Below is an announcement from Wilmington Community Television’s “Book Stew:”
“If I was alive when this happened, is it really HISTORICAL fiction?”
So pondered Roger Williams University creative writing professor and author Edward “Ted” Delaney as he discusses his novel Hard Margins with me on the July episode.
The book’s dual parts recount the careers of two BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) agents, one after the Civil War and the other post-Korean War, both trying to change the lives of unwilling Ute and Shoshone tribal members in Wyoming in 1873 and 1958.
In the 1873 section, an agent modeled after a real BIA agent, Nathan Meeker, causes a massacre as he demands that the native hunters and horsemen become farmers. In 1958, another agent tries once again to convince the same tribe members to take up farming, as oil and gas are discovered on their previously worthless deeded lands.
The hubris of the bureaucrats who doom the intermediary agents to failure, and the resistance of the Indians, is a tragic story rarely told from the viewpoint of both the Indian agents and the reservation residents.
Click on the links below to encounter a world rarely explored and recounted, and one probably being banned in Trump-ified museums and monuments!
Soundcloud podcast: https://tinyurl.com/bookstew151-sc
Eileen MacDougall is the host/producer of 150+ episodes of Book Stew, a web series and podcast originating in 2013, featuring every variety of authors, illustrators, poets, and playwrights, plus a cat that survived a tornado and lived to write about it!
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