I knew nothing about Tom Wilson when I first encountered him at the Abilene, a live music club in Rochester, New York, a couple of years ago. I did not know that he had played in the Juno Award-winning Blackie and the Rodeo Kings. But he appeared at the Abilene under the name LeE HARVeY OsMOND, which was good enough for me. I have often gone to see a band based on its name alone.

Between songs Wilson spoke about his album “Mohawk” and the open secrets he had uncovered about his past. Those stories are fleshed out in more detail in Wilson’s autobiography, Beautiful Scars: Steeltown Secrets, Mohawk Skywalkers, and the Road Home, published in 2017 by Doubleday Canada. I’ve only recently come around to reading it, and I am glad I did.

Wilson’s book contains the sorts of stories one might expect in a rock ‘n’ roll autobiography. He tells us of how he was first turned on by music, formed his first band, and found meaning in performing songs of his own. There are also in these pages stories of drugs, dissipation, and addiction. But there is also here a family story, a moving and at times beautifully written tale of identity, rediscovery, redemption and grace.

He was raised by George and Bunny Wilson in Hamilton, Ontario. He did not look like his parents and they were much older than the parents of his peers. He was adopted, taken in. His biological mother, Janie Lazare, was from a Catholic Mohawk family from Kahnawake. She accompanied a high steel worker from the reserve to New York City, unaware that he was already a married man. She return home pregnant, and made her way in the world as best she could in Toronto and Hamilton. It turned out hat the man she accompanied to the City was not Wilson’s father. Wilson learned later that his real father was a Mohawk named Louis Beauvais. None of that helped Janie. She tried to find an adoptive family for the child but ended up handing him off to Bunny and George, who Wilson says did the best they could. Janie stayed present in his life. “She was always around,” Wilson writes. Janie was Bunny’s sidekick. “She always stood a few feet behind Bunny. Bunny would say her piece and then Janie might respond with a laugh or a head shake or sometimes a few words, words that were often lost in the crowd of conversation buzzing around us.” Janie’s voice, Wilson remembers, was seldom heard, and “there’s plenty of heartbreak in a voice that rarely gets heard.”

It took Wilson decades to sort out the secrets, to understand the connections between the people who had entered his life and crossed his path. Toward the end of the book he writes:

My name is Thomas George Lazare.

I came from a family of Mohawk chiefs. Peacemakers and peacekeepers, fighters and man-eaters. Lacrosse magicians, tobacco salesmen, gangsters, shamans, shit-disturbers and survivors. But instead of growing up around these heroes and zeros, I grew up on the East Mountain in Hamilton….I am a living breathing lie. An embarrassment. A married man’s mistake and a young girl’s only chance to hop a fence out of town and escape to freedom. I was hidden from the world and from myself, my name was changed because it sounded too Indian and my clothes were fitted to look like the other kids.

I’ve been Thomas Cunningham Wilson ever since. An Irish-French kid. Not Indian–No Way. No Indian blood in me. None. Zero.

Later, after meeting his father, he reflected on the process of finding his way back to Kahnawake, now the son of a Mohawk mother. Louis Beauvais, he writes, hinted at their meeting that “I was taken from him. I was supposed to be his.” They talked and they reflected. The past came more clearly into focus. Wilson thought about his family. Beauvais had waited fifty-six years for this homecoming, Wilson said. He was an old man now. So was Wilson. “But I’m here. I’m scared and scarred but I’ve survived. I’m alive and lucky as hell.”

Indigenous identity can be a tricky thing. My students wrestle with the subject when we discuss it in class. Those of us who study the field of history are aware of Pretendians and Poseurs and Wannabes, but also the efforts of government officials to define Native peoples out of existence, of powerful stereotypes and expectations that attempt to limit and define what is authentically “Indian.” Mohawk identity can be especially complicated, with an Indigenous nation that straddles the international boundary between Canada and the United States, that has confronted the efforts of the United States, Canada, New York State, and the provinces of Quebec and Ontario to define who Mohawks are and what they ought to be, while trying at the same time to appropriate their lands, reeducate their children, neuter their sovereignty, and extinguish their culture. Wilson’s biography, of an artist hardly known in the United States, paints a rich and revealing portrait of these many tangled ties. I look forward to using Wilson’s work in class.

The latest installment of the quarterly bibliography. This is aspirational–I am way behind in my reading–but this is what strikes me as the most interesting stuff to come out over the course of the past few months. If I am missing something you think is important, or you would like me to include something of yours that I may have missed, feel free to drop me a line.

Arnott, Sigrid and David L. Maki. “Forts on Burial Mounds: Interlocked Landscapes of Mourning and Colonialism at the Dakota Settler Frontier, 1860-1876,” Historical Archaeology, 53 (March 2019), 153-169.

Baltus, Melissa R. and Gregory D. Wilson. “The Cahokian Crucible: Burning Ritual and the Emergence of Cahokian Power in the Mississippian Midwest,” American Antiquity, 84 (July 2019), 438-470.

Barman, Jean. Iroquois in the West, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019).

Beck, David. Unfair Labor: American Indians and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).

Bjork, Katharine. Prairie Imperialist: The Indian Country Origins of American Empire, (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

Cipolla, Craig N., James Quinn, and Jay Levy. “Theory in Collaborative Indigenous Archaeology: Insights from Mohegan,” American Antiquity, 84 (January 2019), 127-142.

Clemmons, Linda M. Dakota in Exile: The  Untold Stories of Captives in the Aftermath of the US-Dakota War, (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019).

Conner, Thaddieus W. and Aimee L. Franklin, “20 Years of Indian Gaming: Reassessing and Still Winning,” Social Science Quarterly, 100 (May 2019), 793-807.

Erlandson, Jon M., et. al., “Identifying Shell Middens with Historic Aerial Photos: An Example from California’s Santa Cruz Island,” Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, 14 (Jan-Mar 2019), 113-122.

Fritz, Gayle.  Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019).

Griffith, Jane. Words Have a Past: The English Language, Colonialism, and the Newspapers of Indian Boarding Schools, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019).

Hart, Siobhan M. and Paul A. Shackel, Colonialism, Community, and Heritage in Native New England, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019).

Hart, Siobahn, and Katherine Dillon. “Entangled Things and Deposits in Early Colonial Native New England,” Historical Archaeology, 53 (June 2019), 265-279.

Hauptman, Laurence M. Coming Full Circle: The Seneca Nation of Indians, 1848-1934, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).

Herrmann, Rachel B. To Feast On Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic, (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2019).

Hill, J. Brett. From Huhugam to Hohokam: Heritage and Archaeology in the American Southwest,(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019).

Jones, Sondra. Being and Becoming Ute: The Story of an American Indian People, (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019).

Kristofic, Jim. Medicine Women: The Story of the First Native American Nursing School, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019).

Lamana, Gonzalo. How “Indians” Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019).

Legg, James B. et. al., “An Appraisal of the Indigenous Acquisition of Contact-Era European Medal Objects in Southeastern North America,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 23 (March 2019), 81-102.

Lewis, Courtney. Sovereign Entrepeneurs: Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

Leza, Christina. Divided Peoples: Policy, Activism, and Indigenous Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Border, (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2019).

Lopenzina, Drew and Travis Franks. “Who Lies Buried in Satanta’s Tomb? Co-memorating a Kiowa Warrior,” American Indian Quarterly, 43 (Summer 2019), 249-280.

Lycett, Stephen J. and James D. Keyser, “Time’s Arrow: Toward a Social History of Crow Biographic Art Using Seriation and Multivariate Statistics,” American Anthropologist, 121 (May 2019), 363-375.

MacDonald, David Bruce. The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Reconciliation, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019).

Martinez, Ignaco. The Intimate Frontier: Friendship and Civil Society in Northern New Spain, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019).

Miller, Douglas K. Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

Momaday, N. Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain, 50^th Anniversary Edition, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019).

Newman, Andrew. Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

Ostler, Jeffrey.  Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

Ostler, Jeffrey and Nancy Shoemaker. “Settler Colonialism in Early American History: Introduction.” William and Mary Quarterly, 76 (July 2019), 361-368. Interested readers will consult this entire special edition.

Pexa, Chris. Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhóta Oyáte, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

Poorman, Elizabeth. “White Lies: Indigenous Scholars Respond to Elizabeth Warren’s Claims to Native Ancestry,” Perspectives on History, 57 (March 2019), 9-11

Sheffield, R. Scott and Noah Riseman. Indigenous Peoples and the Second World War: The Politics, Experiences, and Legacies of War in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Simek, Jan F. et. al., “The Red Bird River Sehelter (15CY52) Revisited: The Archaeology of the Cherokee Syllabary and of Sequoyah in Kentucky,” American Antiquity, 84 (April 2019), 302-316

Sweet, Jameson, “Native Suffrage: Race, Citizenship, and Dakota Indians in the Upper Midwest,” Journal of the Early Republic, 39 (Spring 2019), 99-109.

Test, Edward McLean. Sacred Seeds: New World Plants in Early Modern English Literature, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).

Treuer, David. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019).

United States, House Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Indigenous Peoples of the United States. Unmasking the hidden crisis of murdered and missing indigenous women (MMIW) : exploring solutions to end the cycle of violence : oversight hearing before the Subcommittee on Indigenous Peoples of the United States of the Committee on Natural Resources, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Sixteenth Congress, first session, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (Washington, D. C.:GPO, 2019).

Wilkins, David, ed. Documents of Native American Political Development, 1933 to the Present, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

Wilkinson, A. B. “People of Mixed Ancestry in the Seventeenth Century Chesapeake: Freedom, Bondage, and the Rise of Hypodescent Ideology,” Journal of Southern History, 52 (Spring 2019), 593-618.