Geronimo After Kas-Ki-Yeh Book

Rawdon Tomlinson?s Geronimo after Kaskiyeh tells the story of the famous Chiricahua Apache war shaman who, after his family is massacred in 1851, makes revenge the driving force of his life. The Chiricahua suffer loss of genocidal proportions. In later years, Geronimo dreams his people are the sun that will not rise again. The ordinary and the extraordinary events of his life and those of his tribe unfold from the Southwest to Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma, where the tribe is held as prisoners of war until 1913. There, Geronimo harvests watermelon with his family, herds cattle, washes dishes for his sick wife, drinks, feeds the cat, sits for his portrait, appears at world expositions, and dies asking for more bullets to kill Mexicans. Woven into this story of the quotidian and darkness is the Chiricahua LifeWay, its emphasis on family, its humor, its spiritual strength, and its ability to meet hardship with honor. Tomlinson's moving collection?bolstered throughout by remarkable historical accuracy?is a meditation on the meaning of family, a cultural identity suppressed, the consuming desire for vengeance, and the theft of human dignity. I get 25 cents for each button I cut from my coat (I sew new ones on between stations); I get $2.00 for an autographed photo: GERONIMO printed in a schoolboy?s labored, shaky capitals; I get $5.00 for my hat (a shaman?s with mirrors will run you five times that); I get $15.00 for a bow and arrows not even mulberry, but you won?t know. You buy everything I make and come back for more, fists clutching cash, hands out for a souvenir, something to prove you?ve seen whatever it was you thought you saw. I too hunt memories . . . no shapes appear in a wind I cannot hear of my homeland or my children in the hole running all of the way through me through the world. "The Tiger of the Human Race" published in Geronimo After Kaskiyeh by Rawdon Tomlinson. Copyright © 2007 by Rawdon Tomlinson. All rights reserved. AUTHOR BIO: Rawdon Tomlinson is the author of the poetry collections Down Under It All, Touching the Dead, Deep Red, and The Line. He teaches creative writing, most recently at the University of Colorado at Denver, where he lives with his wife and their three daughters.Read More