Eating Fire, Tasting Blood: Breaking the Great Silence of the American Indian Holocaust
(Thunder’s Mouth Press, NYC)

In the words of indigenous scholars, community activists, and artists, this unique collection of essays and poems presents the last 500 years of American history from the Indian viewpointânot the "white-washed, academic-tainted, hypothetical . . . history” found in most textbooks. Paula Gunn Allen addresses the myth of the colonists coming to an empty continent, when in fact the acknowledged number of Native Americans at that time is 10 million and rising. Others elucidate the special problems confronted by indigenous women, from those who lost children to the smallpox brought by the initial waves of white settlers, to those marched to "removal reservations" in the 1830s, to incarcerated Native American women today who are denied the opportunity to practice their religious rites. Perhaps the most compelling essays are those chronicling the decimation of entire tribes, such as the Choctaws, dispossessed of their land through a series of 14 treaties, and the Powhatan and Monaca tribes of what is now Virginia. This substantial and meticulous collection supports all who are breaking the "great silence" surrounding the reality of American expansion.

Booklist 2006


"Mothers killed their children to save them from the torture of the mines," writes renowned Uruguayan author, Eduardo Galeano in his essay, "A Flood of Tears and Blood: And Yet the Pope Said Indians Had Souls." Tear-soaked pages. That sentence about mothers killing their children is the second one in the book (after Moore's introduction). Reading it, I put the book down, consumed with sadness. And I wondered if I would be able to read on. As it turns out, a spirit of faith fills the volume - without bitterness. Along with the necessary "eating fire, tasting blood," there's a sense of survival and rebirth. Many pieces get personal. Moore herself talks about her inheritance of a calling from her grandfather, who had also been an alcoholic. Moore's journey from drink and despair to responsible motherhood and a spokesperson's role is well portrayed in her fiction, and put in hopeful context in the anthology. Linda Hogan - whose novel, "Power," is on my top 100 contemporary American novels list - contributes a beautiful description of a trip with her father to their homeland in Oklahoma. Her Chickasaw ancestors had traveled the Trail of Tears. (The famous Chickasaw ponies had been exterminated in the process.) “The awakening of the old ways will emerge, Hogan writes, in "the same way a frog wakes up beneath mud, smells water, feels rain, and digs out of the safe depths toward life and daylight, its internal fire still burning." Earlier, She had written, "The stories we know and tell are reservoirs of light and fire that brighten and illuminate the darkness of human night."

The anthology is an invaluable and extremely potent distillation of a must-be-heard point of view; and Moore has taken a great leap into the light with the service she has provided.

Rob Neufeld, Asheville Citizen Times, September 2006


"We all know people, Indian and non-Indian, who have no soul," says Native American author MariJo Moore, a Western North Carolina writer with more than a dozen titles and numerous literary awards to her credit.

"People," she continues, "who have destroyed the lives of others, and continue to do so, by making greed-based decisions that will affect untold thousands for many generations to come.

"We need to know ourselves as well as we know our enemies," she emphasizes. "The best way to know indigenous people is to understand how they know themselves: through their own history."

Moore edited the new anthology from Thunder's Mouth Press: Eating Fire, Tasting Blood: Breaking the Great Silence of the American Indian Holocaust. In the introduction, she writes: "For five centuries ­ from Columbus's arrival in 1492 to the U.S. Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s, to the renewed assault in the 1970s ­ our continent's indigenous people endured the most massive and systematic act of genocide in the history of the world."

In Eating Fire, Tasting Blood, 40 established and up-and-coming American Indian writers from disparate nations and tribes offer stirring reflections on the history of their people. This is not a collection of essays about Native Americans, but rather a collection written by Native Americans ­ the story of native holocaust on a tribe-by-tribe level as told by those few who have been fortunate enough to survive.

"This was an extremely difficult book to edit," Moore admits. "But I feel it is timely and an absolute necessity. I personally invited writers whom I thought would best relay the truth of the American Indian holocaust. I wanted to give their voices an opportunity to be heard. And when I chose the titles of each section, I wanted hard-hitting, eye-opening silence disrupters. One example is 'Manifest Destiny: Greed Disguised As God.'"

The book is woven with the beauty of intricate and colorful beadwork, along a ghastly premise that stitches together distinctive voices with a taut thread of spiritual solidarity. The authors' words criss-cross generations to articulate the painful account of a horrific history still in the making.

The subjects are decidedly grim, including: women denied the opportunity to practice their religious rites while they scratch out a life for themselves within the modern prisons of the United States; young Indian mothers who witnessed the epidemic extermination of all of their children through smallpox imported by white settlers; entire communities forced along starvation, torture and death marches to so-called "removal reservations"; the brutally calculated attempted genocide of entire tribal nations such as the Monacan, Powhatan and Choctaw.

"My mentor, Vine Deloria Jr., passed to spirit last year," Moore says. "So I am grateful to have included him."

Other contributors include Linda Hogan and Paula Gunn Allen, described by Moore as "two of the best American Indian women writers alive today." "A Flood of Tears and Blood: And Yet the Pope Said Indians Had Souls" is from Eduardo Galeano, one of Latin America's most distinguished journalists. And Kimberly Roppolo and Eugene Blackbear Sr. ­ who is the oldest living Cheyenne Sundance Priest ­ have a fascinating essay titled "Washita, A Slaughter Not a Battle: A Cheyenne Survivor's Perspective."

Lesser known writers get their say, too: young talents such as Nakesha Bradley (Eastern Band Cherokee), Mary Black Bonnet and Joel Waters (both Lakota), Yufna Soldier Wolf (Northern Arapaho), and Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert (Hopi).

Positioning new voices next to legends like Galeano may be Moore's way of keeping the topic fresh ­ along with every fresh insult of "war, injustice, economic deprivation and senseless slaughter," as she enumerates.

"We need to be aware of what human beings have done to each other," Moore says. And, perhaps even more importantly, what they "are still capable of doing."

Tom Kerr, Mountain Xpress, September 2006


It would seem impossible to write a novel with less than three hundred pages and four characters gifted with psychic ability-two of them Cherokee-without the whole thing seeming like an overblown, New-Age melodrama, but MariJo Moore has pulled it off. After having produced books of her own poetry, collections of others' creative work that she has edited, and a fine collection of short stories-Red Woman with Backward Eyes-Moore has now published her first novel, The Diamond Doorknob. In it, she manages to somehow recreate a diverse Southern world of 1920's to 1940's Tennessee and North Carolina with wonderfully drawn characters who come off as totally realistic, yet haunting and intriguing. The novel resonates with influences from Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and T. R. Pearson to Louise Erdrich and Leslie Silko. There might even be a little Toni Morrison in here. The milieu of this novel is the south, but it's an Indian south, an Irish south, an African American South-even a Dutch south-in short, a mixed south where everything but nothing is changing. It is a south where no one is perfect and every character is human-no heroes or heroines, no protagonists and antagonists here, just people-a south where tragedy and happiness are so intertwined and families are so dysfunctional despite love that they must seem real-a south where the supernatural is natural and Cherokees sound like Cherokees, not mystic nature-loving, crystal wavers-even when some crystal gazing is involved. This novel, particularly for a first novel, shows the promise that Moore's name will only become more and more significant in American Indian literature. And as with Louise Erdrich's characters, readers are going to want more of these characters' stories. These characters and this milieu will offer a lot for future novels and will become, I predict, as familiar to us as Lulu Lamartine, Fleur, Pauline, and Marie Kashpaw. I am looking forward to getting to know them even better soon.

Dr. Kimberly Roppolo : American Indian Quarterly


The Diamond Doorknob, by MariJo Moore, is a novel about the entwined destinies of a group of people from Crockett County, Tennessee, during the first half of the Twentieth Century. What's most appealing about the novel is the equal treatment it gives characters of different backgrounds; Native American, African American, European American, rich and poor, and the unflinching way it looks at some of the harsh realities of life such as racism, incest, child abuse and alcoholism.

-Raven Chronicles


The Diamond Doorknob

MariJo Moore's country is the hilly South, between western Tennessee and the western mountains of North Carolina. Moore, Cherokee, tells an intricately netted story of Indian, white, and black people on the land. The cultures that have become the lace of the interior South have met in knotted conflicts for hundreds of years.

Moore's story of Cloud, Edgar, Levi, Beretha and Maggie takes us into the tangled lives that make up the spirit of the Place, a spirit braided of cruelty, sorrow, Christianity, kindness, alcohol, despair, desperate needs and terrible independence, violent terror and quiet will. In Moore's work, it is the Indian perspective, not the more literarily visible white or black view, that is highlighted. Once read, and seen, it is clear to the reader that the Indian thread is a critical element in the story of this place.

Moore's central character, Cloud, engages the worst and the best of the place and time, the years between 1922 and 1950. Through her, we pass time with drunken poor white trash and their meanness that makes up so much of the character of the South. Cloud can deal with their bodies, by judicious use of her own strength of character, a fast way with a knife, and a sanguine handling of a six-chambered pistol and three bullets. But their effects on her soul last longer than their brief times in her geography.

She is treated kindly by black women, a middle-class white woman, and a gay white man. She endures heart-charring love with an impossible partner, scion of a wealthy white family, whose crippled passion tears them apart. Moore's agility in weaving these lives and cultures together through three generations affected by one man, Cloud's grandfather Smoker, is a strong, fine, remarkable literary accomplishment.

IM Diversity.com
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