Joseph Bruchac
Joseph Bruchac lives with his wife, Carol, in the Adirondack mountain foothills town of Greenfield Center, New York, in the same house where his maternal grandparents raised him. Much of his writing draws on that land and his Abenaki ancestry. Although his American Indian heritage is only one part of an ethnic background that includes Slovak and English blood, those Native roots are the ones by which he has been most nourished. He, his younger sister Margaret, and his two grown sons, James and Jesse, continue to work extensively in projects involving the preservation of Abenaki culture, language and traditional Native skills, including performing traditional and contemporary Abenaki music with the Dawnland Singers.
He holds a B.A. from Cornell University, an M.A. in Literature and Creative Writing from Syracuse and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Union Institute of Ohio. His work as a educator includes eight years of directing a college program for Skidmore College inside a maximum security prison. With his wife, Carol, he is the founder and Co-Director of the Greenfield Review Literary Center and The Greenfield Review Press. He has edited a number of highly praised anthologies of contemporary poetry and fiction, including Songs from this Earth on Turtle's Back, Breaking Silence (winner of an American Book Award) and Returning the Gift. His poems, articles and stories have appeared in over 500 publications, from American Poetry Review, Cricket and Aboriginal Voices to National Geographic, Parabola and Smithsonian Magazine. He has authored more than 70 books for adults and children, including The First Strawberries, Keepers of the Earth (co-authored with Michael Caduto), Tell Me a Tale, When the Chenoo Howls (co-authored with his son, James), his autobiography Bowman's Store and such novels as Dawn Land, The Waters Between, Arrow Over the Door and The Heart of a Chief. Forthcoming titles include Squanto's Journey (Harcourt), a picture book, Sacajawea (Harcourt), an historical novel, Crazy Horse's Vision (Lee & Low), a picture book, and Pushing Up The Sky (Dial), a collection of plays for children. His honors include a Rockefeller Humanities fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship for Poetry, the Cherokee Nation Prose Award, the Knickerbocker Award, the Hope S. Dean Award for Notable Achievement in Children's Literature and both the 1998 Writer of the Year Award and the 1998 Storyteller of the Year Award from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. In 1999, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas.
As a professional teller of the traditional tales of the Adirondacks and the Native peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands, Joe Bruchac has performed widely in Europe and throughout the United States from Florida to Hawaii and has been featured at such events as the British Storytelling Festival and the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, Tennessee. He has been a storyteller-in-residence for Native American organizations and schools throughout the continent, including the Institute of Alaska Native Arts and the Onondaga Nation School. He discusses Native culture and his books and does storytelling programs at dozens of elementary and secondary schools each year as a visiting author.
“The old man must have stopped our car two dozen times to climb out and gather into his hands the small toads blinded by our lights and leaping, live drops of rain. The rain was falling, a mist about his white hair and I kept saying You can’t save them all accept it, get back in wev’e got places to go. But, leathery hands full of wet brown life knee deep in summer roadside grass, he just smiled and said They have places to go too.”
“If I've learned one thing in the last few days it is that every question does not need to be answered. A story is not true just because of it's literal veracity. It is the message, what it teaches, that counts.”
“A story is a burden which must be carried with as much care as we carry a sleeping child”
“Never think that war is a good thing, grandchildren. Though it may be necessary at times to defend our people, war is a sickness that must be cured. War is a time out of balance. When it is truly over, we must work to restore peace and sacred harmony once again.”
“Another of the hard things about being in a war, grandchildren, is that although there are times of quiet when the fighting has stopped, you know you will soon be fighting again. Those quiet times give you the chance to think about what has happened. Some of it you would rather not think about, as you remember the pain and the sorrow. You also have time to worry about what will happen when you go into battle again.”
“Kill every enemy twice, Wilky said. Better than gettin' shot by a soldier pretending to be dead.”
“If it wasn't for good," my mother says, "we human beings would have been wiped out a long time ago. Either the monsters would have gotten us or we would have killed each other off with greed and jealousy and anger. So we have to believe in good. We have to look for the good in ourselves.”
“The best teachers have shown me that things have to be done bit by bit. Nothing that means anything happens quickly - we only think it does.”
“Strong words outlast the paper they are written upon. ”
“We need to walk to know sacred places, those around us and those within. We need to walk to remember the songs.”
“Librarians. . . have been my lifelong friends, guides and heroes.”
“The best teachers have showed me that things have to be done bit by bit. Nothing that means anything happens quickly--we only think it does. The motion of drawing back a bow and sending an arrow straight into a target takes only a split second, but it is a skill many years in the making. So it is with a life, anyone's life. I may list things that might be described as my accomplishments in these few pages, but they are only shadows of the larger truth, fragments separated from the whole cycle of becoming. And if I can tell an old-time story now about a man who is walking about, waudjoset ndatlokugan, a forest lodge man, alesakamigwi udlagwedewugan, it is because I spent many years walking about myself, listening to voices that came not just from the people but from animals and trees and stones.”