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Second Hand Books
Mar. 27th, 2009 04:23 pmI've been bad about this whole posting thing recently, but in my defense I have been scouring second-hand book shops and thus distracted by the noble cause of rescuing unloved books.
One of my purchases was an anthology called If I Were an Evil Overlord, which I bought because it has a Nina Kiriki Hoffman story. Nina Kiriki Hoffman wrote A Stir of Bones and A Fistful of Sky; her writing and characters are good but her grasp on plot shaky, so I'm curious to see how her short story works out. I haven't gotten to it yet - it's the last story in the anthology - but the first story does include the amusing line "The troll guard blinked, taken aback by his first confrontation with someone who had a more annoying speech pattern than himself," so that was worth the price of admission.
The other book I got is Ward Churchill's Kill the Indian, Save the Man, which is about boarding schools built for native children in Canada and America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. (This was evidently quite in vogue in the English speaking world at that time; Australia did a similar thing.)
As the title suggests, the schools were designed to brainwash the kids into WASP culture, and if that isn't quite bad enough they had a nasty tendency to kill not just the Indian but the man as well. Between the poor food, hard labor, and filthy conditions (these places were basically run as prison camps), diseases spread like wildfire and killed nearly 50% of the children. Add in the suicides, and the children who died trying to run home, and the percentage goes above 50%.
I was vaguely aware that these schools existed; I wasn't aware that the death toll was so high, or that they only closed down so recently. The last such school in Canada closed in 1984, and in the United States in 1990; and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (evidently unwilling to jeopardize its chance to tango in Hell), still refuses to admit to any fault.
*headdesk*
***
To cheer you up a bit after that: photographs of objects exploding after being hit by an air rifle pellet. I think my favorite one is the eleventh, the exploding M&Ms.
One of my purchases was an anthology called If I Were an Evil Overlord, which I bought because it has a Nina Kiriki Hoffman story. Nina Kiriki Hoffman wrote A Stir of Bones and A Fistful of Sky; her writing and characters are good but her grasp on plot shaky, so I'm curious to see how her short story works out. I haven't gotten to it yet - it's the last story in the anthology - but the first story does include the amusing line "The troll guard blinked, taken aback by his first confrontation with someone who had a more annoying speech pattern than himself," so that was worth the price of admission.
The other book I got is Ward Churchill's Kill the Indian, Save the Man, which is about boarding schools built for native children in Canada and America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. (This was evidently quite in vogue in the English speaking world at that time; Australia did a similar thing.)
As the title suggests, the schools were designed to brainwash the kids into WASP culture, and if that isn't quite bad enough they had a nasty tendency to kill not just the Indian but the man as well. Between the poor food, hard labor, and filthy conditions (these places were basically run as prison camps), diseases spread like wildfire and killed nearly 50% of the children. Add in the suicides, and the children who died trying to run home, and the percentage goes above 50%.
I was vaguely aware that these schools existed; I wasn't aware that the death toll was so high, or that they only closed down so recently. The last such school in Canada closed in 1984, and in the United States in 1990; and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (evidently unwilling to jeopardize its chance to tango in Hell), still refuses to admit to any fault.
*headdesk*
***
To cheer you up a bit after that: photographs of objects exploding after being hit by an air rifle pellet. I think my favorite one is the eleventh, the exploding M&Ms.
