Exploring Indigenous Arts: Reading From The Beadworkers with Dr. Beth Piatote

Dr. Beth Piatote reads from her debut short story collection, The Beadworkers, which explores Native American life in the modern world. The stories find unifying themes in the strength of kinship, the pulse of longing, and the language of return: a woman teaches her niece to make a pair of beaded earrings while ruminating on a fractured relationship; in 1890, two young men at college—one French and the other Lakota—each contemplate a death in the family; a Nez Perce-Cayuse family is torn apart as they debate the fate of ancestral remains in a reimagining of the Greek tragedy Antigone. The Beadworkers (Counterpoint, 2019) draws on indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful and sustaining vision of Native life.

Dr. Beth Piatote (Nez Perce enrolled Colville) is associate professor of English and comparative literature and director of the Arts Research Center at the University of California Berkeley.