Malian learns about the US government’s resistance when, as COVID worsened and spread, the reservation police closed roads into the reservation to those not living in the reservation, who were just using the road as a short cut. A teacher reading this book aloud might want to point out the similarity to what happened to Hispanic women in detention camps, where they visited the doctor and ended up sterilized. She was adopted by a wonderful couple who helped her find her birth parents and took her to visit them, so she was able to establish a relationship with them.īruchac also informs us about the forced sterilization that many Native women underwent when they went to a free clinic for a health care screening and woke up no longer able to have children. (Read more about what an Indian School was in Bruchac’s gripping historical fiction “ Two Roads,”) Her mother, also was ripped from her parents’ arms and sent into foster care.
He growls at the unfriendly woman from Social Services-the government-who wants to check Malian’s living conditions to make sure they are “appropriate.” In this story, Bruchac shares that many generations of Native Americans were torn from their families, and in this novel, we learn that Malian’s grandfather was taken away and sent to an Indian School. He barks at the mailman, making the coughing man (COVID?) keep his distance instead of approaching the house to get a signature from one of her grandparents for a package. Malsum becomes more than just a companion to Malian (a name that is pronounced Maryann), he becomes her protector. She names the dog Malsum, which is wolf in the native language that her parents and grandparents keep alive for her-in spite of the best efforts of the American government to eradicate both the language and their tribal traditions. When Malian wakes up one morning, a dog is outside her door, just as she had dreamed.
All this in Bruchac’s evocative verse, succinct yet poetic and lovely. “Rez Dogs” by acclaimed author Joseph Bruchac is not only a timely story about life on the reservation during COVID, it’s also the story of a girl and her dog, as well as a brief overview of the history of the government’s treatment of Native people even recently.
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