Hearing the Anishinaabe greeting, a smile fluttered at the corners of Alma’s compressed lips.
Asku nodded, his expression guarded.
Judge Baum cleared his throat.
“The defense would like to withdraw its plea,” Stewart said, his voice solemn and steady. “And enter instead a plea of guilty.”
The judge’s nostrils flared. “If this is a stunt to garner concessions from the prosecution—”
“It’s not, Your Honor. We’re not angling for a plea agreement.” Stewart looked at Asku, who again nodded. “We accept the charges as they stand.”
Relief washed over Alma, leaving a tender rawness in its wake. Her hands still trembled with anger. Everything had been taken from Asku. His life . . . his death was all he had left to give.
She listened for an aftershock of murmurs, but silence gutted the courtroom. Mr. Gates slumped down in his chair and hung his head. The prosecutor scratched a few notes onto his pad with a dull pencil.
Asku’s face bore no emotion, but the knotted muscles in his back relaxed and he stood a bit taller.
“I see your trip to the reservation yielded no results.” The judge spoke with a note of amusement.
Stewart’s hands flexed. His chest rose with a deep inhale, but he said nothing.
“Very well. Bailiff, dismiss the jury.” The twelve men scuttled from the room, and the judge continued. “Harry Muskrat, known in Indian as Ask-you-wheat-eo, the United States District Court of Minnesota accepts your guilty plea in the murder of Mr. Blair Andrews.” His gavel struck the desk. “On to sentencing.”
The prosecutor adjusted his spectacles and rose to his feet. “Considering the savage nature of the crime, the state requests a sentence of death by hanging.”
Though she’d been expecting it, each word had teeth like a blade. “Who are you to call the murder savage?” she shouted at the prosecution. “You sit there with your tidy suit and—” A clap from the gavel, and Alma swallowed her words. Even seated, she felt dizzy with rage and wondered at Asku’s unflinching composure.
“Does the defense wish to contest this?” Judge Baum asked.
Stewart’s hand opened upon the desk, his fingers brushing the bottom edge of the documents scattered before him. He drank in three slow breaths and again looked to Asku. The Indian shook his head. “No, Your Honor.”
“You have nothing for the court’s consideration? So be it. Will the defendant please stand?”
Asku rose.
“Harry Musk—”
“I would like to say some words, Your Honor.”
The judge pursed his lips. He had risen slightly from his chair, as if he intended to pound his gavel and scurry off to lunch with its echo still resounding. His eyes flickered to Alma and back. He sank back down and waved his hand. “Very well.”
Asku straightened. Gone was the boy of Alma’s remembrance, standing atop the bandstand, nervously clenching and unclenching his hands. Gone were his youthful visions of the future. Here was a man, worn yet proud.
“Nine years I attended Stover School for Indians and was educated in the ways of the white man. But all the education in the world could not change the color of my skin. I was not a white man and would never be treated as a white man. So I returned to my people. But even there I was an outcast for I no longer remembered the ways of the Indian. For years I lived a lonely life. A shadow life.” He paused. Anger lit his eyes, but his voice remained steady. Alma hid behind the wide brim of her hat and pressed her fingers like floodgates over her eyes as he continued. “Agent Andrews was a despot and a crook. I shot him so that I might have a place among my people. I am again one of them. I shall be hanged, and my Indian brothers will bury me a warrior.”
Muffled chatter erupted on the heels of his words. Mr. Raton shot to his feet, tugging down on his shiny silk waistcoat to keep the ends from furling over his round belly.
“Agent Andrews was no despot. He was upstanding in every—”
“Of that, sir, you are greatly mistaken.”
Alma had never heard her husband’s voice raised in such contempt. He too had quit his chair and stood brandishing his index finger at Mr. Raton. “I have evidence of usury, embezzlement, racketeering, corruption—”
The judge clamored for order. “The time for submitting evidence has passed, Mr. Mitchell.”
Stewart straightened and righted his bow tie. “I am well aware of that, Your Honor. I have no intention of making a submittal to this court.” He glowered over at Mr. Raton and Agent Taylor. “But I shall be releasing my findings to the Indian Affairs oversight committee in Washington and the local press.”
“Enough!” The judge banged his gavel and silence resumed.
Throughout the fray, Asku had remained a statue, standing face forward, his dark eyes locked in a diffuse gaze.
“If I may, Your Honor,” the prosecutor said. “The Indian’s speech only highlights his barbaric nature.”
“So it does . . .” Judge Baum smoothed a hand from mustache to chin, then turned to Asku. “Harry Muskrat, for the willful murder of Agent Blair Andrews, I sentence you to hang by the neck until you are dead.” His gavel rattled the windows a final time. “This court is adjourned.”
Alma sat breathless. Papers shuffled and the court’s various attendees rose. She clutched the edge of the bench and stared at the maple-slatted floor, trying not to vomit.
Asku’s voice came calm and somber. “Thank you, Mr. Mitchell.” Then, to her, “Miigwech, Azaadiins.”
She looked up and met the eyes of her friend. Something in them was renewed—not the hope and curiosity she had seen in them as a girl, but some of the spirit hitherto obscured.
She rose and grabbed his hand.
“Azaadiins?” Stewart said.
She smiled at her husband, though the expression was heavy to wear. “It’s the Indian name Asku gave me. It means little aspen tree.”
“Aspen tree?”
She gestured at her skin. “Their bark is white.”
The bailiff scuttled over and grabbed Asku’s arm. “Let’s go, Mr. Muskrat.”
Alma clasped his hand all the tighter, as if never to let go. Asku squeezed back, then gently pried his fingers from her grasp. “Not because of your fair skin,” he said as the bailiff led him away. “The aspen is a strong tree. A resilient tree. The first to grow back after fire has scarred the earth. For this reason, I named you Azaadiins.”
CHAPTER 45
Minnesota, 1906
From the train’s window, the Mizi-ziibi looked like a ribbon of black satin, a shade darker than the rest of the night-bathed landscape, but equally as tranquil. For several hours they had rocked along, mirroring the great river’s bend and sway; then the tracks veered east. Alma craned her neck and watched the smooth water vanish from sight. For a moment, her gaze lingered, searching the receding darkness for a final glimpse. Her breath made clouds across the window. She rubbed them away with the sleeve of her nightshirt and at last turned away.
Stewart lay beside her in their sleeper car, the rise and fall of his breath a gentle melody played in time with the hum of the train. She tried not to think of another train, one racing northward, carrying the body of her friend.
He had died with the same dignity with which he had lived; brave Asku, who as a boy was the first to leap down from the wagon into a new world. Before the execution, Alma had brought him fresh clothes laundered with crushed pine needles so that it might remind him of home. She stood beyond the bars of his cell, her entire body heavy, searching for the Anishinaabemowin word for goodbye. It did not come. Instead, she kissed him on the cheek, flashed her bravest smile, and left him to change.
Outside, brown grass and dried leaves crunched beneath her feet. A single line of chairs stood before the gallows. She sat down beside Stewart and squeezed his hand until her fingers went numb. It was quiet on the parade ground, even as Asku ascended the wooden steps to the platform. But in her mind, Alma heard drumming—hands thumping hollowed
logs and upturned pots stolen from Mrs. Simms’s kitchen. Stomping feet echoed the drumbeat. Frederick’s voice cut in and then Minowe’s clear soprano.
She glanced up at Asku. His dark eyes met hers for a final time and she knew he heard them, too, the drums, breaking through the silence.
More drums would sound tonight at White Earth during the Mide-wiwin funeral ceremony. The northward train carrying his body had probably already pulled into the Detroit Lakes station. Part of her longed to be there, to hear the Mide’s chants guiding Asku to the Land of Souls, to keep vigil over his body beside Minowe and the others in the birch bark lodge and later at the grave. But that was not her world.
She lay down beside her husband. He turned toward her in his sleep and she welcomed his warm breath against her skin. Her arm wound around his head and she twirled her fingers through his soft sand-brown hair. For once, she felt entirely free to love him, to enjoy their happiness together without guilt’s nagging prick.
Her eyelids drooped with the train’s sway. The well-oiled gears and spinning wheels sang out a lullaby. In this bleary half sleep, a memory floated across her mind—she and Asku at the train depot in La Crosse before he had left for Brown.
“I hate goodbyes,” she’d said after kissing him on the cheek. Tears sprang in her eyes and drained down her face.
He swept his thumb over her wet cheekbone. “The Anishinaabe have no word for goodbye.”
“What do you say in parting?”
“You see life as a straight line. But for us, life is a circle. After something or someone enters our circle, they travel with us forever, influencing us even if they are not physically present. To us, there is no such thing as goodbye.”
Once again water filled her eyes as Asku’s voice became an echo in her thoughts. But unlike those tears shed at the La Crosse depot or beneath the torch-lit elder tree, these bore not the ache of misery but the salve of long-awaited peace.
She looked out the train window again. A ribbon of color rippled across the black of the horizon. She smiled, remembering the Anishinaabe believed that the sinuous colors were the spirits of the dead dancing through the sky. Tonight Askuwheteau danced with them, beside and , beside his brave and intrepid forebears whose great imprint on the earth could never be learned away.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
While Between Earth and Sky is cast with fictitious characters, the historical events underpinning the story are true. Beginning in the late 1870s, several off-reservation Indian boarding schools were established across the United States and, until the 1930s, operated in much the same manner as portrayed herein. Stover School for Indians is a fictional amalgamation of these schools, patterned after historical accounts. Other locations in the novel—La Crosse, White Earth, etc.—though sketched with an eye toward authenticity, are used fictitiously. The massacre at Wounded Knee, the Dawes and Nelson acts, the exploitation of Upper Midwest Tribes’ land and timber rights are all part of recorded, though oft-forgotten, history.
The circumstances of Askuwheteau’s life after leaving Stover were inspired, in part, by the real-life experiences of a Lakota man named Tasunka Ota. An attendee of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the 1880s, he shot U.S. Army Lieutenant Edward Casey in the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre. During his trial, he cited his time at Carlisle and his desire to be reunified with his people as impetus for the killing. Ultimately, he was acquitted and returned home to the Rosebud Reservation. My hope in writing this story is to bring to light his struggle and those of the many Native American children whose lives were damaged or destroyed in the name of assimilation.
* * *
The curious reader may enjoy the following texts, many of which were instrumental in my research: Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, edited by Margaret L. Archuleta, Brenda J. Child, and K. Tsianina Lomawaima; Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928, by David Wallace Adams; My People the Sioux, by Luther Standing Bear; The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic, by John Demos; The Struggle for Self-Determination: History of Menominee Indians since 1854, by David R. M. Beck; Wisconsin Indian Literature: Anthology of Native Voices, edited by Kathleen Tigerman; Living Our Language: Ojibwe Tales and Oral Histories, edited by Anton Treuer; The Mishomis Book, by Edward Benton-Banai; The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889–1920, by Melissa L. Meyer; Rez Life, by David Treuer; and In the Shadow of Wounded Knee: The Untold Final Chapter of the Indian Wars, by Roger L. Di Silvestro.
* * *
Tragically, today many Native American languages face extinction, due in no small part to the boarding schools, day schools, and mission schools established at the turn of the last century. Some, however, like Anishinaabemowin, are enjoying a revitalization, thanks to the tribe’s careful stewardship. In writing this novel, I made every effort to render the Native American languages accurately, employing the help of native speakers, dictionaries, ethnological surveys, recorded tales, and oral histories. All errors are my own, and for any such occurrences I sincerely apologize.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Anishinaabe Midewinin tradition reminds us that humans are but a small part of the ishpiming, the greater universe. So too am I but one part of this story’s transformation from flickering idea to published novel.
Many thanks to my agent, Michael Carr, for believing in both me and the story, and finding us a home at Kensington. To my editor, John Scognamiglio, whose wisdom and commitment helped Between Earth and Sky achieve its highest potential. To Kristine Mills for the book’s beautiful cover, Paula Reedy, the production editor, Sheila Higgins, the copy editor, and the entire Kensington team. Your hard work is deeply appreciated.
Miigwech to Dennis Jones for aiding me with the Ojibwe translations and Randy Cornelius for his help with the Oneida. To Joe Bauer and Robert Itnyre for their woodshop expertise. To Jay Jorgensen, Alex Ip, and Gayle Nathan for advice pertaining to the trial.
To my early readers: Kasandra O’Malia, Kristin Spear, Colleen Morton Busch, John Jorgensen, Christina Salmon, and the Henderson Writers’ Group. Special thanks to Heather Webb, an amazing mentor; Pam Harris, editor extraordinaire; and my faithful A-group, who not only read and reread, but who encouraged and believed: April Khaito, Alyssa Shrout, Angelina Hill, and Jenny Ballif.
Finally, to my ever-supportive, ever-loving family. My mother-in-law, Alice, who sparked my interest in this era of history and challenged me to see the world through eyes other than my own. And to my husband, Steven, the greatest man I know. Thank you.
A READING GROUP GUIDE
BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY
Amanda Skenandore
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The suggested questions are included to enhance
your group’s reading of Amanda Skenandore’s
Between Earth and Sky!
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. When the story opens and Alma first meets the Indian children, she realizes they look nothing like the “strange and fearsome” drawings in her father’s old color-plate books. In what ways do we continue to exoticize Native Americans and their cultures today?
2. Colonel Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, famously said, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” In what ways does Stover embody this principle?
3. When Alma first meets Asku in his prison cell, she defends her father’s actions at Stover saying that he “meant well.” Do you agree? Are his good intentions enough to exonerate him?
4. Consider Asku and perceptions of Stover and the changing world at large. calls Asku “the white man’s pet,” while Asku maintains lives in the past. Who was right? In the end, did either perspective serve them?
5. describes his and Alma’s worlds as being “like the sky and earth . . . They get very close, but never touch.” To Alma, they share the same world. Who was right? How does this relate to the title of the
book?
6. Several types of love are portrayed in the novel—familial love, the platonic love of friendship, as well as romantic love. Consider the impetuous, consuming love Alma felt for and the more staid love she felt for Stewart. Which, if either, was stronger? If had lived, would his and Alma’s love have endured the racial hardships of the day?
7. Names play an important role in the story, mirroring the way the Indian children are forced to straddle two different cultures. Was it difficult to keep track of characters’ names? In the end, Asku reveals why he gave Alma the name Azaadiins. Do you think it a fitting name for her?
8. Alma begins the novel convinced that proving Asku innocent will be easy and reinforce her notion that Stover was an “imperfect means toward a perfect end.” Why does she cling to this idyllic conception? How is her understanding altered through the course of the novel?
9. When Minowe first learns of Alma’s love for , she calls Alma giiwanaadizi—crazy. Why is this her reaction? Did you foresee her larger motives as she later describes them to Alma, saying, “You stole everything! . . . I couldn’t let you steal him, too.” As girls, why did neither notice the other’s affection for ? Is their friendship healed in the end?
10. What did you think of Alma’s father’s reaction to her plans to marry ? Did it surprise you?
11. Midway through the novel Alma thinks back to visiting her father’s gravesite and wishes “she’d left the flower to decorate his grave.” Do you think Alma fully forgave him for what happened to ? Would you have forgiven him?
12. In 1891, a Lakota man named Tasunka Ota (Plenty Horses), who had spent several years at the Carlisle School, killed a U.S. Army Lieutenant in the wake of the Wounded Knee Massacre. During his trial he stated, “I shot the lieutenant so I might make a place for myself among my people.” In the story, Asku’s rationale closely mirrors that of Plenty Horses’s. What led Asku to feel this way? Do you think his actions were justified?
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