The central characters in ACNH are young women, Wazhazhe (Osage tribe), both involved with and running from (or wanting to) history, broadly speaking, and men, narrowly speaking. They are unsettled temporally and, often, existentially. In creating stories about these women, Hicks is writing a literature of belonging for a new generation of indigenous youth, one that places a high importance on reclaiming indigenous language - there is much Wazhazhe ie (the Osage language) included - and that rejects old-fashioned notions of what makes one “Native” that may be held by both natives and non-natives alike, such as percentage of native ancestry one possesses, aka, blood quantum.

The first story, Tsexope, brings the language aspect straight into play, having a brief conversation between two characters in Wazhazhe ie on the fourth page of the book, untranslated but understandable through context.

”Hi^tse thuza ma^thi^. Do^pa dada^ othatse thaishe?”
“Dada^ a^thatse da^kadxai?”
“Are you asking me to dinner?” I said. We smiled at my mistake of switching to English, and our ability to understand each other.

The reader themselves has to smile at the “mistake of switching to English” line, which both points to Hicks’ concern for the necessity of indigenous language revival, and the de facto necessity that English has made of itself through a history of colonialism.

The second story, A Fresh Start, centers on a blended family in 1956 Oklahoma. Florence’s son Roy has just arrived from out of state with his new wife and announced a pregnancy. He wants to use the news to pry from his mother information about their racial background, specifics of which she had been unwilling to get into, though clearly the family identifies as “Indian”. It works, sort of.

”Mother, my wife might like to know. Just how Indian will the baby be?”

“If you’re asking about the baby’s blood quantum, my mother was a quarter-blood, my echo is a quarter-blood, her echo was a half-breed, and her echo was the daughter of Chief Pawhuska. He’s Indian, and any children you have will be Indian.”

The third story, By Alcatraz, perhaps the best of the lot, takes place at an off-campus apartment among students who know enough to gather for a “Friendsgiving” rather than a Thanksgiving, but whose host still failed to realize the classmate he invited over is indigenous, as she didn’t seem to look it (“Sorry, I didn’t realize you were Indian. I mean, Native,” he fumbles. “What did you think I was?” “Uh, mixed?”). Meeting his roommates, she reflects on how physical appearance is used to signal identity, a method that just doesn’t work for her.

She couldn’t guess the race of her interlocutor by phenotype, but many tiny braids signal that she’s in the category of Black, which makes Mary think that she should be doing something more in the way of presentation to signal that she is Native. But what can she do that isn’t totally offensive to herself? If she wore her hair in a left side part with a silk bow, that would be Wazhazhe, but no one would know. Or she could be like 1920s Wazhazhe people wanting to be recognizable to I^shdaxi^, wearing beaded headbands over her forehead in the popular stereotype of the time. Those old photos always bothered her, and she stares at her bare feet.

I didn’t mean to give a story-by-story rundown here, but these first three seem to do a fine job of getting at the themes present throughout the collection, and are representative of its quality. “A Fresh Start” and “By Alcatraz” I thought were quite good, as are most of the following stories. “Tsexope” is one of a couple that didn’t work for me or didn’t seem to be completely formed yet; sometimes the crackling ideas outpace the craft. But this is a debut collection so not entirely unexpected, and it is certainly a promising lead in to the debut novel she says is in the works and which I look forward to becoming available. ( )

The author writes of Osages moving home, some who never left and about the conflicts between. Written first in indigenous languages first and then translated.. Short stories