting of the Literature Club of Hastings-on-Hudson will be held this Wednesday, March 13th at Frances’ beautiful home. Frances will welcome us all at noon for a large snack, but we will begin our regularly scheduled Annual Meeting at 12:30 PM, so that Constance has time for her presentation, “1959/1960 The Year of History” (Spec. New York State for the 350th Anniversary of Hudson's Discovery of the River) – 2023/2024 “Redo: ‘Discovery?!’ First Nations Beg to Differ: First Nation Writers,” featuring Margaret Verble* which will begin shortly after 1 PM.
Please come prepared to discuss potential themes to consider for next year. For those of you who are unable to make it before 1pm, feel free to send Constance your thoughts prior to our meeting and she will present them to the group.
I look forward to seeing you on Wednesday. The weather report is predicting 67 degrees and sunny! x Jacquie
*I won't comment on the fact that I had to type that complex title twice. I just won't!
Christine's Minutes On March 13th, whilst honeybees lured out by the warm weather buzzed hungrily around Frances’ rhododendrons, fifteen members of the Literature Club gathered inside, in the lovely double-decker living room.
President Constance rang the bell at 12:30 PM, to allow time for the business of our annual meeting, as well as Connie’s program. She thanked Frances for her gracious hospitality and delicious selection of nibblies.
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and accepted.
Our treasury is about to swell, as Lori collected from members our annual dues of a whopping $20.
To great acclaim and delight, the Nominating Committee announced our slate for President and Vice-President for the two-year term of March 2024 to March 2026: Joanna Riesman for President and Laura Rice for Vice. With appropriate ceremony, the Bell was handed over to Joanna.
As for the Annual Meeting, Linda raised the salient question: what is the difference between snacks and lunches? Should we or should we not eat lunch before the meeting?? Connie pointed out that for a first time since pre-Covid, Frances has placed identifying labels for the food. She called this: “a process towards normalization.”
Connie read the list of topics that was our starting point last year, and as ever, members suggested other topics, and definitions.
Connie began her program by situating us: we are sitting atop land that was the traditional territory of the Wappinger people, who were a spinoff from the Lenape, who were members of the Algonquin tribe.
The Literature Club’s theme for 1959-1960 (Connie was born in 1959) was titled: “The Year of History. Specifically, New York State–for the 350th Anniversary of Hudson’s Discovery of the River.” Not surprisingly, Connie reacted strongly to the use of the word “discovery” and decided then and there to present a program on an indigenous American writer.
Serendipitously, last year’s winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction, was Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of American: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History. Our first reading, from Blackhawk’s book, began with a visceral question: how can a country built on stolen land (with stolen labor) be the world’s greatest democracy?
The indigenous writer Connie chose to read was Margaret Verble, and she showed us an interview with the writer on Cherokee TV. Verble is a voting member of the Cherokee Nation. In the interview she explained why she writes historical fiction: because she enjoys reading literary fiction, and because she realizes that she has been taught the history of Native Americans incorrectly, and because she saw a need for a “historical perspective.” Well-written. She also spoke of wanting to write the stories of people who, for a variety of reasons, have not been able to speak for themselves.
Verble has written four novels Maud’s Line (2015), Cherokee America (2019), When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky (2021), Stealing (2023). Her first novel, Maud’s Line, set in 1929, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Despite that, Cherokee America, set in the 1870’s, was rejected 92 times before Houghton Mifflin accepted it.
Members read an excerpt from The New York Times’ review of Cherokee America, by Melissa Leonhardt.
The main character in Cherokee America is Check, a widow descended from Cherokees who survived the horrific Trail of Tears, the forced displacement of 100,000 Native Americans by Andrew Jackson’s “Indian Removal Act.” The plot is complex, with a large cast of characters. One central theme is the question of sovereignty in the Indian Nation. Members read short passages from the novel, and met Dennis Bushyhead.
On to Maud’s Line. This novel is centered on a single character, Maud, in the 1920’s, when Cherokee women had more property rights than white women in the US. The landscape of the book is Verble’s family land in Oklahoma, where snakes are a fact of life. In our readings we met Maud’s father, Mustard, her brother Lovely, and Booker, the schoolteacher/peddler. Connie noted that most of Verble’s female protagonists are married to white men, who are often portrayed more positively than are native men, who are often drinkers and fighters. In many cases, native women have married white men in order to ensure that their children are not taken away from them.
In readings from Blackhawk’s book, we learn more about the terrible policy of taking native children from their families and placing them in boarding schools, where their own languages were forbidden and the goal was complete assimilation. As recently as 1928, 40% of native children were being forcibly institutionalized.
Verble’s latest book, Stealing, came out in 2023. The engaging narrator, nine-year-old Kit Crockett, is the daughter of a Cherokee mother who died of TB and a supposed descendent of Davy Crockett. As the story unfolds, the reader realizes that the narrator is at a Christian boarding school, and then discovers how she came to be there. In these horrible circumstances, it is Kit’s avid reading, and her need to write that save her.
Connie then brought us back to our own Hudson Valley, once home to about 60,000 indigenous people. By 1825, there were exactly 125 natives living here. It is far too easy to draw the obvious conclusions. We were introduced to Kay Walkingstick, an 88-year-old painter of Cherokee descent. Many of her landscapes of the Hudson River are currently being shown at the New-York Historical Society on Central Park West, in a show juxtaposing Hudson River School paintings with Walkingstick’s paintings, overlaying the work with indigenous symbols.
I will end with a quote from Walkingstick: “They were selling the American landscape as empty, and of course it was not empty; it was populated. I think of [my paintings] as a reminder that we are all living in Indian Territory.”
Respectfully submitted,
Christine Lehner, Recording Secretary
