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👋 Hello readers!👋 It's November, which means it's time to start reading Winter Counts. David Heska Wanbli Weiden's moody, compelling thriller follows Virgil Wounded Horse, a man hired to deliver punishment on the Rosebud Indian Reservation when the American judicial system or tribal council comes up short. When his nephew Nathan — the son of his beloved late sister — ODs on heroin laced with fentanyl, he sets off on a mission to find the man responsible, with the unexpected help of his ex-girlfriend. They find themselves in the midst of a complicated web of drug cartels, uncovering a dangerous world of money, power, and violence with far-reaching ramifications.
It’s dark but also funny; violent, but poignant. It's an absolutely riveting page-turner, compelling not only for the mystery at its core, but also for its piercing criticism of US (mis)treatment of Native populations. A great way to celebrate National Native American Heritage Month.
Get your copy, or read an excerpt here.
Over in the Facebook group, we'll be posting discussion threads throughout the month, following this schedule:
Be sure to join the group to share your thoughts, too!
Happy reading, Arianna
đź“š Behind the Book đź“š
We asked David to tell us a bit about how Winter Counts came to be. Here's what he had to say. As a professor of Native American studies, I’ve been studying and teaching about the broken criminal justice system on reservations for years. Native nations have no authority to prosecute serious felony crimes that occur on their own lands, and must instead refer these cases to federal law enforcement agencies. However, federal authorities decline to prosecute a large number of these cases, resulting in the release of these violent criminals. As a result, victims sometimes turn to unofficial methods of obtaining justice, such as hiring a private vigilante like my character,
The characters in Winter Counts have been floating around in my head for a long time, and I published a short story back in 2014 featuring Virgil. After writing that story, I thought I was finished, but I kept thinking about him and the others, and I realized there was so much I’d left unexplored in his world.
Winter Counts is about violence and justice, but it’s also about history, identity, and family. Virgil is struggling to raise his fourteen-year-old nephew Nathan, and he’s also trying to make sense of his own conflicted feelings about life on the reservation. I tapped into my own experiences as the father of two teenage sons, and I was also influenced by my family history on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. As I wrote the book, I thought a lot about my grandmother, who was taken as a young woman from the reservation to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where she was forbidden to speak her language or practice her spirituality. Years
List of inspiration: The Index of Self-Destructive Acts Christopher Beha tells us about the people, places, and things he was thinking about while writing. It took me six years to write this novel, and during that time I put everything I had into it, so there isn’t a simple answer to the question of what inspired the book along the way. Here’s a brief sampling.
19th-century fiction Credit: danadoesbooks I was reading a lot of 19th century fiction while writing Index — Henry James (whom I’m pretty much always reading), George Eliot, Balzac, Dostoyevsky. All of these writers do something I was aiming to do in Index, which is set a book in the recent past — ten or fifteen years — and try to paint a relatively complete picture of this near historical moment. Graceland by Paul Simon It occurred to me recently that no work of art of any kind has given me more pleasure of more years of my life than Paul Simon’s album Graceland. (His subsequent album, Rhythm of the Saints is probably a close second in that category.) I was 6 years old when it came out, and I asked for it that Christmas on the basis of Chevy Chase’s turn in the video for “Call Me Al.” I thought of the album at the time as basically inscrutable but enormous fun, like an extended piece of nonsense verse.
At some point, maybe in my teens, I recognized that the album was really about arriving at middle age. I listened to the songs Simon wrote for Simon and Garfunkel, very much a young person’s songs, and I thought about how old the same writer sounded on Graceland. There was some kind of hard-won wisdom there. Now I am almost as old as Simon was when he recorded Graceland, and I have been listening to the album for 35 years.
About halfway through writing this book, I got to see Simon at Flushing Meadows on his farewell tour, and I remember thinking very explicitly that I wanted to write something that could last in the way that his music has and, I think, will. That someone could return to over decades, finding something new in it each time. Paris Credit: Fabien Maurin on Unsplash After nearly 40 years in New York, I moved to Paris while writing this very New York-centric novel. There was something useful about removing myself from the place where the book is set. In its way, it was not unlike the process of writing from a slight remove in time. I’m back in New York now and — of course — writing a novel set in Europe. My daughter, Olive The biggest change in my life during the many years when I was writing this thing was the birth of my daughter, Olive. Family is an important subject in the novel — particularly intergenerational dynamics — and I’m sure becoming a father affected my approach to this subject. But Olive’s appearance in my life influenced the book in a much more fundamental way: having a child cuts down considerably on your disposal time, and it forces you to make some tough decisions about priorities.
The truth is that my first two novels were not such great successes that anyone was clamoring for a third. I had a good job that I found satisfying. It would have been easy enough to set writing aside for a while — perhaps even while secretly knowing that “a while” might be forever. But I did not do that. In fact, I did the opposite: I left my good steady job to concentrate on getting the novel done, which is a crazy thing to do just when you are starting a family. (I was very lucky that my wife let me do such a thing.) All of this was clarifying: I knew then, if I hadn’t already, that I was going to keep writing no matter what. ●
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