TCJ Student, Fall 2018

“Crossroads” by Dennis C. Houle of United Tribes Technical College

Tribal College Journal presents the winning and honorable mention entries in the 2018 TCJ Student creative writing, art, and film contest. This year’s contest brought in scores of entries from tribal college and university (TCU) students from around Indian Country. Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Kimberly Blaeser (Anishinaabe), is serving as guest editor of TCJ Student, and selected the top entries in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

View all the content at TCJstudent.org.

Growing up on White Earth reservation, my brother, cousins, and I fed on stories. Mostly I mean that figuratively— with a wild hunger for stories, we chased them down and devoured them wherever we could. Around camp fires, in fish houses, over the kneading of bread dough we heard stories and a mixture of songs. Often the voices of aunties and uncles would fight one another to get the “true” accounts patched together like a crazy quilt. In the dark by kerosene lantern, our parents or older cousins would read aloud the back sections of The Farmer where spooky tales sometimes lurked amid the milder children’s poems and stories. Sometimes we listened through the heating vents for family gossip we weren’t meant to hear. We also gathered ourselves in attics where we dared one another to tear off, chew, and literally eat small pieces of paper from a trove of old magazines and then try out in our own voices the invention of story destinies. When I think of those years, I also remember the musty “old” smell of second hand books and the brittle yellowing of newspaper pages kept too long. I think the appetite for literature many of us would carry into our lives is a legacy passed to us by Minnesota winters and storytelling relatives. Read more.