Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir (Machete)

A fascinating search for personal and cultural identity. Kirkus Thomas C. Gannons Birding While Indian spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the authors life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, Dickcissel: such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannons traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mothers devastation at racist bullying from coworkers, and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the people and other animals indigenous to the United States. Birding has always been Gannons escape and solace. He later found similar solace in literature, particularly by Native authors. He draws on both throughout this expansive, hilarious, and humane memoir. An acerbic observerof birds, the environment, the aftershocks of history, and human natureGannon navigates his obsession with the ostensibly objective avocation of birding and his own mixed-blood subjectivity, searching for that elusive Snowy Owl and his own identity. The result is a rich reflection not only on one mans life but on the transformative power of building a deeper relationship with the natural world.