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Posts Tagged ‘disappear’

Marcie Rendon, Indigenous Novelist

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on November 19, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Jaida Grey Eagle via MPR News.
Among her many accomplishments, Twin Cities-based author Marcie Rendon writes a mystery series about indigenous investigator Cash Blackbear. 

I read a lot of mysteries, and I gravitate toward those about different cultures, often outside North America. But indigenous cultures here are equally foreign to me, which is why I have enjoyed Marcie Rendon’s Cash Blackbear series, about a tough young Ojibwe woman who investigates crimes against members of Upper Midwest tribes, often women.

I have several articles here for you to click on if interested, but I’m going to focus on what the Minnesota-based McKnight Foundation said about Rendon when they gave her an award.

“The McKnight Foundation is pleased to announce the selection of Marcie Rendon for its 2020 Distinguished Artist Award—a $50,000 award created to honor a Minnesota artist who has made significant contributions to the state’s cultural life. Rendon, an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, is a writer whose poems, plays, children’s books, and novels explore the resilience and brilliance of Native peoples.

“ ‘Marcie brings a strong and necessary voice to so many genres,’ said Pamela Wheelock, McKnight’s interim president. ‘She has created a tremendous body of work, including poetry, plays, lyrics, and award-winning crime novels, all while raising up other Native voices in our community. Her commitment to making art in community embodies what a distinguished artist means to Minnesota and to McKnight.’ …

“A gifted storyteller and prolific writer, Rendon is the author of the award-winning Cash Blackbear mystery series, set in Minnesota’s Red River Valley. The first novel in the series, Murder on the Red River, earned the 2018 Pinckley Prize for Debut Novel, and the second, Girl Gone Missing, was nominated for the Mystery Writers of America – G. P. Putnam’s Son’s Sue Grafton Memorial Award. Rendon … is also the author of four nonfiction children’s books, including Powwow Summer (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2013).

“Rendon’s plays include Sweet Revenge, chosen for the Oklahoma Indigenous Theatre Company’s 2020 New Native American Play Festival. She has also curated and produced a variety of Native-focused performances at the History Theatre, the Minnesota Fringe Festival, and Patrick’s Cabaret. She is the founder of Raving Native Theater, a platform that brings voice and visibility to other Native American artists and performers.

“ ‘We are more resilient than we are traumatized,’ said Rendon. ‘Art keeps us thriving, not just surviving. I try to make room for other Native artists. Every time someone steps forward, it makes room for others to step forward.’ …

“Rendon’s poem ‘Resilience’ is also included in US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s digital project ‘Living Nations, Living Words: A Map of First Peoples Poetry,’ which will join the permanent collection of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

“Rendon’s awards include a 2020 Ensemble/Playwright Collaboration Grant from the Network of Ensemble Theaters and the Playwrights’ Center, and a 2020 Covid-19 artist grant from the Tiwahe Foundation for demonstrating resilience during the pandemic. Rendon was named a 2018 50 Over 50 honoree by AARP Minnesota and Pollen Midwest and received Loft’s 2017 Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship with poet Diego Vazquez. …

“Said Sandy Agustin, a member of the Distinguished Artist Award selection committee, ‘Whether she is writing about boarding schools, incarceration, or the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, she is nurturing Native voices and amplifying communities that are too often unheard, especially Native women.’

“Born in northern Minnesota in 1952, Rendon was a voracious reader, creative writer, and poet from an early age. While studying criminal justice at Moorhead State College in the early 1970s, she was part of a group of Native student activists who successfully demanded the launch of the university’s first American Indian studies department.

“After moving to the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis in the late 1970s, she worked as a counselor and therapist, while raising her three daughters. In 1991 she saw a performance by Margo Kane, a Cree-Saulteaux artist, that inspired Rendon to share her own poetry and writing with a wider audience. …

“She is currently collaborating with artist Heather Friedli on an upcoming installation at the Weisman Art Museum about the high rates of incarceration among Native women.”

I have read most of the Cash Blackbear books (there’s a new one just out), and I find the urgent educational energy of the series both its strength and its weakness. Rendon feels empowered by a need to educate unenlightened readers like me, and I appreciate what she’s doing. After all, injustices continue and indigenous women in particular still disappear at an intolerable rate. I’ll just say that sometimes the mission overwhelms a good yarn.

More at the McKnight Foundation, here. See also Minnesota Public Radio, here, and Visual Collaborative, here.

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Repopulating a Rare Butterfly

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 12, 2016| 4 Comments »

Here’s a guy who didn’t just ring his hands when he learned that a magnificent butterfly species was endangered in his part of California; he decided to do something about it.

Zachary Crockett reports at Vox, “It begins its life as a tiny red egg, hatches into an enormous orange-speckled caterpillar, and then — after a gestation period of up to two years — emerges as an iridescent blue beauty. Brimming with oceanic tones, the creature’s wings are considered by collectors to be some of the most magnificent in North America.

“For centuries, the California pipevine swallowtail — or, Battus philenor hirsuta — called San Francisco home. As development increased in the early 20th century, the butterfly slowly began to disappear. Today it is a rare sight.

“But one man’s DIY efforts are starting to bring the butterfly back.”

Tim Wong, a 28-year-old aquatic biologist at the California Academy of Sciences, tells Crockett, ” ‘I first was inspired to raise butterflies when I was in elementary school … We raised painted lady butterflies in the classroom, and I was amazed at the complete metamorphosis from caterpillar to adult.’ …

“Years later, he learned about the pipevine swallowtail — which had become increasingly rare in San Francisco — and he made it his personal mission to bring the butterfly back.

“He researched the butterfly and learned that when in caterpillar form, it only feeds on one plant: the California pipevine (Aristolochia californica), an equivalently rare flora in the city.

” ‘Finally, I was able to find this plant in the San Francisco Botanical Garden [in Golden Gate Park],’ Wong says. ‘And they allowed me to take a few clippings of the plant.’

“Then in his own backyard, using self-taught techniques, he created a butterfly paradise.”

Read more here. It sure takes persistence.

Here’s hoping an elementary school project in 2016 will lead to the rescue of another endangered species down the road.

Photo: Tim Wong (@timtast1c)

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Languages

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 6, 2011| 8 Comments »

To paraphrase a character in the Brian Friel play “Translations,” if you impose a language on people, one day you may find that their speech “no longer fits the contours of the land.” Language is critical to identity. People can always learn the language of the power group later, once they have learned how to learn.

That is the rationale behind a new effort in Haiti.

“When Michel DeGraff was a young boy in Haiti, his older brother brought home a notice from school reminding students and parents of certain classroom rules. At the top of the list was ‘no weapons.’ And right below it, DeGraff still remembers: ‘No Creole.’ Students were supposed to use French, and French only. …

“DeGraff is now an associate professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he is using his influence to try to destroy the barrier that essentially fences off most of Haiti’s children from a real education.” Read the Boston Globe report here.

The dominance of a few languages was one of the concerns behind creating Esperanto as a bridge. With a bridge language, Esperantists hoped, less common languages would not die. It hasn’t turned out that way.

“There are more than 7,000 languages in the world, and if statistics hold, two weeks from now, there will be one less. That’s the rate at which languages disappear. And each time a language disappears, a part of history — a subtle way of thinking — vanishes too.

“A new documentary called The Linguists, [which aired August 4] on PBS, follows ethnographers David Harrison and Greg Anderson as they race to document endangered languages in some of the most remote corners of the world.

“From the plains of Siberia to the mountains of Bolivia to the tribal lands of India, Harrison and Anderson have hopscotched the globe, but they sat down for a moment with NPR’s Scott Simon to discuss their race to capture the world’s endangered languages.

“Harrison, a linguistics professor at Swarthmore College, specializes in sounds and words; Anderson, who directs Oregon’s Living Tongues Institute, is the verb expert. Together, they speak 25 languages.” Read more here.

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