Elders are precious to Indigenous peoples as carriers of truth. In a time of propaganda and deliberate "fake news," the truth of a people's history becomes increasingly essential. Indigenous people have always understood how his/stories are needed to continue traditions. During the years when tens of thousands Indigenous children were forced to attend boarding schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, powow songs encodes history from the indigenous perspective. This encryption evaded mainstream society and its censorship. Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez publishes with Scarlet Tanager Books a contemporary and equally essential testament to her personal, family, and community history in A Light to Do Shellwork By. The poems are songs and histories at once, and they encode a durable culture.
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