Want to dig a bit deeper, stretch a bit wider, discover unique insights in your reading? So do I! That's why we literary nomads explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Subscribe for podcasts and video, fiction and poetry, essays and online courses, unexpected freebies, and ways to lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs!
On Chance, Transgression, and Survivance
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19 Apr 2026 Reader, This Year's Advocacy Read:Ned BlackhawkThe Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2024) I had a lot of choices to work with for my follow-up to the Hannah Arendt Origins of Totalitarianism project, but I had just about settled on Dunbar-Ortiz's Indigenous American History of the United States when I found her embroiled in a bit of controversy around her own ancestry. Rather than embrace this otherwise well-researched history , I looked elsewhere, a decision I discussed at length in the Jan 11 Words and Ways. But along the way of that search, I also found new ways to think about indigenous history, and I understood some of the scholarly objections to Ortiz. She focuses on a story we all know fairly well: the indigenous culture as victim of white political violence.
“Encounter—rather than discovery—must structure America’s origins story.” (Blackhawk)
Reading works by and influenced by Gerald Vizenor has shown me that history is as much a "framing of" as a "listing of," that how we select and narrate the events of history informs our understanding of them. When I was in elementary school, I was taught about the "friendly Algonquins" and later the "savage Comanche" and then still later the "colonial genocide." These are the narratives of my younger thinking and reading about the indigenous nations. And this is what Blackhawk challenges. In each one, the native presence is an object against which the white history responds. Instead, Blackhawk re-aligns our thinking in terms of "encounter" between two equally complex and dynamic peoples. What effects did each have upon the other? Vizenor calls the indigenous story one of "survivance," which sits contrary to the narrative of "victim." Blackhawk agrees. And so Blackhawk's history is fresh, refreshing, revealing. And it's one I will encourage everyone to read. But then I had a new problem: the book is very recent, and did I, as with Arendt, do anyone a favor by attempting to "summarize" it, especially as that might mean they could glean a Cliff's Notes concept of my summaries and skip the read (and the purchase) of Blackhawk's important scholarship? I needed to respect the active work of this history . . . yet still provide something valuable to potential readers, especially white ones. No, I needed to respect the active work of this history and its people by avoiding a summary, yet still provide something valuable to potential readers, especially white ones. And so I've settled on, rather, the very concept of this shifting perspective. Instead of offering any summary of the history in the book at all, my 'companion work' to it will be reflections and glossary of unique terms Blackhawk engages throughout, particularly as understood by me and my mythologized preconceptions. In other words, I can offer a white guy's guide to reading Blackhawk. I can open up some of his terms and thinking to make the reading more accessible to those who grew up with different stories. And so, beginning this week, I'll release my bi-weekly video series of reflections on Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America, talking about three concepts each week which emerge from each of his chapters. My hope is that I will offer paths into understanding this history without replacing the reading experience at all. Read along with my videos this summer. And by the end of our reflections in October, we will have a complete glossary useful not only for this book but any historical discussion of indigenous history by any writer. For our pre-reading: 1) epistemological shift; 2) interpretative tools; 3) settler colonialism. Join me in the read! Follow Waywords on YouTube! Or apply our growing vocabulary to your own histories and understanding of our country during this 250-year commemoration of its founding.
Literary Nomads: "The Tyranny of Chance: Borges and Assis"After some fun reading the short story "The Fortune Teller" by Machado de Assis, perhaps Brazil's greatest writer, I spent some time reflecting on our peculiar habit of demanding the universe reveal its secret order to us. Mostly, I'm concerned that---at least as by-product, but perhaps as unconscious motivation---we absolve ourselves of responsibility if we believe someone or something else is in charge: the divine, fate, chance, or even some secret cabal. Whatever force we assign to Design, it is beyond our power to alter it. The same, though, with Jorge Luis Borges's story, "The Lottery in Babylon." There, life is framed as a vast lottery of chance, so many rolls of the dice, and is then framed in religious language. Such hard psychological work to wind up thwarting human agency, our ability (and responsibility) to work against injustice! As summer is fast-approaching, I've re-tooled the closing episodes of this Le Guin Omelas season in order to set June up for our Literary Tourism Journey 7. And thanks to those weighing on on Journey 8's topic, which will be an exploration of Monsters and the Marginal as centered around the graphic novel Nimona, by N.D. Stevenson! Now I start narrowing down readings to consider in that theme. Let me know what I should read and talk about in the Mailbag link below! Did your choice not win? Don't worry: I haven't settled on topics for Journeys 9 & 10! Episodes ahead:
Have a question or comment about what we're talking about? Use that mailbag and let me know!
Calendar: Now, Midwest Spring, Kill Everything With FrostSpent this past weekend at a poetry Open Mic. What have you done with poetry this month? There's still time!
What Carries Our History?original short fiction Another moment in the life of Esmond who hears a bit more than most.
Book RecommendationTeaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks (1994) I've read a number of books by hooks now, but I just recently finished her extraordinary teaching memoir and principled pedagogical stance in Teaching to Transgress. Building equally on her relationship with Paulo Freire and her own experiences, she plainly exposes the systems which disenfranchise students and cultivate schooling irrelevance in universities. Most of what she writes is equally and sadly applicable to public schooling. Feeling that schools aren't connecting like they might? Involved in the field of education at any level. If you've missed this, change that. "I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing." "As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence." Yup, and another keeper for my shelf!
Yes, Living With UncertaintyDoes it feel sometimes like we're living while holding our cognitive and emotional breath? That we're living on some kind of existential precipice? I get it. But as I say so often on the podcast, it is uncertainty itself which is often the issue, the condition which we refuse to tolerate in our literature or our lives. Yes, the world is the world; but how we respond to it remains our choice. So, too, says Hannah Critchlow, author of the The21st Century Brain.
And for those who may wonder about the book reviews, yes, I have now a several-month backlog. But I hope to see these updating again soon! (That infernal workflow problem, ever still!) May your spring be more freeing! Steve What's Still Ahead?
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Waywords Studio
Want to dig a bit deeper, stretch a bit wider, discover unique insights in your reading? So do I! That's why we literary nomads explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Subscribe for podcasts and video, fiction and poetry, essays and online courses, unexpected freebies, and ways to lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs!