Bowman Books: A Gathering Place for Indigenous New England

Readers of this journal are well acquainted with Joseph Bruchac—indebted to him, really, for his decades of tireless work on behalf of American Indian literatures.¹ It’s hard to think of anyone in the field who is quite so prolific (with over 120 novels, children’s books, and poetry collections as of this writing) and simultaneously so generous in publishing, promoting, and advocating for others (he has edited over 20 anthologies, among other things). The hub of all this activity is the Greenfield Review Press, which Bruchac started with his wife Carol in 1971. One of the longest-running Indigenous publishing enterprises in the United States, Greenfield was supporting Native American literature at the very moment of its emergence in the academy and in trade and scholarly publishing.² The Bruchacs have supplied steady small-press support for multicultural poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that might otherwise never have seen print.

In a recent and most welcome assessment of Bruchac’s career, Christine DeLucia has described it as moving from “rather generalized” (i.e., pan-Indian and indeed more broadly “ethnic,” as Greenfield initially published a good deal of literature by African, Caribbean, and incarcerated writers) to a more “assertive defense of keeping cultural heritage materials firmly linked to their tribal-national points of origin” (88). Today, Greenfield has a new imprint, Bowman Books, devoted to Indigenous writing and oral tradition primarily from the Northeast. Raised by an Abenaki grandfather (Jesse Bowman, for whom the imprint is named, and in whose house and store the press still operates), Bruchac has been especially plugged in to the vibrant, enduring Native literary traditions of this region. Everyone in Native studies knows Samson Occom and William Apess; but to ignore the many talented writers who are still writing here, still carrying on their legacy, is to perpetuate the myth of New England: birthplace of the new colonial nation, purged of Indians early on.

By registering the continuous presence of northeastern Native writers, Bowman Books literalizes the commonly heard refrain, “We’re still here.” The imprint’s first publication was The Wind Eagle and Other Abenaki Stories (1985) a collection of Gluskabe narratives told by Joseph Bruchac and illustrated by John Kahionhes Fadden (Mohawk). This partnership was a harbinger of the imprint’s approach to region: sensitive to both the erasure of Indigenous people from “New England,” yet also to the highly constructed nature of that region, Bowman Books has pulled in other Haudenosaunee writers from around its home base of upstate New York, as well as Abenaki authors located in Canada, across the artificial international border that divides them from their southern kin.

Bowman Books is a physical and metaphorical gathering place, enlisting Bruchac family members and friends across the full range of textual production, from writing and editing to printing and distribution. Bruchac’s son Jesse is a key force here. He came on to the project with, on the one hand, a desire to publish more bilingual texts in the service of language revitalization; and, on the other, the technical know-how to harness the power of new print-on-demand platforms. Jesse has arrived at an eminently more affordable, and hopefully more sustainable, means of publishing by formatting authors’ texts in pdf and selling them, one copy at a time, through lulu.com. His first project was the bilingual children’s book Mosbas and the Magic Flute (2010), which he wrote and translated (loosely based on a traditional story) and illustrated with his young daughter Carolyn in an advisory role. In just four short years he has published sixteen books using this method.³ You can feel the urgency of this project: at a 2010 conference at the University of New Hampshire (a gathering including many people named in this review), Joseph and Jesse discussed their print-on-demand work with reference to a problem that is all too common for Native authors and for those of us who teach this literature: “No Native writer who wants to be published should be denied the opportunity, and no Native writer who wants to remain in...