A child of a typical 1950s suburb unearths her mother's hidden
heritage, launching a rich and magical exploration of her own identity
and her family's powerful Native American past.
"One day I realize that my entire back seat is filled with relatives who
wonder why I'm not paying more attention to their part of the family
story. . . . Sooner or later they all come up to the front seat and
whisper stories in my ear."
Growing up in the 1950s in suburban Minneapolis, Diane Wilson had a
family like everybody else's. Her Swedish American father was a salesman
at Sears and her mother drove her brothers to baseball practice and went
to parent-teacher conferences.
But in her thirties, Diane began to wonder why her mother didn't speak
of her past. So she traveled to South Dakota and Nebraska, searching out
records of her relatives through six generations, hungering to know
their stories. She began to write a haunting account of the lives of her
Dakota Indian family, based on research, to recreate their oral history
that was lost, or repressed, or simply set aside as gritty issues of
survival demanded attention.
Spirit Car is an exquisite counterpoint of memoir and carefully
researched fiction, a remarkable narrative that ties modern Minnesotans
to the trauma of the Dakota War. Wilson found her family's love and
humor--and she discovered just how deeply our identities are shaped by
the forces of history.
