In-depth Written Interview

Joseph Bruchac, interviewed in his upstate New York home on March 18, 2013.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You are a storyteller, musician, educator, writer, publisher, academic, and martial artist, and you have many other interests besides. What were you like as a child? Were you involved in the same sorts of things?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I was a very bookish and shy kid. I spent a lot of time in the woods and a lot of time with my nose in a book. And I was small. I didn't get my growth until later on in high school. So I was often a kid who was bullied or ignored, and sometimes the fact that I had a big vocabulary got me in trouble. I might say things to someone bigger like, "Your Neanderthal vocabulary betrays the inadequacy of your intellect, despite your physique." And they would respond, "Me no understand, but me hit!"

TEACHINGBOOKS: Social interactions weren't always positive for you growing up. Was school frustrating, too?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I actually found school comforting. I had teachers who appreciated my intelligence and encouraged me, and librarians who gave me books when I needed them, so I think that in some ways, despite the fact that I wasn't very well socialized as a child, I was certainly given a lot of information and opportunities, and I was inspired by things I read in books.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Were books and stories a part of your home life as a child?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: My father and mother and my two sisters lived at a different location about a quarter of a mile away. I was raised by my grandmother and grandfather in the house where I am right now. When my parents were first married, they lived with my grandparents, and then my grandparents gave them some property and a house. This house, we always called the farm. My parents moved there, and I stayed, supposedly for the time being, which became the rest of my time, with my grandparents.

My dad was a person who told stories—not traditional stories, but stories about his own experiences and jokes. He was the kind of person who really had a very strong personality. People listened to him whenever he came into a room.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk more about your family and community growing up.

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I grew up in a multiethnic family, and in a very interesting multiethnic community. Saratoga Springs, where I went to school, had a large African–American population by the standards of the time. So I had black kids as friends and schoolmates, and especially as friends once I got to high school.

When I was in grade school, though, everybody beat me up. I was an equal opportunity victim of bullying. I was bullied because I was poor, because I came from the country, and I was also made fun of because I wasn't a city kid and didn't know anything.

TEACHINGBOOKS: How is it that someone who endured such mistreatment as a child came to be such a peaceful person?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: Well, rather than making me bitter, it made me aware of certain kinds of inequity. When I did turn into a very large, strong human being in my senior year of high school, I was on the football team, I was the heavyweight wrestler who won the conference tournament, and I was also a shot put and discus thrower.

Despite the fact that I had grown into this physical stature, it didn't change my emotional and my intellectual approach towards life. I thought that being a peaceful person was much better, and that beating up the people who used to beat me up was just a stupid thing to do. It never crossed my mind to go in that direction. In fact, I have now been a martial arts teacher for almost 40 years, and had the rank of master. In no way has this made me a violent person; quite the contrary. Because when you recognize your physical ability, you try to use it well, in the service of human beings rather than against them.

TEACHINGBOOKS: It sounds like building bridges became very important to you.

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I eventually became very close friends with a lot of kids who were from various backgrounds: Jewish, African—American, and so on. But people didn't make themselves visible as Native American in our area. There were a lot of families that were Native, but no one talked much about it. The place where I saw American Indians was at tourist attractions, where American Indians worked portraying American Indians, and a number of those people later on became very close friends and mentors of mine in my adult years. They provided me with a lot of information and a lot of guidance.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Is it fair to say you've received information and guidance and education from many sources throughout your life? You eventually received your master's degree and Ph.D., so you're an accomplished academic.

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: Well, I don't feel that you should measure someone by the degrees they have connected to their name, but by the work that they do. And I think that some of the work I've done outside of academia is much more significant than my efforts to earn an advanced degree.

TEACHINGBOOKS: In what ways does your education influence your non—academic work?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I would say that I've tried to use my education to deepen my storytelling and my writing. Because I have this education, I'm aware of the importance of research and how to do academic research—so if I'm telling a story, I know how to research it, and not just by Googling it on the Internet.

I also know the importance of objectivity and not getting lost in one side of the story, although that's also a Native tradition—the idea that we have two ears to hear both sides of everything. So I bring my education into my writing in that way; I'm always trying to be more accurate, more objective.

TEACHINGBOOKS: How would you describe what you do?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I would describe myself as a writer and a storyteller; someone whose work really depends on what I've learned over the decades from many different people, especially friends and family who have ties to the Native traditions of the Northeast.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You've lived and participated in some very powerful events, and you write and talk about powerful issues. Would you also describe yourself as an activist?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I guess I could be described as an activist, for whatever reason. Since a very early age, I've been aware of inequities and inequality in the world and have done what little bit I could do to try to respond to it.

TEACHINGBOOKS: In addition to bullying, were there other things you experienced or stories you heard as a child that prompted an awareness of inequality among people?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: My dad was Slovak, pure Slovak, and he suffered discrimination, too, as a child. I remember him telling me they used to call the Slovaks "brown heads," and they made fun of him because his clothes were so poor compared to those of everyone else. That touched me. I certainly remember that.

I also have very strong memories of my grandfather talking about the fact that he left school. He left formal education in fourth grade because people persisted in calling him a dirty Indian—to the point that one day, as he put it, he literally flattened the person who said it and then jumped out the first—floor window of the school. He never went back to school again. He went to work in the woods for a man named Seneca Smith and spent his life as a laborer, and later on, as the proprietor of a little general store with my grandmother here in Greenfield Center. So that's a very vivid memory from my childhood; I had a strong awareness that my grandfather suffered prejudice because of the dark color of his skin and his Native ancestry.

Later, when I was in college, I became involved in the Civil Rights Movement and also was involved in the movement against the Vietnam War. I took part in marches and demonstrations, and was with Robert Bly at some of his first anti—Vietnam poetry readings back in the 1960s.

TEACHINGBOOKS: When you were a young man, your passion for peace and equality kept you busy at home and abroad.

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: Yes. My wife, Carol, and I were very similar in our viewpoint about the world. I think I'd describe it as an awareness of the basic humanity of all people, and an awareness of cultural and economic differences, which sometimes come between us and result in people being put in a position of unfair disadvantage.

When I graduated from Syracuse University with my master's degree, the two of us went to West Africa for three years. I was a volunteer with the Teachers for West Africa Program at a secondary school in Ghana.

TEACHINGBOOKS: How did your activism and beliefs lead you to publishing?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: When I came back from teaching in Ghana in 1969, I started putting together The Greenfield Review Press and a literary magazine called The Greenfield Review with the $2,000 readjustment allowance I'd been given from the Teachers for West Africa Program.

I did this not to put my own work in print, but because I wanted to respond to the fact that American poetry publishers did not seem to be very representative of the broad scope of people who were writing outstanding poetry in this country and throughout the world. So from the start, The Greenfield Review Press was a multicultural press, publishing work by a wide variety of people from many, many different areas.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What challenges did you face, starting your own press in the late sixties?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: Well, I think that we started publishing at a time when it wasn't all that easy. We had to deal with people who were using linotype setting, and we had to deal with a culture that wasn't really tuned into multiculturalism as it is now.

I also think that because publishing poetry is a tricky thing too, devoting yourself to publishing poetry was certainly not financially viable, and would not have been possible had it not been for grant support from state and federal funds in many ways over the years. Fortunately, Carol was completely behind it in every way from the start, and worked as our business manager and often coeditor throughout those years.

To this day, we still publish books by Northeastern Native authors, and my son Jesse is my coeditor and publisher in this. We're trying to publish things that are also bilingual in format, so we can do something to support the survival of our indigenous languages.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You've personally contributed to all sorts of genres, including folktales, poetry, and biographies. How do manage this versatility?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I read widely. I'm always reading every kind of book you could imagine, from biographies and works of nonfiction about things and places I'm interested in, to mystery novels and science fiction and things that are translated from other languages. So I have a very wide taste in reading. And I think that's reflected in my writing.

To put it in terms of storytelling, when you tell a story, you listen to that story while you're telling it, and you let that story tell you what it's supposed to be. When I'm writing, I think the same thing happens. Something tells me it wants to be a poem, or it wants to be a play, or it wants to be a song that I'll sing with a guitar, or it's the start of a novel. I should also mention that my editors help me there, too.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What are some books that have influenced you?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: One thing I discovered early on was how much I loved historical fiction when it was written well and based on reality. I read I, Claudius for the first time when I was a teenager, and it just made me see the history of Rome in a totally different way.

I remember, too, when I first read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I suddenly saw the entire African continent in a totally different light. And, of course, Chinua wrote Things Fall Apart to counter novels like Mr. Johnson by Joyce Cary, or stories like Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. And I wanted to do that. I wanted to tell stories that were true to history and culture, that were going to be read by the people I was writing about, but also informative to people who have no connection or perhaps no knowledge at all about the subject matter I've chosen.

TEACHINGBOOKS: How do you work to ensure your books are faithful to different histories and cultures?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: People have been very generous with me. Just as an example, I have a novel called Code Talker, about the Navajos in World War II. As I was writing that novel, over the course of many years, I was actually researching it, sometimes without knowing I was doing it, by meeting and talking with people who were code talkers, and reading about it and reviewing their personal accounts. When I had a first draft ready, I sent it to the Navajo Code Talkers Association for their review.

I also worked directly with several other people who were extremely helpful. I gave the draft to Navajo scholars, who wrote and spoke their own language, to make sure I had the language right in it. I gave a later draft to the head of the Navajo Museum at DinÃ© College in New Mexico, so he could review it for accuracy.

This is a process I try to follow with every book I write that's about a different culture. It is important to have people who are culture bearers, and other knowledgeable readers see it before I ever put it in print. It's really saved me a lot of embarrassment and mistakes over the years. All you have to do is look at the way people talk about Frank McCourt in Ireland ever since Angela's Ashes was published to realize how upset people can get—even about things that are absolutely true when you write about another culture, or even your own culture.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Generally speaking, what helps you to be accurate in your writing?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I think one of the most important things is patience. As I once said to a friend, life is not a weekend seminar. He had approached me about learning traditional Native medicine. I said, "Well, if you want to learn about traditional Native medicine, you need to find a medicine person to teach you. And at best, you should go and live with them and help them out, and over the course of time, months or years, they'll begin to teach you." My friend's response was, "I was thinking of a weekend seminar." Accuracy takes time. It really does take time, and patience is important. In terms of some of the books I've written, they've required a lot of patience.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You've written historical novels, but you also write and tell stories of contemporary Native people. Please talk about how you came to write these current stories.

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: Well, I think I've been really fortunate because ever since I was a kid, I've been in contact with Native people in various ways. Of course, there was my own grandfather, who tried not to appear Native, but there were also other people who were, as I said, playing the parts of Indians at tourist attractions who really were Indians—people like my friend Ray Fadden—Tehanetorens, who ran the Six Nations Indian Museum, or people like Maurice Dennis, who put together the Indian village in the Enchanted Forest in Old Forge, New York.

These people were being visibly Indian to the public, and they really helped me see Native people not as an artifact or as a vanishing group, but as living, breathing human beings in the same world I was walking through. So it became important to me to tell stories that didn't make Native people look like some kind of missing link that only existed in the fossil record.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Do you feel differently about reading aloud from your books verbatim, versus telling those stories in their oral form?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I can manage to read my own books aloud every now and then. But the first time I was invited to do a storytelling program for my first book of traditional stories, when I got to the school I said, "I hope you don't mind, but I'd rather not read from the book. I'd rather just tell you the stories." So that was my first public storytelling event.

I think that when you write a story down, you have to put it a certain way on the page, so someone can read it without your being there. But when you tell it, the story comes to life with your voice and your gestures. And sometimes it is spoken in a slightly different way than how you put the words on the page, because the story is very much alive.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Do you feel a responsibility to document oral stories from the pasts of various peoples?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: Well, I feel a more responsibility to try to retell stories that I know have been told badly or incompletely. And I've been complimented by various people from the Haudenosaunee Nations here in New York, for example. People in the Seneca Nation said they really appreciated my books because they could take them and use them in their language classes, because they could easily translate them back into Seneca and have a written record in English. They could go back and forth between the two languages with their kids.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you sense when you feel a traditional story has been badly retold?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: Well, a couple of things can happen. The very worst is when someone makes up a story that's totally inauthentic. Usually it's a story about doomed lovers committing suicide, people from different tribes. There are songs about that, too, all of them pretty awful. So that's the worst extreme.

And then in between that, you find stories that have cultural inaccuracies in them, told from a European point of view that doesn't really reflect Native people. They can be inaccurate in terms of the language they use, referring to women as squaws, referring to men as braves. They might make Native people look stupid in the stories, so they behave in a child–like fashion. Even though it's a traditional tale, it might not be told fully or well, and it might include elements that are completely foreign to the culture. So there's a lot of that.

Then the other thing that happens is sometimes ethnologists or anthropologists have recorded stories. And they recorded them word for word, but the people who told them the stories may have told a partial story, or may not have known that story all that well, because not every Native person is a storyteller. So we have a lot of incomplete or poorly told stories out there, directly from Native people, which you find in these collections that were put together, especially around the late 1800s or early 1900s.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You've mentioned having Navajo scholars check over the language in Code Talkers. Please talk more about how you incorporate different languages in your books.

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: For me, knowledge of the language is really important. So when I work on Abenaki stories, for instance, I have to be able to understand what might be said in the Abenaki language as opposed to in English. Generally speaking, if I work with a story from another culture, I really want to know as much as I can about the language and how things were said, so that the English reflects the other language.

I'll often have a bilingual dictionary handy, and access to a person who is a Native speaker. For example, I have a novel called Dragon Castle that takes place in Slovakia. I worked with two different Slovak speakers in writing that story to make sure I was idiomatically correct and that any time I used Slovak, I used it well. I know some Slovak, but I'm not a fluent speaker.

With Abenaki, I'm pretty good in Abenaki, but my son Jesse has devoted much of his life to learning the language, and he is indeed a fluent speaker and teaches it all over New England. His knowledge gives me access to virtually every Algonquin language, because they all are interrelated. Once you've said it in Abenaki, you can learn now to say it in Menominee or Anishinaabe or Lenape or Wampanoag.

TEACHINGBOOKS: To give an idea of what it sounds like, would you please say something in English, and then say it in Abenaki?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I'll do a traditional greeting in Abenaki: Kwa kwai nib8ba. Ndelewizi Sozap, ala Nokidahozid. Ndai Salatogi ala Nebiz8bik. Aln8ba nia. Hello, my friend. My name is Joseph, or The Peaceful One. I am of Saratoga or the Medicine Spring. Human Being I am.

8 is a nasalized O; it sounds almost like "own." Sozap is Joseph; Nokidahozid means The Peaceful One. If you go to westernabenaki.com, my son Jesse's website, you'll find all the dialogues we've done and stories told in Abenaki. There is a thorough dictionary and conjugation feature, and you can hear recorded lessons and several programs of "Western Abenaki Radio."

TEACHINGBOOKS: Do you have an Indian name?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I actually have several. I mentioned Nokidahozid, The Peaceful One. I was also given Gah—hey—go—hi—yoh, which means The Good Mind in Onondaga, and Hikadoi Nahku, which means Quiet Bear in Cheyenne.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Can you address the negative and stereotypical portrayals of Native people in books and elsewhere?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: Well, there are a lot of popular words that are applied to Native people — monosyllabic, uneducated, violent, untrustworthy, innocent, noble, savage, pagan — and then, of course, there are the words that are misinterpretations of who people are, like the word "squaw" applied to a woman. "Squaw" is a feminine ending in Abenaki, but it's become a term of abuse. Or the word "brave" applied to a man, or calling every Native man a "chief," which again happens. I had that happen to me.

Stereotypes, of course, means there may be a grain of truth to it, but the truth is exaggerated or misunderstood. Let me give you an example. There's the idea of Native people as monosyllabic or stolid, or silent—you know, just standing there stoically. The stereotype comes in part because in Native traditions, throughout the continent, when someone else is speaking, you listen. You expect that the speaker will be finished, and then you can speak. Except what happens, many times, is they don't stop talking. You're just standing there, waiting and waiting and waiting. That's why one of Vine Deloria's books was called, We Talk, You Listen.

So there is a good example of a cultural difference and a misunderstanding that came out of that.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What are your feelings about how Native people are portrayed in school mascots?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: Well, I deal with that in part in my novel, The Heart of a Chief. I also have made mention of it in other books I've written, where that question comes up, of the Native person as a stereotype or a symbol rather than a human being. That's a big problem, when people become stereotypes or symbols rather than fully fleshed out human beings.

As far as the mascot issue goes, my feeling is a very simple one. If Native people do not want their names to be used as mascots, they should not be used that way. If you're using a term which is abusive, like redskin—which is just as abusive as calling someone by the N—word—then why in God's name keep using it? And why have images like Chief Wahoo, which are exaggerated, ugly, stupid, savage, and foolish, stand for your sports team?

Then there are teams that seek approval. For example, the Florida Seminoles football team has the approval of the Florida Seminole Nation to use that name, so my feeling in those instances is cool, no problem.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Let's talk about advice to other writers. What would you like to say to people who want to become writers?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: Well, first of all, every writer is always becoming a writer because once you finish writing something, you move on to something else. And we all start with an idea, a blank page, or an empty screen. We're always, always starting over. And to be a writer, you have to enjoy that process of starting over again.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You've written many books, so you've gone through that process many times. What helps you to be so prolific?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I'm a good listener. And I think that helps a lot. I'm also very determined. Once I start something, I don't give it up even though it may take me years. I think that's an important characteristic for any writer. I always tell kids, if you want to write, write every day. Write a page a day, and you'll have 365 pages, or 366 if it's leap year. And a lot of people don't do that. They talk about writing or think about writing, but they don't actually do the work.

And then, try to love the process of revision. Enjoy that process, and you'll find yourself making your work much better. I have fun revising things. I'm on the last two pages of revising a new novel called Killer of Enemies. I've had a great time in the revision, and it completely changed—I even cut out some of my favorite parts because they didn't work. By the way, that's one thing you have to do as a writer, be willing to sacrifice something that's really well written but doesn't fit what you're doing.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk about Eagle Song.

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: Eagle Song was my first chapter book. It's been adopted for the Common Core for fourth grade for New York State, which is really cool. They've got like 80 pages they've written on it. It's a story that deals with bullying, with finding nonviolent solutions to confrontation. And it includes in it the retelling of the founding of the Iroquois League of Peace. And all of those are things I think are important.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Eagle Song is one of the many books of yours that are used frequently in schools.

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: Yeah, actually, there are several books that I know are pretty well used. One of them is Thirteen Moons on Turtle's Back, which was my first picture book. I coauthored that with Jonathan London in a very funny way.

Jonathan and I were corresponding. He's a poet, and I published him in the Greenfield Review, my literary magazine. And every time I wrote Jonathan a letter, I wrote the name of the moon on top. For example, if it was a June letter, I wrote "strawberry moon."

And then Jonathan called me. He said, "I'm working on this book, and I'm going to use Native names for it, Native moon names for a book of poetry." I said, "Oh, cool, so you remembered my letters." And he said, "My God, that's right. You did write me those letters. That's where I got the idea." Then he said, "Let's coauthor it." So that was how we got to coauthor the book.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You tackle fantastically scary subject matter in Skeleton Man.

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: Skeleton Man is one of my most popular novels for kids, and one of the things that thrills me about it is that kids often say one of two things: One, "I started reading it, and I couldn't stop until I finished it. I stayed up all night." And two, boys saying, "I didn't realize it was about a girl until I was 50 pages into it."

It takes place in modern times, but it's based on traditional storytelling and deals with an issue that kids are always worried about, which is losing your parents. It puts a child in a situation where, like our traditional stories, they're confronted with a monster. But because they've learned the right things to do, they can overcome or escape that monster. And that's one of the messages in our monster stories: they're scary, but they're also instructive.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You have coauthored several books, like When the Chenoo Howls and Rabbit's Snow Dance. Can you talk about that process?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: When the Chenoo Howls is a book I coauthored with my son Jim, who is a professional storyteller and an expert at monster stories. The book was his idea, and when we wrote it, our objectives were to tell authentic, scary stories from the Northeastern Native tradition, and to tell stories that spanned time. So we'd begin long ago and come on down to the present day in our stories. The arc of the book begins with a story from long ago and ends with a very modern story, but still within our monster traditions. We alternated back and forth with the stories in that book.

Rabbit's Snow Dance is a story I told to my kids while they were growing up. Jim started using it as part of a story he tells at schools, so we decided we would put together our two versions of the story, which diverged a little over the years because your own personality comes into the story. The story is a fun story, but it is also a teaching story that points out some things in the natural world in a way that can be remembered. And therefore, maybe because it's remembered, the lesson may be more deeply understood.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Jim Thorpe seems very relevant as a biography.

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: Yeah. I didn't know much about Jim Thorpe until he spoke at my school in Saratoga; I think it was during my junior high school years. I find him to be a tremendously powerful example of the ways in which Native people have excelled in the face of adversity. He was truly the world's greatest athlete. I love sports, and knowing kids love sports really inspired me to tell his story.

I decided to tell it from his point of view because there's a lot out there that was documented about things Jim Thorpe said and stories about what Jim Thorpe did. But I wanted to try to give it his point of view so people would not see him as a sort of, oh, a prodigy or even a freak of nature, but as a real human being going through those experiences.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You are a martial arts master. Have you included the martial arts in your books or storytelling?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I have a novel called The Way, which is about a boy learning martial arts from his uncle, and I'm in an anthology for Guys Read, edited by John Scieszka. In The Sports Pages anthology, I have a martial arts story called "Choke."

TEACHINGBOOKS: How did you come to write The First Strawberries?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: That's an interesting book because I didn't intend to publish it as a book. A storyteller friend of mine, Judith Black, introduced me to a woman named Anna Vojtech, who is an artist from Czechoslovakia. As we got to know each other, Anna said, "Joseph, if you know any stories about plants, I would love to try to illustrate some." So I wrote down a few stories and sent them to her. And she sent me a few sketches she'd done, and I thought, oh, these are really cool.

And a year passed, and I got a phone call from a woman who said, "Joseph, I have wonderful news. Our book is being published." And I said, "Who is this?" She said, "It's Anna, Joseph." I said, "What book?" And she said "The First Strawberries." And I asked, "It's a book?" I hadn't realized she was submitting it to publishers. So I got a book published without having submitted it. It's still in print, and it's actually a very popular book as wedding gifts because it talks about respect between men and women. I told that story at my sister's wedding.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Hidden Roots addresses a topic that is about disrespect.

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: Yes, the question of eugenics is a hidden issue in American culture. And many Native nations and many non– Native people suffered from these theories that you could, by sterilization, produce better human beings. And I'm talking about this happening here in the United States, even before Nazi Germany. The German eugenicists were inspired by work being done in Vermont. I wrote this novel because in many cases, the main character is a lot like myself. I'm like that boy, growing up at that period in time and not knowing much about my Native history.

There was a very interesting trial in Vermont, when Native people in Vermont—and I was part of this—deliberately fished without licenses to bring it to court to claim aboriginal rights in a state where it was said there were no Indians at all. And there were, of course, hundreds and hundreds of families, thousands of people who are directly of Abenaki ancestry, many identifying first and foremost with Abenaki.

At the trial, I was called in to testify and told traditional stories as part of my testimony. But we also introduced in that trial, which the Abenaki Nation won, the Evidence of Eugenics Project, which had been dug out of the archives in the state of Vermont Historical Society and was introduced to the public for the first time during that trial.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What inspired you to write My Father is Taller than a Tree?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I chose to do that simple little poem because I really feel it's important to show fathers with sons in functioning families. There's so much about absent fathers in many cultures and communities, and I think sometimes, we find ourselves being drawn away from our kids.

My relationship to my sons is very important to me, so I deliberately wrote that book and talked with the illustrator about making it a book that represented fathers from many different cultural and economic backgrounds, with their kids, engaged in many different things. And I think it really succeeds well. I think Wendy is an incredible illustrator. I loved the way she approached the story.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you do when you get stuck?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I just keep going. Because a wonderful poet friend of mine, Bill Stafford, used to say that sometimes writing is like starting a car on ice. Your wheels may spin for a while, but eventually, you get traction.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What is a typical workday like?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I get up early in the morning, do a few exercises to wake myself up, maybe go for a walk around the little pond we have by our cabin in the foothills of a mountain. And then I sit down and start writing. Around noon, I'll leave the cabin and come down to the house I was raised in and start going through my e–mails and doing whatever work needs to be done around there.

In the summertime, that includes a lot of gardening. And then I sometimes eat breakfast, sometimes don't, sometimes eat lunch, sometimes don't. But I always make sure I eat dinner. In the evenings, I usually teach or take martial arts. I'm doing jujitsu with my son Jesse, who teaches jujitsu along with my son Jim.

So that's kind of a typical day. Weekends might include going to see a folk music concert, or I'll watch a movie. I don't watch a lot of television. I'm very selective about that.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You speak a lot to kids. What do you like to tell them?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I like to point out the symbol of the circle, which relates to us all. We're all part of the circle. Everyone has a spot on that circle that's different from everyone else's, but equal to everyone else's. We can all see each other's faces when we're in the circle. We're all the same distance from the center of the circle. More people can always be added to the circle, and it still stays a circle.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you like to tell educators?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: I like to remind educators that they, too, were children. We need to be patient with our children, as we once hoped people would be patient with us.

I like to remind educators just how important they are. Sometimes educators forget that, and they feel diminished or put down by various forces in our culture—often political ones, by people who know nothing about education but think they can define and legislate it. I think that no one has a more important job than a teacher.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You do many types of work, you've had many kinds of experiences, and you can speak from many different perspectives. Which of these facets of your life stand out to you as especially noteworthy or meaningful?

JOSEPH BRUCHAC: Well, I'm always more comfortable talking about other people and what they're doing or can do. I love talking about my sons more than I love talking about myself. I think my work as a husband and a father is really important. I think the lives of my two sons are a measure of my success, and the fact that my wife, Carol, and I were married for 48 years before she passed away.

As a writer and a storyteller, I think what I've done more than anything else is to pass on the knowledge and the wisdom that's been given to me by others.

I feel good about all this, because one of the things I want to do is be successful as a human being—within my family, within my community, as a writer or as a teacher, whether I'm teaching poetry or martial arts. I just want to do it a good way.

There's a saying that one of the most important questions you can ask is, "How will I be remembered after I'm gone?" I ask myself that question a lot.

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