The Turtle's Beating Heart: One Family's Story ofLenape Survival by Denise Low (review)

Indigenous invisibility has recently been cited as one of the most urgent barriers to the well-being of Indigenous peoples (First Nations 8), and persistent misperceptions of identities and histories are part of that invisibility if and when Indigenous peoples are recognized at all. Part of breaking down this barrier is telling the nuanced and complex stories of Indigenous families and communities of many kinds: enrolled and unenrolled, rural and urban, rooted in homelands or forced into diaspora, and mixed by ethnicity or blood in various measures. It is into this space that Denise Low offers her recovered story of her family's Lenape roots and takes her readers on the journey of piecing this story back together.

Thoughtfully written and carefully paced, Low traces the rumors of Indian heritage backward into the constellation of stories her family has told about itself, stories that shift and move according to who is telling them but that nonetheless are rooted in the historic record and in family trauma, in the bodies of her forebears and in the lands on which they lived. By following the individual histories of her grandfather, Frank Bruner, her mother, Dorothy Bruner, and herself as Denise Dotson, Low draws the connections among people, stories, places, and time to create a coherent story of Delaware survival.

Part 1, "A Twentieth Century Native Man," is the beginning point in Low's narrative, and her grandfather Frank Bruner stands as the tangible link between Low's known family and the unknown (to her) Delaware family from which he is descended. Who was Frank Bruner? As she travels across Kansas she muses on the larger-than-life significance he has taken on in her imagination, and she seeks to know him better. This part moves backward in time to name his Delaware ancestors and their origins as far as she knows them and then moves forward again to describe her own memories blended with the process of research and interviews with family and family friends she conducted along the way. She knew him as the kind grandfather who spoke about the KKK as he played cards with her as a ten-year-old (44), but as with many memories it only hints at a larger family and historic dynamic.

Part 2, "Cutting Ties," picks up the family story again, this time with her mother's birth into the family. If Dorothy Bruner "went her own way" her entire life (84), in this space Low endeavors to understand her mother's choices and the ways in which Dorothy sought a life independent of her family's struggles. If her parents had fallen on hard times, she married well and distanced herself from their poverty; and if they had recognizable-enough Native heritage to bear the disdain of her in-laws and their like, then she would become the "melting-pot American" (92). But hard times and prejudice also eventually played a pivotal role for Dorothy, and so as Low parses the individual dynamics of her often-difficult relationship with her mother, she also understands those dynamics as part of the larger pattern of historical trauma and pain.

Part 3, "A Haunted Life," reframes the family story again, this time from the perspective of herself as a child and her relationship with her grandfather, her mother, and her siblings. Here she reflects on the teachings she gained from these relationships, however painful or late that understanding comes in her own history. Through these contemplations we see her as an adult make the connections with her heritage through these relationships, connections that she could not have grasped as a child. She ends this section with a reflection on her own responsibilities to her ancestors and descendants, as the link between seven generations back and seven generations forward, who must preserve the memory she has for all her relatives' sakes.

Part 4, "Today: Living...