The Beadworkers: Stories [Paperback]

Beth Piatote's luminous debut collection opens with a feast, grounding its stories in the landscapes and lifeworlds of the Native Northwest, exploring the inventive and unforgettable pattern of Native American life in the contemporary world

Told with humor, subtlety, and spareness, the mixed–genre works of Beth Piatote’s first collection find unifying themes in the strength of kinship, the pulse of longing, and the language of return.

A woman teaches her niece to make a pair of beaded earrings while ruminating on a fractured relationship. An eleven–year–old girl narrates the unfolding of the Fish Wars in the 1960s as her family is propelled to its front lines. In 1890, as tensions escalate at Wounded Knee, two young men at college—one French and the other Lakota—each contemplate a death in the family. In the final, haunting piece, a Nez Perce–Cayuse family is torn apart as they debate the fate of ancestral remains in a moving revision of the Greek tragedy Antigone.

Formally inventive and filled with vibrant characters, The Beadworkers draws on Indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life.Praise for The Beadworkers

Long–listed for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection
Long–listed for the 2020 Aspen Words Literary Prize
Shortlisted for the 2019 NCIBA Golden Poppy Book Award
Long–listed for the 2019 Northern California Golden Poppy Book Award in Fiction

The Native experience in Idaho, like in many other places, has been characterized by the land, the spirit of the people and the coming of white settlers.