Reviews for Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education

The average rating for Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-04-04 00:00:00 William Harmon Great anthology of stories - autobiographical, fictional, traditional - poems and other texts about growing up Native American. It's a strong reminder of how colonialist behavior by the US & Canada ( esp. the respective governments) against Native American was/is still present in the 20th century. At times the stories are post-colonial in a "writing-back" sense: Using the colonizers language (which in this case English is) to write of distinctly Native American (colonized) experience. More about my reading of the book at my blog.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-10-12 00:00:00 Jonathan Gianguzzo In many ways, this monograph is a terrible book even though it contains a great deal of useful information. Teasing out that information is damnably difficult,not least because Kidd does not present a properly organized narrative. Furthermore, he tries to bring far too much under the rubric of Protestantism--so wide an umbrella as to render the term useless. Sorry, Nation of Islam may have been influenced by American Protestantism, but it is manifestly NOT Protestantism. There are also points at which he conflates Protestantism with all of Christianity, which doesn't work either. He is correct in his assessment that Protestantism with its insistence on sola scripture, sola fidism, and priesthood of all believers ties itself up in knots over the issue of race (as defined by skin color); he is also correct that race is, from a biological standpoint, utter nonsense. What he tries and fails to do is chart a course of how we get from the beginnings of Protestantism to the current crop of right-wing racist & racialist nut jobs (without, of course, defining racist and racialist). And here's the worst part--his argument is so clearly teleological as to drive a reader insane. Nothing is inevitable, and nothing is a linear progression when discussing human history, nature, arrogance, and/or delusion.