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Two critically-praised works of fiction by Harold Burton Meyers in one volume-Geronimo’s Ponies (selected by Jane Smiley as Winner of the National Novella Award) and Reservations, a novel-that draw on the author’s upbringing on Navajo, Hopi and Zuni Indian reservations during the Great Depression, the son of U.S. Indian Service schoolteachers.
Both center on Will and Mary Parker and their son Davey. In Geronimo’s Ponies Mary’s brother Eph and the taciturn Mr. Smart descend on the Navajo Reservation to buy Indian horses being sold off in a Dust Bowl stock-reduction program, intending to sell them as saddle ponies to Texas children. Joining in their grandiose scheme, Davey leads parades in Amarillo and Wichita Falls and meets his boisterous Texas relatives, only to encounter complications that he seizes as opportunities to grow up.
In Reservations a vast landscape populated by memorable characters leaps to life: Davey and his parents, plus their colleagues, the Navajo and Zuni Indians they work for and with, including medicine men and policemen, and assorted traders, salesmen, hobos and tourists. The story dramatizes the fight within FDR’s Indian Service–under reformist Commission of Indian Affairs John Collier–between those like Davey’s parents who wish to bolster attendance at day schools, keeping Indian children within their own culture at home, and assimilationists intent on de-Indianizing them at boarding schools. In poignant, sharply-drawn episodes based on lived experience and created with literary force, Will Parker sponsors a bold experiment using schoolbuses to increase enrollment and Mary Parker mentors students and colleagues despite the harsh and unforgiving environment and opposition from all quarters.
Readers will find Geronimo’s Ponies and Reservations two of recent American fiction’s richest works.
