That doesn’t seem like any kind of future to me.
I look back at the letter I hold, California scrawled in my mother’s hand, hastily, desperately.
Find me, Jane.
“Jane McKeene, what is it?” Katherine asks, her eyes wide with worry. I get the feeling it isn’t the first time she’s asked me.
I laugh, loud and long. “Oh, I am Fortune’s fool,” I say, knowing Katherine won’t get the reference. But the quote is too apropos.
I hold the letter up, feeling calmer and more focused than I have in weeks. I told the preacher that there would always be men like him, and people like me to stop them. And I meant it. After the trials and tribulations of Summerland, I know my life’s path: Stop the Survivalists and all those like them. I’m done running away from trouble. Why not meet it head-on?
Stopping the Survivalists. It’s a lofty goal, but I ain’t ever been one for half measures.
“Kate, we’re going to California.”
She gives me an incredulous look, but before she can ask any questions I’m striding toward Nicodemus, quickly enough that she has to scurry to keep up with me. My sickles are heavy at my side and my penny is a warm, comforting weight around my neck. For once I’m happy and I can’t help but smile.
It’s a good day to be alive.
Author’s Note
I felt I would be remiss to end this story without telling readers that the events in this book are based on actual historical occurrences. While zombies did not stalk the battlefields of Gettysburg, the United States did have a system in which Native American children were sent to boarding schools where they could learn to be “civilized.”
Beginning as early as 1860, whites would remove Native children from their homes and send them to boarding or industrial schools. The point of these schools was to destroy Native culture and force Natives to assimilate into white or European cultural norms. The most famous is the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, established in 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. I moved the timeline up a bit to account for Mr. Redfern’s education there, but its existence is real.
It is now Carlisle Barracks, a US Army post, and I first visited the base in 1999 and was amazed at the murals in the gym that depict Olympian Jim Thorpe, a Native American from the Sac and Fox Nation who attended the school at the turn of the century. I’d never heard of Native American boarding schools before then, and in the abstract it seemed like a pretty cool thing.
However, when I attended a master’s program at a nearby university some years later I was able to visit the Carlisle Historical Society and learn the truth about Indian schools and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in particular: how they broke up families, erased Native culture, victimized vulnerable children, and hired out students for backbreaking labor to nearby farms and households in a system that was eerily reminiscent of chattel slavery.
This exploitative school system became the basis for the fictional combat school system in the alternate historical timeline of Dread Nation. Because if well-meaning Americans could do such a thing to an already wholly subjugated community in a time of peace, what would they do in a time of desperation?
I encourage everyone to read further on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the American Indian boarding school system as a whole. I’m including a list of books I found helpful and that I have seen recommended by Native scholars, who most certainly know better than I:
Archuleta, Margaret L., Brenda J. Child, and K. Tsianina Lomawaima. Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences. Phoenix: Heard Museum, 2000.
Child, Brenda. Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940. Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2000.
Ellis, Clyde. To Change Them Forever: Indian Education at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893–1920. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
Hyer, Sally. One House, One Voice, One Heart: Native American Education at the Santa Fe Indian School. Albuquerque: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1990.
Happy reading.
Always,
Justina Ireland, 2018
About the Author
Photo by Eric Ireland
JUSTINA IRELAND is the author of the teen novels Vengeance Bound and Promise of Shadows. She enjoys dark chocolate and dark humor and is not too proud to admit that she’s still afraid of the dark. She lives with her husband, kid, and dog in Pennsylvania. You can visit her online at www.justinaireland.com.
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Copyright
Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
DREAD NATION. Copyright © 2018 by Justina Ireland. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether ele ctronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover photograph by Gustavo Marx/MergeLeft Reps Inc.
Cover design and hand lettering by David Curtis
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017943393
Digital Edition APRIL 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-257062-8
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-257060-4
18 19 20 21 22 PC/LSCH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
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