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  • The Beadworkers: Stories by Beth Piatote book cover
  • The Beadworkers: Stories by Beth Piatote book cover
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The Beadworkers: Stories

by Beth Piatote

Kinship, memory, and Native Northwest life

$17.89 USD
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AlbakiReads Editorial

Kinship, memory, and Native Northwest life

Set across different periods and situations, these mixed-genre stories connect intimate family relationships with larger histories of Native life. Beadwork, the Fish Wars of the 1960s, tensions at Wounded Knee in 1890, and a family’s debate over ancestral remains all figure in the collection. Their recurring concerns include kinship, longing, cultural inheritance, and return, while the final piece revisits the conflict of Antigone through a Nez Perce-Cayuse family. Together, the stories bring personal choices into conversation with history and community.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in Indigenous literature and contemporary Native life.
  • Readers who enjoy story collections spanning different historical periods and forms.
  • Readers interested in family ties, cultural inheritance, and the histories of the Native Northwest.

Themes

Kinship and family relationshipsNative Northwest histories and contemporary lifeCultural inheritance and ancestral remainsLonging and return

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

Beth Piatote's luminous debut collection opens with a feast, grounding its stories in the landscapes and lifeworlds of the Native Northwest, exploring the inventive and unforgettable pattern of Native American life in the contemporary world

Told with humor, subtlety, and spareness, the mixed-genre works of Beth Piatote's first collection find unifying themes in the strength of kinship, the pulse of longing, and the language of return.

A woman teaches her niece to make a pair of beaded earrings while ruminating on a fractured relationship. An eleven-year-old girl narrates the unfolding of the Fish Wars in the 1960s as her family is propelled to its front lines. In 1890, as tensions escalate at Wounded Knee, two young men at college--one French and the other Lakota--each contemplate a death in the family. In the final, haunting piece, a Nez Perce-Cayuse family is torn apart as they debate the fate of ancestral remains in a moving revision of the Greek tragedy Antigone.

Formally inventive and filled with vibrant characters, The Beadworkers draws on Indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life.
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