AMPERS
Diverse Radio for Minnesota's Communities
Two well-respected Anishinaabe writers and educators have started a new publishing company focused on Native stories. Tom and Betsy Peacock plan to publish stories from American Indian writers based in the Great Lakes region and the Dakotas.
They started the venture with assistance from The Minnesota Chippewa Tribe’s business development program and the Office of Native American Business Development in the U-S Department of Commerce.
Reporter Melissa Townsend has the details.
HOST INTRO:
Two well-respected Anishinaabe writers and educators have started a new publishing company focused on Native stories.
Tom and Betsy Peacock plan to publish stories from American Indian writers based in the Great Lakes region and the Dakotas.
Reporter Melissa Townsend has the details.
REPORTER: Way back early in his career as a writer and teacher, Tom Peacock was working with students at a small school on a reservation in northern Minnesota.
He says he remembers one particular 8 year old girl, and the poem she wrote.
PEACOCK: A poem called My Heart and it went like this: My heart - A bear eating blueberries. That’s the perfect description of a beating heart.
REPORTER: When I hear that I just think pure bliss - a bear eating blueberries.
PEACOCK: Yea, Yea. The imagery was so stunning and so beautiful that it’s always stuck with me.
REPORTER: Nearly 50 years later, Black Bears Eating Blueberries is the name of the publishing company Tom Peacock is starting with his wife Betsy.
Both are Anishinaabe - Tom is from Fond du Lac and Betsy is from Red Cliff - and both just retired as faculty from the Education Department at University of Minnesota, Duluth.
PEACOCK: When we retired we just had all this energy and I just saw this need as an educator to try to figure out a way to get accurate historical and cultural material to our young people.
REPORTER: Tom says they searched for other publishers in the United States focused on American Indians— and found none.
That means good Native writers are going unpublished and important Native stories are going untold.
Tom Peacock says there is power in getting those stories in the hands of young people.
PEACOCK: Adults read to young people so that knowledge will continue on for generations to come.
REPORTER:Tom says non-Natives can write about Native people but they lack authenticity.
PEACOCK: The ability to place yourself in a context that you have a good strong, basis of understanding. So for example, if you’re going to do a fictional story about a little Rez kid who decides to adopt a dog that doesn’t have a home, you can put yourself within the context of being there, within the Native community and what a rez dog might look like. And also for many native writers, it would be important to have a deeper understanding of culture if you are writing about cultural things.
REPORTER: When you talk about context - I’ve been thinking about the Scaffold sculpture at the Walker. A reporter reached out to me to ask if I knew anyone who would want to talk. I said I think I do but you have to keep in mind - nobody wants you to call and say hey - I need a quote on deadline, call me back — you really need to start from a completely different perspective. Right, because you are not going to get it all in a 15 second sound byte.
PEACOCK: Absolutely right — and there is a whole history especially for the Dakota people in this state that you know can only be gotten by speaking to Dakota people who understand the whole history of that period and everything that lead up it. So, yea, all of those layers of reality are part of that context.
REPORTER:Black Bears Eating Blueberries publishing company is a non-profit because Tom and Betsy don’t expect to make much money at this work.
PEACOCK: Things are so driven by market in the publication business. I published a text book with probably the largest publisher of text books in the world some years ago. And I came back to them with another idea for another text, and they just came right out and flatly told me, you know, the market for their potential sales is just too small that it doesn’t make sense, financially, to do anything.
REPORTER: Interesting. It strikes me as heartbreaking that people would get all these rejection letters not because they aren’t talented, they aren’t smart, they don’t have what it takes, but just because people don’t think there is an interest out there.
PEACOCK: And well some ideas just suck, how’s that [laughter!] I know that [laughter] Not everything you write can be a gem. [laughter]
REPORTER: The Peacocks are working hard to find those gems.
And Tom Peacock says they are fronting their own money and squeezing their wealthy friends in order to publish three books starting December 2017.
They are soliciting manuscripts — to get more information — check out their website blackbearsandblueberries.com
For Minnesota Native News, I’m Melissa Townsend.