REVIEW OF RAIN IS NOT MY INDIAN NAME

 

A. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Smith, Cynthia L. 2001. RAIN IS NOT MY INDIAN NAME. New York, NY: Heartdrum, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 9780380733002.

 

B. PLOT SUMMARY
Cassidy Rain Berghoff and Galen Owen have been best friends since second grade, but now their relationship has become closer. They spend New Year’s Eve together, Afterward, Galen heads home, but he never gets there. Crossing a road, he doesn’t see the oncoming car. The driver doesn’t see Galen until it’s too late. Cassidy finds out that her best friend is dead on the morning of the next day, her 14th birthday.

She spends the next few months avoiding her friends and other people. She basically walls herself off from social and emotional contacts with the world. It’s her way of coping with the loss of her best friend. Years earlier, her mother had died; and now her first love has died, too. The combined emotional impact causes her to withdraw from life.

Finally, she starts renewing contacts with her friends. She participates in activities around town. Most of all, she finally finds a way of dealing with the loss of her mother and Galen. 

 

C. CRITICAL ANALYSIS (INCLUDING CULTURAL MARKERS)
For Cassidy’s 14th birthday, her best friend Galen Owen gives her a Native American necklace. It was one that Cassidy had admired at a Lakota trader’s table at a powwow she had been taken to by her Aunt Georgia.

Both of Cassidy’s parents have Native American heritage. Her mother’s side of the family has Muscogee Creek-Cherokee blood. Her father’s side has Ojibwe blood.

Early in the novel, Cassidy describes her mother’s traditional tear dress. The tear dress is the traditional (and official, by proclamation of the Cherokee National Council) dress of the Cherokee Nation. As Cassidy mentions in the story, her mother’s dress is made of calico cotton. This is a traditional fiber with which to make Cherokee tear dresses. The history of this traditional dress is remarkable in itself. Apparently, the lineage of this dress descends from a dress that was carried by a Cherokee woman on the Trail of Tears sometime between 1830-1850. The original dress was kept by the descendants of that woman for over a hundred years. It became the template for all future tear dresses modeled after it.

Later in the novel, one of Cassidy’s Native American friends shows her a dreamcatcher that his mother had made. Dreamcatchers are authentic artifacts of specific Native American cultures. Dreamcatchers originated within the Ojibwe Nation who are part of a larger cultural group known as the Anishinaabeg. During the 1960’s and 1970’s the dreamcatcher spread to other Native American groups during what has become known as the Pan-Indian Movement, so now dreamcatchers are not only associated with the Ojibwe Nation.

Toward the end of the novel the following sentence appears. “A biography about Billy Mills lay open on the laser printer.” There was no lead-up to the sentence, and nothing related to it came after it. As the saying goes, it was out of the blue. However, considering that the protagonist, her family, and many of her friends have Native American heritage, it does fit. For some reason, the author chose to insert the name of one of the greatest examples of Native American resilience into the frame of the story. I won’t go into detail about him here, but the story of Billy Mills is one of the finest examples of Native American determination in modern history. I recommend everyone reading this book review look him up and learn about him. He’s a great role model.

The end of the book is quite good. Cassidy does a lot of soul searching; and, eventually, she comes to terms with her feelings and thoughts. She finally experiences a sense of peace. She is able to go on with life.   

 

D. AWARDS AND REVIEW EXCERPTS

Teaching for Change: Social Justice Books Selection (2020)

Teaching for Change: Social Justice Books Selection (2023)

American Indians in Children’s Literature (AICL) Best Books of 2021

School Library Journal: “Rain and Galen have been friends forever, but for Rain's 14th birthday, the thrill of finding that her burgeoning romantic feelings are being reciprocated puts the evening into a special-memory category. The next morning, she learns that Galen was killed in an accident on the way home. Plunged into despair, Rain refuses to attend the funeral and cuts herself off from her friends. Skipping to six months later, the main portion of the story takes place as she thinks about Galen's upcoming birthday and summer plans are complicated by the girl's Aunt Georgia's Indian Camp and political efforts to cut its funding. Rain participates in nothing and her family members, loving though they are, seem preoccupied with their own needs and concerns. Gradually, Rain's love of photography resurfaces and lands her an assignment with the local newspaper. She becomes involved in examining her own heritage, the stereotypical reactions to it, and her own small-town limitations. There is a surprising amount of humor in this tender novel. It is one of the best portrayals around of kids whose heritage is mixed but still very important in their lives. As feelings about the public funding of Indian Camp heat up, the emotions and values of the characters remain crystal clear and completely in focus. It's Rain's story and she cannot be reduced to simple labels. A wonderful novel of a present-day teen and her "patchwork tribe."”

Horn Book: “Fourteen-year-old Rain, of mixed Native American heritage, is devastated by her best friend's death. She comes out of her self-imposed seclusion to shoot photos for a local newspaper feature on a summer youth program for Native Americans in her Kansas hometown. The engaging first-person narrative of Cynthia Leitich Smith's Rain Is Not My Indian Name convincingly portrays Rain's grieving process and addresses the varying degrees of prejudice she encounters.”

Kirkus: “Tender, funny, and full of sharp wordplay, Smith’s first novel deals with a whole host of interconnecting issues, but the center is Rain herself. At just 14, Rain and her best friend Galen promise always to celebrate their birthdays; hers on New Year’s Day, his on the Fourth of July. They had just begun to see themselves not just as best friends but as girl and boy that New Year’s Eve night, when Galen is killed in a freak accident. Rain has already lost her mother and her Dad’s stationed in Guam. She’s close to her Grandpa, her older brother, and his girlfriend, who realize her loss and sorrow but have complicated lives of their own. Her response to Galen’s death is tied to her tentative explorations of her own mixed Native American and German/Irish heritage, her need and desire to learn photography and to wield it well, and the general stirrings of self and sex common to her age. Rain has to maneuver all of this through local politics involving Galen’s mother and the local American Indian Youth Camp (with its handful of local Indian teens, and Rain’s erstwhile “second-best friend” who is black). What’s amazing here is Rain’s insight into her own pain, and how cleanly she uses language to contain it.”



E. CONNECTIONS
This story is about losing your best friend and the love of your life, knowing that you can never, ever have them back again, and still going on with life. It’s also tangentially about Native American culture.  

Here are other books that have similar themes to Rain Is Not My Indian Name:

Smith, Cynthia L. HEARTS UNBROKEN. ISBN 9780763681142

Smith, Cynthia L. ANCESTOR APPROVED: INTERTRIBAL STORIES FOR KIDS. ISBN 9780062869944

Green, John. THE FAULT IN OUR STARS. ISBN 9780525478812 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
      Infographics                 Infographics is a method of conveying information in a concise and eye-catching way. In various incarnations, infographics can be traced as far back as the beginning of book illustrations. One such example is the illustration of “sunspots in  Rosa Ursina sive Sol , an illustrated astronomical text published by Christoph Scheiner in 1626 . ” (Evers, 2015) Another example of infographics from the 1600’s was Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius , published in 1610. Galilei’s work used infographics to share information about Earth’s moon, the moons of Saturn, and various constellations. Thus, it can be argued that the use of infographics is 400 years old. Some have argued that infographics goes back as far as prehistoric cave paintings or Egyptian hieroglyphs, but I prefer to limit our historical identification of the usage of infographics to the post-Gutenberg press era, from the 1400’s onward. The term infographic comes from combining the t
Read more
  REVIEW OF A BIG BED FOR LITTLE SNOW   A. BIBLIOGRAPHY Lin, Grace. 2019. A BIG BED FOR LITTLE SNOW . New York City, NY: Little, Brown Books For Young Readers. ISBN 9780316478366.   B. PLOT SUMMARY At the beginning of the winter season, a boy named Little Snow gets a new bed made for him by his mother. She reminds him that it is for sleeping on, not for jumping on. He agrees to sleep on the bed, not jump on it. That night, after his mother left from tucking him in, Little Snow started jumping on his bed. When he heard his mother coming back, he lay down and pretended he hadn’t been doing anything. The next morning, after he had woken up, he decided to jump on his bed some more. When he heard his mother coming, he laid back down and pretended he hadn’t been jumping on his bed. That winter, Little Snow enjoyed jumping on his bed whenever his mother was not around. One time when he was jumping on his bed, when he landed on it he made a rip in it. Whenever he jumped on
Read more