ALL STORIES
LIKE LOCUST OUT OF DIRT
Originally published as Like Grasshoppers in the Sky in Oyster River Pages 6.1
The U.S. Army threatens Dakota and Ho-chunk relations of a white fur trader circa 1827.
EPA WANTS COMMENTS ON TREATED SEEDS BY DEC. 11
Tell the EPA to prohibit neonicotinoids as seed treatments. Save bees, birds, water, food health.
CONTROL PESTICIDES, NOT PELICANS
Clinton Telegraph Herald Nov. 3, 2023
Pesticides like neonicotinoids endanger the Mississippi River, not the consumption of fish by white pelicans.
OWL’S MYTH
Weber: the Contemporary West Spring/Summer 2023
Mystical owls battle for the nature of the Mississippi River and America’s soul.
INDIAN PICTURES
HEArt Online: Human Equity Through Art August 15, 2013
Inspired by Seth Eastman’s paintings, his Dakota wife Stands Sacred and Doctor Charles Eastman at Wounded Knee.
RIVER SUN WARBLERS: A MYTH
Pushcart Nomination: American Athenaeum, Front Porch Edition Spring 2013
The animals and birds danced inside the core of the Earth, scorching their feet on hot crusty rock, thirsting, chanting in the dark. They rested, and Thrasher heard the sea seep from the rim way above. He sang the song of two tiny warblers, those we call the prothonotaries today…
BOATHOUSE LIFE: MEMOIR FROM A FLOATING HOME
The first 5,000 words…
I dreamt I lost my home, my boathouse on the Mississippi, on election night, November 3, 2020. The wrong presidential candidate led in electoral votes as I climbed the ladder to the sleeping loft…
BOATHOUSE PHOTO GALLERY–1
Richie moves into a boathouse on the Mississippi in 1987. His sweetheart Barbi moves into a boathouse next door in 1988.
BOATHOUSE PHOTO GALLERY–2
Richie’s boathouse life continues, faithfully documented by Barbi Bell’s photos.
CITIZEN SCIENCE AND NATURE’S SOLACE
Red-headed Woodpecker story in MINNPOST, November 2, 2021.
“Red-headed woodpeckers have declined 95% in Minnesota since 1970, the largest loss in any state or Canadian province…North America has lost 29% of its birds since 1970, according to a study published in the journal Science in 2019. The continent’s population has dropped by 2.9 billion adult birds…”
FIRST TERRITORY: Editorial comments, opening excerpt
Sunstone Press 2013
The Indian who claimed to own the Umatilla ferry was nowhere along the bank, and I wondered out loud if the governor was the kind to bristle at a delay, but Dominique merely nodded at two canoes poking from beneath willows.
Reviews of First Territory
In Whispering Wind Magazine and Old West Book Reviews
In 1855, 16-year-old Andrew Eaton agrees to the Washington territorial governor’s offer of five dollars of gold per day to act as interpreter at a mandated Walla Walla treaty council…
Indigenous Writers Illuminate History with Pride, Resilience
La Crosse Independent November 11 2020
I give thanks this holiday season especially to Native American writers who open their hearts in their works, who have enlightened me with truth-telling and…
SPIRIT MOON: SNEAK PEAK OF THE MISSISSIPPI BEHIND US
From Richies river novel
The morning we’d found Heron Quill sweating and shivering in her bark house, I showed Spirit Moon a jar of quinine, the fever treatment all fur traders used in 1820. But she stared at my cedar stethoscope instead, as if it held some sacred power like the medicine stone…
REVIEW: THE ROAD BACK TO SWEETGRASS, DANCE BOOTS BY LINDA LEGARDE GROVER
Whispering Winds Vol. 43 No. 4 Issue 296
Linda LeGarde Grover of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwa joined the ranks of the world’s great novelists last year, publishing The Road Back to Sweetgrass. She renders the boarding school era and reservation era as powerfully as…
REVIEW: IN THE NIGHT OF MEMORY, Linda Legarde Grover
Whispering Winds Vol. 43 No. 4 Issue 294
Linda Legarde Gover of the Boise Forte Band of Ojibwe has written another masterful novel of Indian life in northern Minnesota, In the Night of Memory. She dedicates the story to “missing Native women and all who grieve them.”
Wetlands Book Review – Wading Right In
April 18th, 2020 – Katy Haas
Ever dreamt of saving turtles squashed on highways? Of creating clean water and carbon sequestration? Of undoing the havoc humanity has wrought upon nature? Then read Wading Right In. It interprets…
Wings of Native America
Western Birder 2/5/2001
If silent and void of activity, the sheer, pink rock wall of Frijoles Canyon at Bandelier National Monument might have been evocative enough…
Bicycling the Oregon Coast
Oregon Coast Magazine July/August 1994
The first residence of the Oregon Coast I met was not in Oregon at all. The year was 1978. I had come west for the first time…
Of Murres and Men
High Country News November, 2002
Thirty thousand birds called common murres stand in penguin-like suits atop a single sea rock, crammed as tightly together as commuters on a bus. All drone tones…
THE MISSISSIPPI BEHIND US: EXCERPT FROM A NEW NOVEL
The Mississippi Behind Us depicts a white fur trader and his Dakota wife on the upper Mississippi circa 1819-1828, while Indians hotly contest the new nation’s claim to the river’s wilderness. Read an excerpt!
Bea’s Bench Trempealeau Refuge
Red-headed woodpeckers, Covid-19 – Wisconsin State Journal, April 19 2020
This commentary appeared in The Wisconsin State Journal, La Crosse Tribune, Winona Daily News and Red-headed Woodpecker Recovery Project Newsletter during spring 2020
A Walk Through a Flood of Song
Breeding Bird Census, upper Mississippi River, Gloria Mundi Press, April 22 2003
In June in southern Minnesota, the pearly gloss of dawn creeps across the Mississippi about 4 a.m. A mile wide, the river easy slowly…
Cerulean Warbler: Down But Not Out
Birder’s World – June 1998
The song came from the top of a cottonwood tree towering through a small gap in the dim, green light of the forest canopy…
Red-Shouldered Hawk
Birdwatcher’s Digest, January/February, 2004
The Stubby gray shape hung two or three inches over the edge of the nest of sticks and was absolutely motionless. The nest was deep in a floodplain forest…
Wood Thrush Deep Woods Serenade
Birder’s World, June 1997
A sudden burst of notes leaped into the dusk, a flute-like “ee-o-lay” followed by a slower, bell-like trill. The song echoed against a steep hill across a creek…
TURNING NO-MAN-LAND’S INTO A NATURE PRESERVE
Story copyrighted by Big River Magazine, Pamela Eyden, All Rights Reserved
The preservation of Aghaming’s nature and Richie’s involvement, courtesy of Big River Magazine May-June 2018.
THE TROUBLE WITH BECOMING AN AUNT: INERTIAL GUIDANCE, AN EXCERPT
Excerpt from the Year 2000 Peace Writing Award
I did not understand until my late twenties that my father had created geometric equations that had been translated onto super-light cards that had raced through a miniature computer in the nose cone of an atomic missile…
FROZEN RIVER WALKS
The Mississippi River Revival sponsored newspaper columns and winter walks, advocating for the protection of Aghaming Park and Preserve, 1,000+ acres of wetland (backwater) habitat used by the red-shouldered hawk and other declining wildlife species.
PASSENGER PIGEON WALKS
The Mississippi River Revival sponsored newspaper columns and spring walks, advocating to protect Aghaming Park and Preserve, 1,000+ acres of wetland (backwater) habitat used by the red-shouldered hawk and other declining wildlife species.
Breeding Bird Censuses – Bottomland Hardwood Forest
Breeding Bird Censuses Mature Bottomland Hardwood Forest Winona, MN 1993, 1994, 1995, 1997, 2000, Totals.
Breeding Bird Censuses – Mature Upland Forest
BREEDING BIRD CENSUS RESULTS, 1996
EAGLE BLUFF WOODS – PERROT STATE PARK – TREMPEALEAU, WISCONSIN
Conservation Vision Winona Parks
Conservation Vision submitted to the City of Winona’s 2018 Comprehensive Parks and Recreation System Plan, by the Winona Bird Club’s Conservation Committee.
Bluff Traverse Input
March 3 2020 by CONSERVATION COMMITTEE OF THE WINONA BIRD CLUB
The Winona Bird Club’s Conservation Committee thanks the City of Winona for commissioning the Bluffs Traverse Conservation and Recreation Area Natural Resources Management Plan…
River Bird Blog
The frozen Mississippi readied itself to thunder. A wailing whine rolled slowly from the direction of the Wisconsin bank, where cottonwoods 90-feet tall sometimes provided summer-nest habitat
Prairie Island Input
Letter to City Council & Mayor, April 10th, 2021
We’d like to share information about Prairie Island Park and its exceptional biodiversity. We believe Prairie Island needs a conservation destination…
FLYWAY TRAIL EXTENSION: CONSERVATION CONCERNS
Letter to Environmental Assessment Team of Great River Trail Extension of Flyway Trail 4-26-2022
Invasive thistle. Loss of buffer strips and visual shields for wildlife. Run-off, sedimentation. Loss of pollinator plants. Additional disturbance in a roadkill zone. Trail will lead wildlife to a roadkill zone. Regulating E-bikes.
THE TROUBLE WITH BECOMING AN AUNT: THE SIN OF SAYING NO, AN EXCERPT
Excerpt from the Year 2000 Peace Writing Award
The girl smiled a weak smile at Pepe, and I knew my brother, he would not see any sickness in that moony look he got. He saw the shine in the girl’s eyes and believed it was a twinkling for him.
2000 PEACE WRITING AWARD: NEWS ARTICLES
Newspaper articles about The Trouble with Becoming an Aunt, the Year 2000 National Peace Writing Award for an unpublished novel.
Rinehart’s Beach
Fall 2011. The Contemporary West
I shot the otter during the evening tide, and he thrashed in kelp, and when the moon finally rose, and he didn’t washup, I figured his mate had carried him like a pup…
The Howls Behind the Waves
SNReview Summer/Spring 2013
I knew my mom died having me, but Auntie never said anything about my dad, and I about hoped out my heart, hoofing it beside the surf, expecting a letter from him. Every day the mail was due, I climbed Náah Rock and looked up the beach…
Otter Jack
Gloria Mundi Press website 2002
Any other day Valerie came running through the stumps, knocking down fireweed and foxgloves, I would have thought a yardline had snapped or a rigger had fallen or some, new, chain saw had run itself across a faller’s leg…
Salvaging
Bancroft Library listed Salvaging in Finding Aid to the Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies Records 1972-2012
A window crashed apart, and fire leaped through the shards, leaped up the frame, and I waited behind Auntie, watching through the doorway as little flames raced across the front-office floor, and she bent to her switchboard…
Removal
Poydras Review Winter 2012
Keekwillie played behind a hanging mat, smelling camas cooking in sweet grass, the hunt in his head so real he didn’t hear the rain against the cedar-plank roof or the bustle outside. He pretended he was a spruce cone in the little canoe…
So Hard Pull the Insides
Alligator Juniper Spring 2003 – Finalist, Alligator Juniper National Fiction Contest
Even though the salmon were coming like hell, and I was sliming like mad, I got a full look at her as she climbed the ladder to the gutting table. She turned out to be the most stoic beautiful woman I ever met–I was twenty-three…
Spirit Birds
Some of Richie’s stories involve “spirit birds” who inspire characters and plots with wisdom and loveliness beyond the human world and beyond human perspectives. Story
The One Above the Bottoms
Pushcart Nomination, Prick of the Spindle Magazine, Vol. 7.1, March 2013
The river this late afternoon seemed to prove Nathan right, and the pilots, log rafters and keelboat men wrong. Mid-April already, and the channel looked smooth from up at the cabin, glistening a muddy milk-brown, silvery-blue, sunny, rosy-toned…
Eden Never Heard
Wilde Literary Journal Fall 2013
He knew of a bench of shoreline upriver in Minnesota Territory, a town-site opening, Sioux Prairie, and he said he needed men to preempt and hold claims until Congress ratified a treaty that would secure the Mississippi’s west bank from Dakota Indians.
My Fancy and Fuss
Magazine of History and Fiction Issue 4 December 2019
The fog swallowed the Mississippi thick as a forge’s smoke, and silent as the slither of the serpent that led me to my fancy and fuss—Spirit Moon, Chief Rattling Wind’s daughter. One moment the river yawned before us, a trail of blue-gold sunlight calling me to the fur post I was to open one-hundred miles upriver…
INJUN JOE AND PRINCESS WENONAH
Thirty-First Bird Review, Summer 2010
Crane gnawed at the skin of a dead bat, sucked the bones and fur, and Tom and Huck shouted outside the door, and Crane did not know if the boys were real, beguiling him…
Creator Bird
Raven Chronicles Vol. 13 No. 1 2007
As soon as the tide got low enough, I snuck away from Ma and Pa and the fish nets, and I crossed the mudflat and saw my creator bird. I climbed way up Oystercatcher’s rock and laid me down, and she bobbed frantic on her ledge beneath me, flashing flaming-red rim…
Tide and Sorrow
Ginosko: between literary vision and spiritual realities Spring 2003
Though the World was very new, Raven watched the beach from a spruce that was old and dead, towering as bare as a bone atop a cliff. Raven knew hunger, and he felt lust, but no tide had washed the shore yet…
How the World was Stolen
Mobius: The Journal of Social Change Winter 2003
Sun as she set toward the sea made the song inside him strong, but Tune was hard black rock, basalt, and his song did not come out. His member swelled for ten thousand years, stretching across the ocean…
Cycle of Life: a novella
Falling in love with endangered lives
I leaned my bicycle against a big yellow backhoe, and flute notes whirred up the scale, airy and then musical and reedy and fast, ringing with the same frenzied chords…
