"Blonde Indian" Author Visits Hoonah

A month ago I finished reading "Blonde Indian," a memoir that was “Book-of-the-Month” for the Hoonah Book Club. It was an interesting read for me. I had a love/hate relationship with this piece. The structure was confusing and some stylistic choices and poetic license were bothersome. The redeeming factors of the book for me were the detailed descriptions of the Alaskan landscape, parts of the history and her personal journey.

Hoonah’s English teacher invited the author, Earnestine Hayes, over to work with her students for a week. Wednesday evening, I and other Book Club members sat with the Earnestine to discuss her memoir.

The first questions pertained to the process of publishing her book, if she had an agent and how much money she makes being a published author. Finding a publisher was difficult. She felt she was lucky when University Press of Arizona decided to publish her manuscript. One problem she found with University Press is that because they don’t publish with the sole purpose to make money, they don’t set up book signings or market the book. Yet on the bright side, twenty years from now her book will still be on their reading list, where as with other publishers it may have been long forgotten.

From the time they signed a contract to the publishing date totaled three years, which she said is quick in the publishing world. After the initial publishing in 2006, her book went on to win some awards. It was at this point she began to look for an agent. Thirty letters were sent to agents. She received one reply and after a brief conversation no further contact was made. Ms. Hayes even sent her book to Oprah, twice. No reply there either. She gave up on Oprah and signing with an agent and instead focused her efforts on her teaching job at the University of Alaska Southeast.

The first year the book came out she made $1500.00, the second year less than $500 and this year, she laughs, she may have to pay them. She makes seventy cents per $16.99 book. She had no input on the design of the cover. The small inset picture is her, but the harbor is a photo from Cordova, Alaska and the mountains in the background are a composite created by a graphic artist.

She began writing during her time in San Francisco staying at the St. Anthony’s Women’s Shelter in 1985. She still has the rough brown paper towel that she took from the bathroom and began to scribble down descriptions of the women she was living with.
She preaches to her students that they should keep a journal and write everyday, but she doesn’t follow her own advice and never journals. There was only one time when she felt a voice of a character speaking to her. One morning she woke up and as clear as the sunshine, Old Tom was telling his story and she grabbed a pad of paper and pen to write it down as fast as she could. She feels that stories have spirits and authors are just vehicles to allow those spirits to live on. Many parts of her book she doesn’t feel she made up, but rather were given to her to pass on.

The book has five different sections that were “braided” together: “bear and salmon,” “lady in the woods,” Indian history, archetypical characters named Old Tom and Young Tom, “land” and her personal story. The content of the book was a conglomeration of assignments composed during her undergraduate and master’s degree studies and literally “squashed” together for her graduate “book length” graduate thesis. I learned that one assignment was even a theater piece. Although the book went through several revisions and workshops, this could be why the structure of the memoir was so frustrating to me…she jumped all over the place and repeated words and ideas that didn’t seem stylistically appropriate. It just felt odd.

Before the evening ended, Earnestine gave an insight to what she feels about the state of the Indian population today. She referenced a story from the Chookanedi people, which were thought to have been the first clan to settle in this area. It is of a time long ago when a great glacier moved and forced the Chookanedi people to evacuate and relocate to Juneau, Hoonah territory. In the tale a grandmother chooses to stay behind as sacrifice to the glacier so that future generations may live in prosperity. (These stories are highly protected and are not to be retold in their entirety without permission from Indian elders. The complete story as to why the glacier moved and forced Chookanedi people to relocate is in her book.) Earnestine believes that what has happen to the Indian people is cultural trauma. With all the characteristics of clinical individual trauma: depression, alcohol abuse, inability to work, and denial, but on scale that has affected the entire culture. Ms. Hayes thinks that like the grandmother of thousands of years ago the first generations of Indians are baring the brunt of the “great white glacier” or the invasion of Euro-Causation influence in their world. They have suffered through their language being taken away, severe alcoholism, family split up and children sent to boarding schools, religious persecution and near annihilation of their rituals and customs. Ernestine believes that with each generation Native American Indians are getting stronger and are able to adapt even better then their forefathers. She believes that these past generations are heroes who paid with their lives so that their children could thrive in a new land.