Tyler Hill couldn’t find a children’s book about Native American kids playing lacrosse to read to his three children at bedtime. So he wrote one himself.
“Wormburner” follows the story of Canoe, a 10-year-old American Indian boy whose life revolves around lacrosse. The title comes from a type of quick, targeted lacrosse throw in which the ball is whipped just above the surface of the ground.
“I wanted something I could read to my kids — something they would identify with and be proud to hear,” Hill said. A member of the Mohawk Nation, Hill has also written about Native Americans and lacrosse in short film scripts; a non-fiction book about the sport is in the works.
Hill, who lives in North Syracuse, New York, and grew up nearby on the Onondaga Nation, is one of 14 authors from upstate New York participating in the Oñgwaga•ä’ Writers’ Workshop; “Oñgwaga•ä'” is Haudenosaunee for “our story.” Cornell’s Center for Cultural Humility is holding free weekly virtual workshop sessions through Oct. 24 to highlight the work of Native American writers and help them cultivate the skills to improve and distribute their projects. Each of the seven sessions is taught by Cornell staff, faculty members and graduate students, most in the Department of English Literature in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Topics range from imagery and writing exercises to poetry, memoir and the publishing process. In the first session, Joanie Mackowski, associate professor of English literature (A&S), asked authors to describe a scene without using descriptive words.
“It really opened things up for me,” said Hill, who turned a dream about a beam of light in outer space into a poem. “Those things you would never create without the help of the professors – I love it.”
In a recent session, Ernesto Quiñonez, associate professor of English literature (A&S), encouraged students to “steal” from archetypal plots and characters and put their own literary stamp on them. Writers have always done this, he said, citing many films, novels and poems.
For example: The plot of “Wuthering Heights” also appears in “The Great Gatsby”, which in turn was inspired by Petronius’ “Satyricon”. And Vladimir Nabokov, who was a professor of Russian literature at Cornell from 1948-59, drew on Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee” to create the title character of his 1955 novel, “Lolita,” Quiñonez said. .
“When does stealing characters and plots cross the line into copyright infringement?” asked one participant.
“A lot of these plots are archetypes, so it’s very hard to say, ‘Oh, this is it [F. Scott] Fitzgerald’s plot’ – boy meets girl, boy loses girl because he’s poor, boy makes a fortune and wins girl, – replied Quiñonez. “She [the plot] also occurs in ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’. It’s everywhere.”
Quiñonez encouraged participants to reimagine classic characters and plots with their own voices, tastes, and experiences. “You take the characters you love who are not Native Americans and turn them into Native Americans. Change your character and there it is,” he said. “What about a ‘Notes from the Underground’ from Latin America? A ‘Notes from the Underground’ but Native American? That sounds interesting – let’s run with it.”
Writers try to make readers care about their characters, Quiñonez added. “And the more we put ourselves into these characters, the more interesting, I believe, they will be.”
Katherine Zaslavsky, a doctoral candidate in the graduate field of sociology, is acting as a mentor for the participants. Writers are incredibly gifted, she said, both in conceiving their work and crafting it in their own voices. “I do my best to create an environment that allows them the freedom and resources to do what they do best: write what they want.”
Common humanity
The workshop was created by Michelle Cronin, a children’s book author from Nedrow, New York, and the team at the Center for Cultural Humility. The collaboration began when Jerel Ezell, director of the center and assistant professor of General Internal Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, approached her about collaborating on the center’s programming.
“When I was in school, it was practically impossible for me to find books written by local authors. And unfortunately, that hasn’t changed much,” said Cronin, who is a member of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation. “So that was my main goal in starting this workshop: to encourage other Native voices, to share our stories, our experience, our knowledge.”
The workshop focuses on bringing communities to Cornell, rather than sending academics to communities, applying the center’s core principles of cultural responsiveness and cultural humility, said Natalie Gosnell ’23, a biological sciences major in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the center. community outreach coordinator. “We want to increase the representation of Indigenous authors, further promoting cultural responsiveness on a larger scale,” she said. “By creating environments in which both Indigenous writing participants and Cornell facilitators collaborate, we encourage dialogues that lead to deeper understandings within and between different cultures.”
Cronin is currently writing three children’s books. In one, adults repeatedly tell a Native American girl that she “doesn’t look Native American;” even so, she eventually finds beauty in her unique appearance. A second book describes the Great Law of Peace, the oral constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy, and the importance it places on treating others with care, respect, unity, and justice. The third tells the story of how lacrosse became a symbol of sovereignty for the Haudenosaunee Nation.
“We all know what stories do: They are windows and mirrors,” Cronin said. “They allow us to see people, cultures, places that we would probably never see. This is an amazing thing. And the mirror – it’s so important for everyone to see themselves in the story.”
As a participant, she says she appreciated the workshop as a forum for exchanging ideas. Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire, a PhD candidate in English literature, taught the participants about Ugandan writers who incorporate the natural world into their work and how writing about nature can set the tone for a story. “The natural world is so important to us as Native people,” Cronin said. “It was enlightening to see another culture that had that connection to the natural world.
Through the seminar, “we are connecting, we are seeing our similarities. We are understanding our differences,” she said. “But in the end, I always feel that writing allows us to see our common humanity.”
