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The Forgetters is a story collection by Greg Sarris, chairman of the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria (Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok). This collection is a companion to his earlier story cycle How a Mountain Was Made: Stories. Both are centered on Sonoma Mountain, California. Both are framed by the crow sisters, Question Woman and Answer Woman sharing stories. I highly recommend both as works attempting to share Indigenous knowledge with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who have "forgotten the stories."

How a Mountain Was Made shares a set of stories inspired by traditional stories from the time when animals were people. The Forgetters foregrounds recent historical memory, with most stories set between the 1860s and 1960s. While How a Mountain Was Made exists in a sort of mystical reality (for want of a better expression), The Forgetters delves into the details of its historical setting, often invoking the dispossession, impoverishment (literally and culturally), and exploitation of Indigenous people reduced to working as day laborers or servants for the white settlers who have stolen and mangled their ancestral lands.

The story structure, however, echoes the earlier book, providing morally didactic stories on the overarching theme of people "forgetting" the lessons of how to live well with each other and the land. Individual stories take up themes such as greed, envy, ostracism, and subtler forgettings like lost humility and failure to comprehend another's needs (even in a very good, moderate people). Though centered on Indigenous experience, the text explicitly encompasses non-Indigenous people too, and they occasionally appear as protagonists.

The final story ventures into Indigenous futurism, depicting how stories continue on a Sonoma Mountain ravaged by climate catastrophe.

For me personally, the story that moved me most was (semi-coincidentally?) the one that centers a protagonist I take to be white (due to the absence to racially marked experience). The story concerns being a parent of an older adopted child, and for me as such a parent, it rang very true and brought (good) tears to my eyes.

I have been enjoying Drew Hayden Taylor’s Take Us to Your Chief and Other Stories (2016), a collection of short sci fi stories from a First Nations perspective. The collection includes a wide variety of stories, often with a sense of quirk but always with a sense of struggle, physical and psychological, at the continued colonization indigenous people live with and through. The stories are more about Native experience than science fiction concepts. The sci fi often forms a background or plot trigger for ruminations on life as a Native person in modern day Canada. Taylor explores a range of people’s perspectives, young and old, men and women, from various Tribal backgrounds.



For me, the standout story is “Lost in Space,” a near-ish future tale of a quarter-Anishinabe man working in space and his reflections on what it means to be indigenous—to come from roots inextricably tied to a particular land—when you are separated not only from that land but Earth itself. I read this story right after completing Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, which also treats, very differently, with the physical, psychological, and ecological dislocation that comes from trying to live away from Earth. Robinson’s story has very Western cultural roots, and I found myself wondering how indigenous experience might figure in this matrix. And here is Taylor with a piece of a reply: that it’s hard to imagine; it’s a whole other layer of separation.

The most thought-provoking story for me, however, may have been “I Am… Am I,” which discusses an AI whose search for personhood leads it to identifying with Native experience and ultimately to disillusion at the devastation of Native peoples. The story is entirely from the perspective of white people, the creators of the AI, and as a white reader, I found this fascinating. Taylor presents these white folks as… clueless? The most “woke” attitude seems to be, “Yes, bad stuff happened in the past.” (Not a direct quote.) That’s a pretty clear reflection of the ideology I was raised with in America in the 1980s. But today? My first thought was “Does he really think we’re that clueless?” And my second thought was “Are we really that clueless?” Judging by YouTube comments, yeah, yeah we are. There’s no shortage of white folks talking today about how Natives just need to stop “whining” about stuff that was over two hundred years ago. So yeah. It was interesting to read that characterization of whiteness, at once so stereotypical and so valid.

One theme across various stories, prominently including “I Am… Am I” and “Mr. Gizmo,” which features a sentient toy, is that everything has spirit or personhood or some sort of animate-ness. I love the emphasis on that perspective, and I hope it becomes far more pervasive across, well, the whole world. De-animating the world is probably the most harmful thing that Western civilization (with help from a few others) ever did to it.

Overall, I highly recommend this book for a quick, engaging read that focuses on contemporary First Nations experience. If you’re looking for “high concept” sci fi or far future, this may not be your cup of tea. If you’re looking for realistic psychological and cultural commentary, check it out.