Violet Duncan is an author based in Mesa. She has published four books illuminating the Native American experience through a variety of lenses.
But while her first three books were picture books, her latest is a young adult novel about a Native woman reckoning with the legacy of the residential schools program, which separated generations of Indigenous children from their families.
The book is called “Buffalo Dreamer,” and it tells the story of Summer, a young girl who begins having dreams about a runaway from a residential school. As Summer begins to recognize the connection between her dreams and her own family’s story, her understanding of herself and her community is transformed forever.
Duncan got the idea for the book in 2021, when she was quarantining at home with her children. That spring, news broke that the remains of over 200 children had been discovered at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada.
As Duncan recently told The Show, she felt completely bowled over by the tragedy.
Full conversation
VIOLET DUNCAN: And my children were like, right in my face, “Why are you crying? What’s going on? What’s happening? What are you reading?”
And I’m like, “Oh my gosh. Give me some space.” And I had to explain to them what I was reading and why it was making me sad. And they were like “Residential school? Why would they have to go? And what did they do there? And what happened to them?”
And after I kind of explained in kid version, the horrific things that happened to those children, I just slipped in that my father went, so saying “Your mooshum attended. You câpân — aka your great grandmother — attended. And I didn’t expect that to blow their minds and be like “What!?”
They thought this was like hundreds of years ago. And I was like, “Yeah, your grandfather did go through this. And this is why he’s sensitive to certain topics.” Yeah. So that’s kind of like what inspired it.
SAM DINGMAN: Wow. So one of the most compelling elements of the book for me is the way in which the elders in Summer’s family, they sometimes drop hints about what they’ve been through in terms of their experience at the residential schools. But there’s always a bit of tension that Summer feels about how much it’s OK to ask about, and whether or not it’s going to be something that they want to talk about.
But then there’s also this idea that the story needs to be told so that the younger generations in the family will know that this really happened. Is that a dynamic that you had to navigate with your parents and grandparents?
DUNCAN: And still do, yeah. And instead of saying tension, I would say caution, that we never know what is going to be triggering. And when our relatives are triggered, it sometimes takes weeks to heal because there's been no real healing work.
And so when we do want to talk with them about it, you designate the day to spend with them. We’re not going to visit kookum from 2 to 4 and ask her about storytelling. It’s like, “All right let’s bring food. Wherever she needs to go — whether she wants to go garage sale shopping, she wants to go grocery shopping, she wants to go pick sweetgrass — That’s what we’re going to do.” And as we spend the day with her, we could ask the questions. And if this question arises, you know, that will naturally come.
DINGMAN: Yeah, that makes sense. I have some experience in asking folks in families about traumatic incidents from their past because of a previous project that I worked on. And one of the things that I remember being difficult about it is that these are the kinds of things that people aren’t equipped to just give you a succinct, coherent narrative about, because these are memories that oftentimes they’ve either repressed or been compelled to suppress.
DUNCAN: Yep. And that was also a part of it, because my kids would say, “Can we ask Mooshum what happened?” And I would say, “Sure. How do you want to ask him?” And that would allow them to think like, “Yeah, how do I want to ask him?”
And so when they did talk to him, I saw when they found their moment. And it wasn’t like when it was ideal, like in the morning with his coffee. It was like when they were brushing the horses, “Mooshum, did you used to ride a horse when you were a little boy?”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah.”
“How little were you?”
“Oh, I started riding when I was 12.”
“What about when you’re my age? You know, 8 years old, 7.”
And that would kind of prompt him to say. “Oh, OK. Well, when I was 7, that’s different.”
DINGMAN: Oh, so that was without coaching. You just kind of said go spend the time with him. And all you gave them was the encouragement to think: How do you want to ask? Just to even think about that question.
DUNCAN: Yeah.
DINGMAN: Do you remember how you began to receive this, this history for yourself?
DUNCAN: Well I was really lucky. I learned about residential school probably when I was in grade two. And that’s because both of my parents were in university, and they were pursuing their fine arts master’s. And so they were writing scripts, and they were using historical stories to share in those scripts. And they would always have a scene that was the residential school scene, and it would be a nun or a priest cutting a child’s hair, and everybody kind of in the same uniform.
Most of these plays were unscripted. So it was all through dance and movement and music. And so it was up to your own interpretation. But I was privy to the director, my mom, and I’d be like, “What is happening? What is that?” And, grade two and grade three, I remember my mom saying, “That’s a residential school. That’s where kids were forced to go, like your dad.”
DINGMAN: Right. But there’s this interesting way I’m just realizing, as we’re talking about it, that your parents were creating somewhat fictionalized expressions of their own history in the form of these dances, and now you’re kind of doing the same thing in creating this fictionalized version of your experience of approaching the understanding of this truth with caution.
DUNCAN: Yeah.
DINGMAN: So there’s a real throughline there.
DUNCAN: You know, I never even saw it like that because when I was writing it, I didn’t know what I was doing with the story. All I knew is that it was healing to write it down. And it’s so parallel to my life.
Honestly, my dad ran away from the school a lot of times. Oh wow. And one was a particularly terrible blizzard. And he told me about that time, and I think they were walking for like five hours, him and a friend, and they were really confident that they were going to get home. And finally a car came and they were like, “Oh, finally we can get warm.”
And the car picked them up. And it was the priest. And they turned around and sent them right back to the school. And I was like, “What if he got away?” And so this book was like, what if? What if he made it home?
DINGMAN: Wow. I have to say reading — I don’t think this is giving away too much — there is a blizzard scene for a runaway in the book that is extremely harrowing to read. And so hearing that it's based on a true story just sort of undergirds the emotional experience of reading it.
And one of my favorite scenes actually, in the book that to me illustrates this is this scene where I believe it is Summer’s parents who go to see an elder in the community named Kookum Rose. And Summer has been having these dreams where this story of one of the other elders of the community is is being revealed to her, but she doesn’t know how to make sense of it yet.
And so Kookum Rose looks at Summer and she says, “You have a visitor.” And she can tell that Summer has been having these — I don’t know if she literally knows it’s dreams, but she can tell that something is going on.
Can you tell me a little bit about how you came up with that scene? I think it’s my favorite scene from the whole book.
DUNCAN: Thank you. It’s one of my favorites as well, because — surprise! — Kookum Rose is inspired by my mom. My mom, her name is Rosa. So that’s Kookum Rose. My mom has this emotional intelligence where she just — and I’ve met a couple other people like that who just, you don’t have to explain yourself. They just get it.
My mom constantly has tea on the stove, ready to pour tea. Anybody who comes up the driveway — we have a long driveway so we can see who’s driving up for a long way on the rez — and we’re, “Oh, somebody is coming. Put the tea on.”
It’s always been a safe place to come to my parents’ house. Whether you’re a kid, an elder teenager, a naughty one. That was the safe place to drop in. And sometimes it would be like “Something’s bothering me. Nobody believes me.” And my mom was just like, “I believe you.”
