Native Americans

In 1847 a group of Choctaw Indians collected $170 toward the relief of Ireland’s potato famine. This story is a fictionalized account of that little-known real event. Choona, now an old man, relates this story from his boyhood. Although 14-year-old Choona knew that his people had been forced to march from their homelands in Mississippi to Indian Territory, now the state of Oklahoma, the adults did not speak about this tragic event to their children. Then, during a tribal meeting, where the Choctaw meet to discuss sending relief to the Irish, Choona’s great-grandmother relates the terrible truth about the winter …

In this Byrd Baylor prose-poem classic, Indian children in the Southwest make a game of collecting pieces of ancient pottery and trying to fit the pieces together. Their parents remind them to treat the clay with respect because “every piece of clay is a piece of someone’s life” and every piece “has its own small voice and sings in its own way.” As the children carefully touch the pieces of clay, they listen for the songs they sing and think about the hands that shaped them. And as they examine the pottery’s designs, their imaginations conjure up details of the …