A Council of Dolls: A Novel

Mona Susan Power. A Council of Dolls: A Novel. Boston: Mariner Books, 2023. 296 pp., paper, $18.99.

One of the most egregious harms American society has inflicted on vulnerable children is the trauma caused by the ill-advised federal boarding school system. The devastating impact of these educational institutions has left generations to recover from racist harms that were deliberately inflicted to cause the cultural, spiritual and total annihilation of the original people of this continent by targeting helpless wakaneja or children. American society purposefully directed these inhumane policies toward the first people of this continent in order to take possession of the ancestral territories of tribal nations.

It is the important creative work of Oceti Sakowin or Seven Council Fires writers like Susan Mona Power to educate, communicate truth and ask difficult questions in their work. This story informs how the Oyate or Nation through the generations has shown resiliency and healing from a terrible and painful chapter in Oceti Sakowin history. That is the forced taking of Oyate children from their parents in order to annihilate the Oceti Sakowin through policies of separation, assimilation and boarding school education. These actions were intentional to accomplish the exertion of American authority onto the homeland of the Oyate in order to take the natural resources and aboriginal territory for American expansion.

This book relates a story of three generations of survivors of the perpetration of mass...