Tamara Dean: Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless

Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless – Tamara Dean – University of Minnesota Press – 9781517918569 – Paperback – 224 pages – April 22, 2025 – $19.95 -ebook editions available at lower prices

Books like Shelter and Storm are all too often errantly categorized as “regional,” both by publishers and reviewers alike. That’s a problem, as if you think of this book as being “only” about the Driftless region, or Wisconsin, or even the Midwest as its “region,” too many readers might not be interested enough to read this book. It’s an irony for anyone writing from or about a specific place – it may be that through a deep understanding of a unique place that one can address and communicate the most universal issues of human life and the natural world.

Tamara Dean is a truly gifted writer, and I suspect that she can write well about almost anything. But this book is personal, and it gives her storytelling abilities the opportunity to shine. There are twelve “stories” in this book, really linked chapters that document on multiple levels, the time she spent during a “return to the land” experience not that many years ago in the truly unusual region called The Driftless because the glaciers that extended across this continent managed to miss this part of what is now mostly Wisconsin (and a bit in Iowa). It’s not flat there, but rather consists of steep hills and deep valleys, highly forested with a number of spring-fed streams.

While the stories are about Dean’s life there, she uses her own experiences to illuminate a variety of issues that matter to almost all of us, from climate change as it affects peoples lived lives (especially in farm communities), how people create community and mutuality, survive natural and household disasters, and citizen science (with a special interest in blue-glow fireflies). Dean’s personal experiences are transformative for her, and through her essays, for us as well

Tamara Dean’s Shelter and Storm is reminiscent of the best writing about nature and rural living, including works by Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry and Gary Paul Nabhan. Tamara Dean’s writing will engage those many of us who care deeply about climate change and sustainability, and her stories will make you feel that it is possible and necessary to spend more time not only being in the natural world, but reflecting on what it means now for us in our alienated, disconnected, thoroughly modern world, and how we might forge a way of being that allows us to live better lives and preserve some level of nature still.

I do want to say that this book is one of the best of the many I have read this year. And I truly enjoyed having the opportunity to speak with Tamara about the book and her experiences in the Driftless, a place I now very much want to visit to experience for myself.

Tamara Dean’s essays and stories have been published in magazines including The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, the Guardian, One Story, Orion, and The Progressive. She is also the author of The Human-Powered Home: Choosing Muscles over Motors. She teaches writing independently in various locales.

“It may sound familiar, but Shelter and Storm is an engaging read largely because Dean is a very good writer.”—Big River Magazine

“Tamara Dean’s luminous essay collection paints a thoughtful portrait of the Driftless region of Wisconsin and the struggles it faces due to climate change.”—Shelf Awareness

“The essays collected in Shelter and Storm, grounded in Dean’s experience tending to and rewilding neglected farmland in the Driftless region, are a product of Dean’s lively, curious, meticulous mind, exploring topics as varied as the impacts of climate change, the challenges of sustainable living, brickmaking, prairie tending, and the history of abortion […] At their essence, these essays are informed by awe. They are about what happens when we make space in our lives for deep attention and wonder.”—Craft Magazine

Author website here.

Buy the book at Bookshop.org

 

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Mark van de Logt: Between the Floods: A History of the Arikaras

Between the Floods: A History of the Arikaras — Mark van de Logt — University of Oklahoma Press —Paperback — 9780806194905 — 384 pages — $29.95 – October 1, 2024 – ebook versions available at lower prices

During the past couple of years, I’ve read several really good books that recast the history of indigenous Americans both prior to, during, and after the invasion of North America by Europeans, first by explorers, fishermen and traders, and later by colonizers. Almost everything most of us learn about this part of the history of the Americas has been told and taught from the European perspective. Academic studies have similarly been mostly conducted by white Americans with indigenous people seen as subjects for interrogation and study by what is proposed to be a more “accurate” form of science, rather than treating indigenous people as equals, with practical knowledge, historical awareness, and actors with full credibility in the telling of their own histories and practices.

Mark van de Logt’s excellent book Between the Floods, purposely challenges the way the history of an indigenous people is studied and understood. Mark gives credence from the outset to the oral storytelling of the Arikara people, that sets forth their history in an oral tradition, which he then supplements with other forms of knowledge to expand them.

The Sahnis, or Arikara, as they are best known, were at one time a powerful independent nation, who likely migrated from the southwest hundreds of years ago, and settled in the Missouri River region in what is now mostly Nebraska (though today, the tribal lands are the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota.)

The Arikaras, like their Hidatsa and Mandan neighbors on the northern plains, were both farmers and hunter-gatherers who thrived as corn growers and successful buffalo hunters. The arrival of Europeans, even hundreds of miles away from them brought pressure on their villages from other indigenous nations, notably the Lakhotas, whose larger population and more successful military forces caused displacements and relocations, and contact with Euro-Americans brought devastating diseases and other problems for the Arikara as well. Their important location on the Missouri River brought them into contact early on with French fur traders, the Spanish, and especially Americans after Lewis and Clark, often with damaging effects on their tribe.

Between the Floods creates a historical narrative of a resilient semi-sedentary people in their migration and settlement as they confront the colonialist era, endure many tribal conflicts, experience terrible diseases, and incorporate horses and metal tools into their culture. Arikara oral traditions and histories provide an entry into their past and current culture that at its core has survived intact despite so much suffering at the hands of their enemies and the conquering American society.

Mark uses information from archaeology, linguistics, and anthropology to enhance native storytelling, and the book is illustrated with Native maps and ledger art, along with historical photographs and drawings. There is no better way to understand this important tribal nation that likely is known to very few Americans today.

This is a terrific book. It’s well written, well-researched, and demonstrates throughout a deep appreciation for the Sahni people, their lifeways, history and traditions. This kind of history-telling is really important not only for the tribe but to all of us who know so little about their past and present lives. And Mark deep knowledge and broad field of study makes him a terrific interview subject.

Mark van de Logt is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University of Qatar, teaches in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Radboud University, and is also the author of War Party in Blue: Pawnee Scouts in the U.S. Army (2010) and Monsters of Contact: Historical Trauma in Caddoan Oral Traditions (2018). Between the Floods was awarded the Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize for best book in Ethnohistory from the American Society for Ethnohistory. His current research involves linking oral traditions to historical events. His articles appeared in the “Journal of Military History,” the “American Indian Quarterly,” the “American Indian Culture and Research Journal,” and “Wicazo Sa Review.” He is (co-)editor of the University of Nebraska Press’s “Studies in the Anthropology of North American Indian” series.

Buy the book here.

There is an interesting interview with Mark about the Arikara scouts for “The Friends of Little Bighorn” here.

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Jeremy Brecher: Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual

Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual – Jeremy Brecher – PM Press – Paperback – 978-1-62963-385-5 – $12.95 – 128 pages – April 2017 – ebook versions available at lower prices.

For years leading up to the 2016 election, when Americans alarmingly voted (somehow) for a president who maintains the bizarre fiction that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese, we have been heavily propagandized and brainwashed by inaccurate and misleading information about climate science supplied by corporate financed sources. Only half of us believe that climate change is caused by human activities, something that scientists overwhelmingly recognize is true, based on actual data.

Still, millions of our fellow citizens do understand the danger to human life and our natural environment by human caused climate change. So many of us are searching for ways to make a real impact on the future through concrete actions. The scale and scope of what we face, and the impediments we face daily to rational thought and action are daunting and sometimes overwhelming.

We need tools – both to understand what is happening in our world, and to help us act positively to make change and to oppose those who seek to diminish and undermine our efforts.

Jeremy Brecher is a long time organizer and thinker about social change. He has been involved in environmental issues for almost thirty years. He puts much of what he has learned into Against Doom, this short but powerful book that I can recommend to any and all of us who want to join the global movement for change. What he calls “climate insurgency” is a strategy for using people power to realize our common interest in protecting the climate. It uses mass, global, nonviolent action to challenge the legitimacy of public and corporate officials who are perpetrating climate destruction. This may be our best hope for saving the planet and human civilization, while at the same time helping change that civilization for the better.

Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual provides guidance in how we can put this strategy into action and succeed. It’s an essential read now. Listen to my optimistic conversation with Jeremy and go buy this book!

Jeremy Brecher is the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements, including Save the Humans? Common Preservation in Action and the now-classic labor history Strike!, recently published in a revised fortieth anniversary edition by PM Press. He has been writing about climate protection since 1988, most recently in his book Climate Insurgency: A Strategy for Survival (2015). Jeremy is a cofounder of the Labor Network for Sustainability and lives in rural northwest Connecticut. Jeremy was arrested in the early White House sit-ins against the Keystone XL pipeline.

There are many organizations and websites working on climate change insurgency efforts. Visit Jeremy’s own site for a good introduction or go here for a list of reputable climate change nonprofit organizations you can work with.

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