Shonda’s family, the subject of this stunning memoir, is wild. Her aunt, like one out of three Native American women and 20 percent of Black women, is raped, and “her body was a scar, because she’d been ripped open like a pig hanging from a spit on a tree.”įunerals bookend this narrative the characters, Shonda’s mother, fathers, aunties, grandfather, siblings, and cousins, curse their way through each family gathering. In her mother’s city home, “he thin brown carpet is worn down to the color of a deer’s trail” in the woods. At once Indigenous, Black Female, Speculative, Feminist, Womanist, Urban, Southern Gothic, and counter to the Tragic Mulatto stereotype in American literature, stage, and film, Black Indian is a quintessentially American narrative.Įven descriptions of decay and violence sing with Buchanan’s poetic voice. Her work honors the complexity and diversity of these Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. An educator, freelance writer, and literary editor, Buchanan is a culture worker with deep, decades-long engagement in communities of color. Rendered and rippling with family dysfunction, secrets, deaths, alcoholism, and old resentments, 'Black Indian' explores Buchanan's family legacy of being African Americans with American Indian roots and how they dealt with not just society’s ostracization but the consequences of this dual inheritance.Īccording to the description of 'Black Indian,' Buchanan tells the story of her Michigan tribe - a comedic yet manically depressed family of fierce women, who were everything from caretakers and cornbread makers to poets and witches, and men who were either ignored, protected, imprisoned or maimed - and how their lives collided over love, failure, fights and prayer despite a stacked deck of challenges, including addiction and abuse.īuchanan says some readers have been drawn to the book for the history aspect of it, while others like the family dynamics of the book.īuchanan was born in Kalamazoo, and teaches at Loyola Marymount.AWARD-WINNING POET Shonda Buchanan honors multiple literary traditions in her breathtaking new memoir, Black Indian.

'Black Indian,' a memoir written by Shonda Buchanan, explores the author's legacy of being African-American with American Indian roots and the societal exclusions the combination brought.

Black indian shonda buchanan