Ledfeather

"This is an interesting example of how historical fiction can dovetail with other genres that you might not consider it to have much of a relationship with—in this particular case, with horror. And this book has a wild experimental structure; it’s very fragmented. Part of it is a contemporary drama set on a Blackfeet reservation in Montana, as you say. This part is about a suicidal teen named Doby Saxon, who is just struggling through his life with a broken family, deceased father, substance abuse on the reserve. That’s mixed with a braid of epistolary fiction set in the 1880s on the same reserve, where an Indian Agent, Frances Dalimpere, is participating in the colonial effort to starve the Blackfeet, and he’s writing to his wife about his activities in a way that makes him look sort of heroic. This book is amazing. It’s got multiple time frames and points of view. It’s in the first person, the second person. It’s got the modern setting, it’s got this historical setting, and all the spaces in between. And despite its complicated structure, it’s really gripping. In a lot of historical fiction, we see how transgressions people commit against other people can really mark a place, how people who flow from that place into the future are affected by the transgressions of the past. This book does an especially great job of making that clear. At the same time, the epistolary sections highlight the unreliability of a lot of non-fictional historical accounts. People sometimes say that if they’re going to read something historical, they’ll just read non-fiction; there’s a sense that you can learn something hard and true from non-fiction that you can’t take from fiction. But, of course, non-fiction is also a contrivance—the result of authorial decisions. Things are left in, things are left out, there’s some emphasis here, a glossing over there, interpretations made and conclusions drawn. There’s no way to experience the past that isn’t the result of some kind of human construction, so with that in mind, the knowledge that historical fiction gives us seems a little more legitimate."