Doubters and Dreamers

Description

“Doubters and Dreamers” opens with a question from a young girl faced with the spectacle of Indian effigies lynched and burned “in jest” before UC Berkeley’s annual Big Game against Stanford: “What’s a debacle| Mom?” This innocent but telling question marks the girl’s entree into the complicated knowledge of her heritage as a mixed-blood Native American of Koyangk’auwi (Concow) Maidu descent. The girl is a young Janice Gould| and the poems and narrations that follow constitute a remarkable work of sustained and courageous self-revelation| retracing the precarious emotional terrain of an adolescence shaped by a mother’s tough love and a growing consciousness of an ancestral and familial past.
In the first half of the book| “Tribal History|” Gould ingeniously repurposes the sonnet form to preserve the stories of her mother and aunt| who grew up when “muleback was the customary mode / of transport” and the “spirit world was present”–stories of “old ways” and places claimed in memory but lost in time. Elsewhere| she remembers her mother’s “ferocious| upright anger” and her unexpected tenderness (“Like a miracle| I was still her child”)| culminating in the profound expression of loss that is the poem “Our Mother’s Death.”
In the second half of the book| “It Was Raining|” Gould tells of the years of lonely self-making and “unfulfilled dreams” as she comes to terms with what she has been told are her “crazy longings” as a lesbian: “It’s been hammered into me / that I’ll be spurned / by a ‘real woman| ‘ / the only kind I like.” The writing here commemorates old loves and relationships in language that mingles hope and despair| doubt and devotion| veering at times into dreamlike moments of consciousness. One poem and vignette at a time| “Doubters and Dreamers” explores what it means to be a mixed-blood Native American who grew up urban| lesbian| and middle class in the West.