Kensington
Featuring: Harry Muskrat; Stewart Mitchell; Alma Mitchell
316 pages ISBN: 1496713664 EAN: 9781496713667 Kindle: B074DH9537 Paperback / e-Book Add to Wish List
A child sees a truckload of young children arrive at her
school. These are not playmates; they are Indian children
from the reservation, and her missionary parents intend to
teach them. The year is 1881 and the location Wisconsin,
and neither young Alma nor the newcomers are allowed to
talk back to their elders. Alma questions the changes
imposed on the Indian children, but is told "it's for their
own good."
BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY skips forward to Philadelphia of
1906, when one of the children, Harry Muskrat, has been
charged with murder. Alma, married to lawyer Stewart
Mitchell, reads about it in the newspaper and asks her
husband to make inquiries. She considers it likely that her
Indian friend has been framed.
Reading about the callous handling of the Chippewa children
is unsettling; we know it would not happen nowadays, and at
least the boys and girls were not given infections nor
starved. But stuffing a child's mouth with lye soap? Some
readers may find these scenes distressing, as Alma did;
Alma herself is treated little better. Small wonder that
the lonely, curious girl enters the secret world of her
classmates outside school. This part I did enjoy.
Stewart seems like a sensible, forbearing man. I am just
surprised that he didn't know about checking his lame
horse's hoof for stones as this would surely have been
common knowledge. Other details are pressed like flowers in
the pages of this book, preserving customs and aspects of
life, intricately researched. We see many words of Native
languages, inquire about land allotments, and peer around
corners of neglected old forts. The author Amanda
Skenandore tells us that she based her tale on historical
cases, amalgamated and fictionalized.
Gentle Alma is easy to like and admire, a woman of her time
throughout, revealed as still somewhat naïve when adult.
BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY would be a useful read for book clubs
and can be seen to relate to issues of environmental
despoliation today. We need to learn from lessons of the
past, not blot them out, and some readers will undoubtedly
be unfamiliar with aspects of the history which is the
backdrop for the actors. I admire Amanda Skenandore for her
careful research and skillful writing.
In Amanda Skenandore’s provocative and profoundly
moving debut, set in the tragic intersection between white
and Native American culture, a young girl learns about
friendship, betrayal, and the sacrifices made in the name of
belonging.
On a quiet Philadelphia morning in 1906, a newspaper
headline catapults Alma Mitchell back to her past. A federal
agent is dead, and the murder suspect is Alma’s childhood
friend, Harry Muskrat. Harry—or Asku, as Alma knew him—was
the most promising student at the “savage-taming” boarding
school run by her father, where Alma was the only white
pupil. Created in the wake of the Indian Wars, the Stover
School was intended to assimilate the children of
neighboring reservations. Instead, it robbed them of
everything they’d known—language, customs, even their
names—and left a heartbreaking legacy in its wake.
The bright, courageous boy Alma knew could never have
murdered anyone. But she barely recognizes the man Asku has
become, cold and embittered at being an outcast in the white
world and a ghost in his own. Her lawyer husband, Stewart,
reluctantly agrees to help defend Asku for Alma’s sake. To
do so, Alma must revisit the painful secrets she has kept
hidden from everyone—especially Stewart.
Told in compelling narratives that alternate between Alma’s
childhood and her present life, Between Earth and Sky
is a haunting and complex story of love and loss, as a quest
for justice becomes a journey toward understanding and,
ultimately, atonement.
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