Oscar Hokeah says his debut novel — 14 years in the making — helped him find healing
One Book One Valley wraps up its 2024 community read with an event featuring author of “Calling for a Blanket Dance”
Ali Longwell/Vail Daily
For the past five or so months, the local partners behind One Book One Valley have encouraged community members to share in the reading of Oscar Hokeah’s “Calling for a Blanket Dance.”
On Thursday, the 13th year of the community read wrapped up with an event at Colorado Mountain College in Edwards featuring the book’s author.
“Calling for a Blanket Dance” was Hokeah’s debut novel. The book follows the story of Ever Geimausaddle — the son of a Kiowa and Cherokee mother and Mexican father — and was modeled on Hokeah’s own life. Using a peripheral narration style in which Ever’s story is told chapter-by-chapter by a member of his family, Hokeah said the book was able to bring healing to his own life and history.
On Thursday, Hokeah described the novel as a “transformation narrative.”
“This traumatic thing happens when (Ever is) young and it reverberates throughout his life, manifesting in anger and frustration,” Hokeah said. “Then, he has to get to a point where he has to make a choice: Is he going to continue to attack and be aggressive toward the community? Or is he going to switch and be a healing force?”
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From the first chapter written in 2008 to the novel’s publication in 2020, it was a book that took around 14 years to see the light of day.
“It was 14 years of ups and downs,” Hokeah said.
13 years of One Book One Valley
One Book One Valley was started in 2011 by Lori Ann Barnes, who recently retired from the Vail Public Library. Every year since, a group of community partners has come together to select books — spanning from fiction to nonfiction, young adult to adult — meant to inspire community connection and conversation around new ideas and themes.
This year, the program was supported by the Vail Public Library, The Bookworm, Colorado Mountain College in Edwards, Eagle County School District, Vail Mountain School, Vail Symposium and the Eagle Valley Land Trust.
Since the 2024 title was announced in December, these partners have organized several companion events meant to enhance the reading experience by exploring the themes in Hokeah’s debut novel.
This included a bilingual Vail Symposium event in February on how to cultivate generational resilience in the face of trauma as well as a screening of “Gather” hosted by the Vail Public Library and Eagle Valley Land Trust. “Gather” is a 2020 documentary following Native American communities who are reconnecting with their identities through land and food sovereignty.
As is tradition at this point, this year’s One Book One Valley concluded on Thursday with a discussion and reading from Hokeah.
Growing up Oscar
Hokeah began the evening sharing his story and upbringing, which much like the book’s main character, Ever, was split between the many facets of his identity: traveling between the Kiowa community in Lawton, Oklahoma, to the Cherokee community in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and, in his earlier years, to his paternal family in Mexico.
“I have that in my lived experience, not only between these two tribal cultures but also a transnational (culture), going across the Mexican border, back and forth to visit, and navigating that dynamic as well,” Hokeah said. “I grew up moving back and forth between those environments.”
Today, Hokeah still lives in Tahlequah in the heart of Cherokee Nation working as a social worker for Indian Child Welfare.
Hokeah dropped out of school after completing his sixth-grade year.
“At 13 years old, when you’re living on the rez and you drop out of school, nobody’s going to look for you, nobody cares what you’re doing. Being young and angry and rebellious, it was easy for me to kind of fall into that track,” Hokeah said.
However, becoming an avid reader at 14 years old kept him from this fate, which many of his peers fell into. The first book Hokeah remembers reading was the uncut version of Stephen King’s “The Stand.”
“After reading that and the world that he created, even though I was that young, there was a part of me that was like, ‘I could do that, I could write something like that,'” Hokeah said. “It inspired me to create worlds that were more familiar to me, that were Native-centric.”
For many years, Hokeah lived in the world of horror and fantasy, reading and writing as he worked for family roofing businesses in Oklahoma and obtained his GED at 17.
“At that point, I didn’t think much about going to college. I couldn’t see myself in a college setting. I didn’t have the confidence to do that. I didn’t think I was smart enough. But other people around me would see (my potential),” Hokeah said.
In 2004, Hokeah moved to Santa Fe to work at an all-Native group home, mentoring Native youths. It was there that his colleagues encouraged him to pursue a creative writing degree at the nearby Institute of American Indian Arts. He enrolled in the fall of 2006.
“At the end of that first semester, I got a 4.0,” Hokeah said. “It blew my mind that I could keep up. That inspired me to continue to write and continue my education.”
“It changed my life,” Hokeah added.
Finding Ever
While at the Institute of America Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Hokeah began reading a lot more literary fiction, including novels from Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday and Cherokee author Robert J. Conley.
“What I wasn’t seeing was this intertribal dynamic, how I grew up. And Oklahoma is home to 39 different tribes; we interact with other tribes all the time, and I didn’t see that intertribal dynamic,” Hokeah said.
Hokeah described the depictions of Native Americans as “homogenous” at the time.
“There wasn’t a recognition that every tribe had its own language. Every tribe has a different set of dances, different set of customs, different set of behaviors and ways of talking. So, when I looked at what I was reading, I felt like this was missing in fiction,” he added.
It was here that Hokeah saw the space to bring his unique voice into the literary canon.
“That’s why I wanted to contribute to the world of literature,” Hokeah said. “And so that’s when I started to write some of the first earliest chapters in this book.”
In 2008, Hokeah wrote the first chapter of what would become “Calling for a Blanket Dance.” The story, which is written from the perspective of Ever’s cousin Quinton Quoetone, was published in “American Short Fiction” in 2010. In 2009, he wrote the next chapter, which was published as a short story in the “South Dakota Review.”
However, soon after, self-doubt sent him into a prolonged writer’s block, Hokeah said.
While he kept writing and grinding — getting his Masters in English from the University of Oklahoma in 2012 — the chapters sat in solitude until many years later when a mentor’s encouragement led him to revisit Ever’s story. From there, he began to write the other chapters. In 2018, he had a 50,000-word book, which he eventually sold through a pitch event on Twitter.
Healing through fiction
On Thursday, Hokeah read from three chapters of “Calling for a Blanket Dance,” sharing stories on his writing process and the healing he found in Ever’s story.
“The auto-fiction style sometimes gives us the opportunity to rewrite our life in a way that can be healing,” Hokeah said.
Hokeah said this was reflected in a chapter written from the perspective of Ever’s grandfather, Vincent Geimausaddle. Vincent was modeled off of Hokeah’s grandfather Virgil Hokeah in many ways.
“There’s a story that’s told in my family where (my grandfather) was making Gourd Dance regalia for me and my cousin, Quincy, but he passed away before he finished,” Hokeah said. “Hearing that story growing up, of my grandfather trying to do what he could to keep us in the culture, was an inspiration for me writing that chapter.”
Hokeah added that writing the chapter from Vincent’s perspective “gave me the opportunity to be connected to him” and “gave my grandfather an opportunity to finish.”
Hokeah spoke about the other ways writing was able to help him process and heal. In writing about his father from other character’s perspectives, he was able to rediscover positive memories and heal from some of the negative aspects of their relationship.
“It gave me an opportunity to write about him from a different angle and to humanize it,” Hokeah said. “That’s where peripheral narration becomes super important.”
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In writing about Ever’s loss of a daughter at birth — something Hokeah also experienced — Hokeah said it was “an opportunity to come to terms with what happened.”
Hokeah said that drawing from his own experiences not only helped him, but he hopes it helps connect him to the readers.
“In order for me to write something that’s going reverberate with energy on the page, to such a degree that it will transfer over to the reader, I feel like I need to write something close and personal to me. Then I can get that genuine experience on the page,” Hokeah said.
