the book would open. They finally settled on an approach that would take the long view, with an image of an origin story common to many eastern tribes. Turtle Island features the world on the shell of an enormous reptile. Vo- luptuously rich in detail, the image sucks the reader right into the powerful story. The book’s title, “Ghost River,” also came
out of shared discussion. During the group’s field trip to central Pennsylvania, their bus re- peatedly crossed over the Susquehanna River. They joked about the ubiquity of the river. It finally struck them that the Susquehanna served as the perfect metaphorical thread ty- ing the past to the present. The river then as today served as a lifeline, a major source of transportation, agriculture and recreation. Water breaks down all sorts of racial barriers because everybody needs it. The novel’s last scene remains Francis’ contemporary American Indians
favorite:
stare at the reader, while behind them, their ancestors look on. “This book is about hon- oring those ancestors,” he says. Alvitre echoes those sentiments. “We can humanize people so often dehumanized,” she says. “That’s the first step in healing.” And, she adds, “we can learn from them so this never happens again.” The novel begins simply with the words,
“History is complicated. Violence is simple.” Today, as during the era of the Paxton Boys, notes Francis, “we default to violence because we can’t deal with talking about the com- plexities of the situation.” He believes that this book will take one step toward acknowledging those very complexities. For Fenton, this project has an impor-
“Ghost River” took its title from the Susquehanna River (top), a potent metaphor suggesting the sweeping and twisting journey of history through the past into the present. Rivers also connect humanity, regardless of ethnicity or background, because all life requires water.
typeset documents. “You can see inadvertent small ink blobs, just like you see in the archival material,” she notes. She spent hours detail- ing every single brick in the colonial houses and buildings so the reader experiences the claustrophobia that the Conestoga felt as they moved from open forest to city streets. Alvitre tracked down an Oregon “pigment hunter,” who scavenges wild berries, fossilized minerals and plants to create pigments rich in organic, earthy colors. She decided to eschew digital shortcuts and use only these natural pigments to give the novel an authentic historic feel. The project required intense collabora- tion, and the team vigorously debated how
20 AMERICAN INDIAN WINTER 2019
tant social justice component. “It’s tempt- ing to see white supremacy as a recent or contemporary problem, but the ‘Ghost River’ story reveals that it is interwoven into the fabric of our foundational mytholo- gies.” The Paxton debate, after all, cohered a politically and ethnically diverse colonial population of Scots-Irish, Germans and English into “white” settlers besieged by a foreign adversary in their midst. “By focus- ing on the Indigenous peoples at the center of this tragic story,” he says, “‘Ghost River’ equips modern readers to dispel the double- speak—to see past violence in the name of law, order, faith, family and security—to discern the humanity of our neighbors, and to redouble our efforts towards an inclusive, multiracial democracy.” X
Author and journalist John F. Ross’s most recent book is “The Promise of the Grand Canyon: John Wesley Powell’s Perilous Journey and His Vision of the American West.”
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