Dance Me Outside: More Tales from the Ermineskin Reserve
by W. P. Kinsella
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Collection of short stories about life on the Ermineskin Indian reserve near Hobbema, Alberta.Tags
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Dance Me Outside is an excellent collection. All the stories are from the perspective of Silas Ermineskin and though I did take umbrage with the syntactical choices of the author (one which the character explains) I did find myself wondering why most all the Cree in this book talked like Silas. This quibble aside there are funny, poignant and some real gut-punches in this one. After a while the camaraderie of Silas, Frank Fence-post and others takes on an almost Steinbeck-esque level of brotherhood and escapades like how they band together to help Annie in the story Penance. Lark Song is one of the strongest in the collection, rendering the brother Joseph who suffered brain-damage when he was young and never gets any older inside his show more head. The resistance of the community to send Joseph to a care facility combined with the reality of his situation was well handled by Kinsella and it doesn't leave the reader with any definitive answers. I would have liked to have seen more lyricism that popped up in this story and Between. The handling of the American Indian Movement in The Inaugural Meeting seemed boorish at best and there could have, perhaps, been a much better way to highlight the disconnection between the day-to-day life and life of activists without making the CIA seem like benevolent and benign. The majority of these stories do handle the cultural divide between the Cree and farmers in a way that I've experienced and it is well worth a read for anyone looking for a solid short story collection. show less
This book is so hilarious and reminds me of people I know and situations I've been in! Funny and real. The author understates so much that the read-between-the-lines parts show the comedy and tragedy of being a reservation Native as much as what's in the text. I'm reading it again at some point.
A collection of short stories set on a reservation in Alberta. Funny in places and desperately sad in others. My favourite was the first story Illianna Comes Home.
I like Moccasin Telegraph much better. These stories were just so very bleak.
Silas Ermineskin and Frank Fencepost are one matter. Mad Etta ... she is a must-meet!
Stories of unhappy people.
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42+ Works 5,231 Members
William Patrick Kinsella was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on May 25, 1935. He received a bachelor of arts degree in creative writing at the University of Victoria in 1974 and a master of fine arts degree in English at the University of Iowa in 1978. Before becoming a full-time author, he was a professor of English at the University of show more Calgary. During his lifetime, he wrote approximately 30 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His first collection of baseball stories, Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa, was published in 1980. In 1982, Kinsella expanded the stories into the novel Shoeless Joe, which was adapted into the 1989 movie Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner and Ray Liotta. Shoeless Joe won the Canadian Authors Association Prize, the Alberta Achievement Award, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. His other novels included The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt, The Alligator Report, The Miss Hobbema Pageant, Magic Time, If Wishes Were Horses, Butterfly Winter, and Russian Dolls. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1993. He received the Order of British Columbia in 2005 and the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. He died of a doctor-assisted death on September 16, 2016 at the age of 81. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Nonpareil Books (73)
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Has the adaptation
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Dance Me Outside: More Tales from the Ermineskin Reserve
- Original publication date
- 1977
- Disambiguation notice
- Do not combine the book with the movie.
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Statistics
- Members
- 179
- Popularity
- 182,344
- Reviews
- 6
- Rating
- (3.96)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 6
