In the introduction to her collection, River of Bones, Rebecca Roanhorse asks the questions, “What do we owe our ancestors, what do we owe our history, and what do we owe ourselves?”
Impossibly big questions that thread a relationship between historical obligation, love, and retribution. Not only does Roanhorse not shy away from analyzing the complexity of characterizing what it means to be made a stranger in one’s own home, but she does it with a flexibility that efficiently portals the reader between subgenres, centering character arcs at the heart of her work. This comes across in “Welcome to your Authentic Indian ExperienceTM,” which has become one of Roanhorse’s most publicly recognized stories. Roanhorse explores the historically cyclical encounter of colonization from several different angles, including the visitor-(settler) asking the person from the culture they are about to dispossess to perform their culture before it is completely taken from them.
“A Harvest of Beating Hearts,” the second story in River of Bones is curious about the ways love invites us into the exploration of our anger. Wherein “Abigail Fields Recalls Her First Death, and, Subsequently, Her Best Life,” follows up with a fast-paced action sequenced story of a Black Native girl given a second chance at life by the desert spirits who she calls on to avenge her people killed by a white man.
A plant rooted in survival threads its way throughout this collection, not only emphasizing the decisions we make to survive, but also the grief in the loss that inevitably travels with survival. Roanhorse takes a writer’s scalpel to look for the pieces that are vanished in the process of surviving cultural, societal, and personal apocalypses. In “White Hills,” Roanhorse interprets Toni Morrison’s quote, “Sometimes you don’t survive whole, sometimes you survive in part…” quite literally when the protagonist is asked to give up a piece of her body in order to maintain the privileges she has been given access to because of her proximity to whiteness.
Nina Simone once said, “The role of the artist is to reflect the times,” and Rebecca Roanhorse reflects a full range of contemporary human sensibilities, acknowledging the subjectivity of morality, so the good, the bad and the ugly all are wrapped up into the possibilities of every person. Desire breeds obsession, love shields and protects what is vulnerable, while the cunningness that survival requires, asks us to be more curious than afraid of our own anger. Roanhorse does not imagine worlds where characters can fall neatly into any one category about anything.
Instead, lonely queer boys can summon the dead to save them, discontented women kill for their sapphic love, the monster-eater can and does become the monster, and spirits of the desert are on the side of the dispossessed, swallowing whole the dispossessor.
There is the story the people are given about the nation and there is the truth, scattered and fragmented at the site of its attempted destruction. Roanhorse, through insisting on the living of her Black and Native often Queer characters offers a counter-telling of the stories that relied on erasure to protect those in power. Dark fantasy and horror become a tool to depict the undercurrent of a country whose origins are founded on slavery and genocide.
“A Brief Lesson in Native American Astronomy” examines the objectification of women’s bodies with a body horror haunting that reflects the ghost of history sweeping through the relationships and world building of this collection. “Falling Bodies”, while taking place in a far future where Earth has been colonized by aliens, goes back in time to invoke the failed experiment of living side by side with one’s captors.
“River of Bones,” the title story which also happens to follow the second book in Roanhorse’s Sixth World series, closes out the reader out with a riveting eco-love story. The reader is invited to follow Kai and Maggie as they find their way back to each other in the midst of fighting for their lives, and their autonomy. This novella offers a delightful conclusion to an incredibly versatile collection.The last story is one that could not feel more timely in its solidifying the collection’s invitation into living and loving through the collapse of a political worldbuilding, while holding onto the most intimate experiences of grief, desire, heartbreak, and with the insistence on an unyielding spirit, hope.
