Books: Savage Conversations
On the Stories We Must Hear
Savage Conversations, Leanne Howe.
There are many things that the United States of America refuses to reckon with from its history: who determines what is history, whose stories are told and what is sanitized in that telling. The crimes that settlers committed against Native people are central to those considerations. This slim book, as Susan Power writes in her forward, “burns through accepted stories like fire.”
“Being Native American in this country means often having a very different take on American history and historic figures generally accepted as national heroes. Just because they’re your heroes doesn’t make them automatically ours, since what benefitted non-Native settlers was often dangerously harmful to indigenous communities,” writes Power, who is from the Dakota Nation.
In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the order for the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men, the largest mass execution in US history. In 1875, Lincoln’s widow Mary Todd Lincoln was tried on charges of insanity and committed to a sanitarium. Entered into evidence is Mary Todd Lincoln’s claim that every night a “Savage Indian” enters her bedroom and slashes her face and scalp.
Leanne Howe, from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, links the two events in this short and devastating book. “Savage Conversations is a daring account of a former First Lady and the ghosts that tormented her for the contradictions and crimes on which this nation is founded.”
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her new book, an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World, will be published March 5, 2025. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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