Word: northerners
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...Siberia is rougher around the edges. The precipitating horror--the narrator's grandfather hangs himself--creates a strangely shallow impression. But what the story lacks in polish, it makes up for in mood. Reading a Petterson novel is like falling into a northern landscape painting--all shafts of light and clear, palpable chill. The narrator and her brother Jesper grow up in this setting, on a farm in Denmark in the 1930s. Distant from their parents, they find happiness in each other, and as the narrator grows from tagalong sister to adolescent, Petterson gives their relationship a delicate physical dimension...
...winning joke is from a 12-year-old Northern Cheyenne boy: "Three men are riding in a pickup--two in the cab, one in back. The truck falls into the river. The two men open their doors and swim out but can't find the third man. Finally, he comes up. 'What took you so long?' they ask. 'I couldn't open the tailgate,' he says...
...bright spot is Chief Dull Knife College, named for a Northern Cheyenne hero and fervent advocate for education. It and 36 other tribal colleges and universities, with a total of about 27,000 students, are a little-known part of American higher education. Like the other colleges, Chief Dull Knife was founded in the 1970s in protest over the curriculums that white institutions offered. "There was no connection with the reality at home," says its president, Richard E. Littlebear. The Indian students often had to endure racial cruelty too. "They called us 'prairie niggers,'" recalls...
Courses at Chief Dull Knife are similar to those at any community college--English, history, math--but with a unique Northern Cheyenne flavor. Reading includes books like Cheyenne Autumn, a highly praised 1953 novel about the tribe's 1878-79 return to Montana after exile in Oklahoma. History classes teach America as experienced by both whites and Native Americans. Part of the curriculum is devoted to Northern Cheyenne culture and its complex language, which is still spoken by a few elders but almost no students. For decades, reservation schools were strictly English-only. The chairman of the Dull Knife board...
...Cheyenne; he teaches evening courses in it. He refers to tribal colleges as "underfunded miracles." With a meager $4.9 million budget provided mostly by the Federal Government, his school operates on a thin shoestring indeed. But Chief Dull Knife College perseveres, holding out hope for a new generation of Northern Cheyennes. More than half its graduates now go on to four-year schools. One of them is Jennifer Wooden Legs, 29, daughter of the college-board chairman, whose academic career was postponed by five horrific years of meth addiction. ("Very awful stuff, very hard to get over," she says.) Jennifer...