Episode 286: Hingepoints and Speculative Fiction (with B.L. Blanchard)
/We’re joined by author B.L. Blanchard to imagine a North America without colonization. We talk about map-making as world-building, returning home, and dancing the rice.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of murder, imprisonment, colonization, climate change, death, heart attack, and estrangement.
Guest
Brooke Blanchard, who writes under the name B. L. Blanchard, is a graduate of the UC Davis creative writing honors program and was a writing fellow at Boston University School of Law. She is a lawyer and enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. She is originally from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan but has lived in California for so long that she can no longer handle cold weather. Pre-order The Peacekeeper today!
Housekeeping
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- Recommendation: This week, Amanda recommends The Anti-Racism Daily newsletter.
- Books: Check out our previous book recommendations, guests’ books, and more at spiritspodcast.com/books
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Sponsors
- Calm is the #1 app to help you reduce your anxiety and stress and help you sleep better. Get 40% off a Calm Premium subscription at calm.com/spirits.
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Transcript
AMANDA: Welcome to Spirits Podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends, and folklore. Every week, we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. I'm Amanda.
JULIA: And I'm Julia.
AMANDA: And this is Episode 286. With Brooke Blanchard, Brooke, welcome to the show!
BROOKE: Thank you so much.
JULIA: We're very, very excited to have you on and to talk about your book which just came out if you're listening to this the day of its premiere, the Peacekeeper. So Brooke, can you to kind of entice our listeners, obviously, if they're listening to this, we want them to go pick up the book, can you give us a little summary maybe a little teaser so that they– they get a little taste?
BROOKE: Oh, absolutely. It's an alternate history novel. And it's set in the present day, it's technically set in 2020, but in a different 2020 than we experienced in our timeline, and it set in a world where North America was never colonized. And it takes place in the Great Lakes region. So it's a an Ojibwa nation that kind of surrounds the Great Lakes. And it takes place in two parts. One is in what we know is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is where I'm originally from we know it as Sault Ste. Marie. In the book, it's called by its original name Baawitigong and then the rest of it is set in what we know is Chicago or Shikaakwa, as we call it in the book. And it involves a detective in that small town whose mother was murdered 20 years prior to the events of the novel and his father had confessed to it and received the harshest punishment available, which is imprisonment, Chibenashi, our hero has been raising his younger sister ever since. On the 20th anniversary of her death, which is on the night of the Manoomin harvest, her mother's best friend is also murdered. And it is it happens in such a way that it looks like there may be a connection to his mother's murder. And so he doesn't want to go to Shikaakwa, he likes his small town. Shikaakwa is where his father is Shikaakwa is where the woman who broke his heart now lives. But he goes there and so we see sort of an indigenous major city in the year 2020 had things played out a bit differently. And so that is– that is the Peacekeeper. And the Peacekeeper refers to his title, which is what police officers/detectives are called in that society. They're called Peacekeepers.
JULIA: This sounds like such a cool book, I guess, a great place I feel like to start is speculative fiction is always a really interesting topic for me. And I think it requires so much like both historical context and also a very like fictional literary mind. What kind of got you into the idea of speculative fiction in the first place?
BROOKE: I think like a lot of people, especially when I was younger, and as in for me, in particular, around 2016, the desire to escape into another world is a very strong one. And for building up a world that's never existed before from your imagination, and one that I think maybe even fills a gap that you have in your own life or just is something you can hook on to and fantasize about, I think that's very powerful. And so for me, I just love immersing myself in a, in a world that isn't real, whether it's a magical world, or like the Peacekeeper is not a magical world, but it is a very different one. And that's just always very fun for me. I mean, when I wrote this book, I spent a good year, maybe a little longer just thinking about what the world would look like. And that was a lot of fun. It was challenging. If you're looking for a thought experiment that will occupy you for a year imagining a world without colonization is really one I can recommend. So yeah, I think that's– that's a lot of it's just the– the immersion and the– the what if and, you know, thinking about all the possibilities, I think that's always really exciting.
JULIA: I mean, I gotta know, in a thought experiment of what a never colonized North America looks like, where did you start?
BROOKE: I started first with one building, that the whole world grew from me thinking of I was driving to work there, there were high rises around me because I was in downtown, and I thought I just kind of saw one that looked like it had a dream catcher in almost like a cathedral window, except it was like a dream catcher. And I thought that's interesting. And I started with sort of an alternate history, we refer to it as the hinge point, the point at which our history and the alternate history diverged from each other. Well, the one I have is about 500 years ago. So I first started thinking how it would develop went down a bunch of rabbit holes, does that mean there's no colonization period? Does that mean that there's just not colonization in North America? And I thought about it in a lot of different ways. And I eventually just thought, you know, here's what I want it to look like. I want to see, you know, a 21st-century city with a majority indigenous population, what does that look like? And there are indigenous cities throughout the Americas, but many have been lost to history, you don't tend to hear about them in school. So I also sort of based on what some of those known ones look like, and just kind of went from there and thought, what would be interesting to me and what would be interesting to learn about. So that's– that's kind of where I started from, as I initially started thinking, well growing it organically. And then I thought, No, I'm going to start from the endpoint, what do I want it to look like, and go from there.
JULIA: That's such an interesting place to start. And then also having to think about how the rest of the world interacts with it. And I love the idea of like, is just North America not colonized? Or is the whole world, there's no colonization, that's such a like, I can see why you spent a year on it. I can imagine spending a decade on it, you know what I mean?
BROOKE: Oh, yeah. And if I let my I still think about it, and there are, you know, things I was right, I've been, I'm in the middle of writing the second book in this universe, and it's set in Europe. And so think about what Europe looks like, without having that and I settled on, there's no colonization anywhere. So what Europe looks like is very different and the map looks very different from what we would know. So it's, it's fascinating to think about.
JULIA: So I know you are a big fan of maps, can we talk about your love of maps a little bit?
BROOKE: Helps are so much fun. Yes, absolutely.
JULIA: I mean, does like, this love of maps kind of play into creating speculative fiction, like do you picture the maps of the land in your mind as you're starting to kind of form what the world looks like?
BROOKE: Oh, absolutely. I think if you're creating a speculative world, I think a map is essential. And I almost get a little disappointed if I don't have one in a speculative fiction or fantasy book I'm reading because I want to know where things are.
AMANDA: Totally.
BROOKE: Even a real history book, I like to have a map. So I can kind of orient myself. Peacekeeper does have a map, I hand drew a map that took almost as long as writing the book did to create, and it's without borders, North and South America, I didn't think they would have actual borders. But it shows nations and peoples in their rightful place in their own land, not having been removed. It's written in their own languages and that was very moving. But I was also struck by how challenging it was to find accurate, you know, sources of information. And I mean, it's not wasn't terribly challenging to find it most nations, you know, have information about it, but finding the primary source for it, you know, and then trying to figure out who to which nations to show and which ones not to, because I can't show all 570 Odd nations just in North America alone, it wouldn't fit. So yes, looking at the map was really essential in order to figure out, Okay, what's their source of power? What's their energy resource? You know, obviously, the weather, how do they heat their homes? How do they provide air conditioning? What crops are they living off of? How much interaction do they have with other nations, I decided there'd be a pretty vast travel network, both abroad and domestically. What's the transportation system like, you know, this nation is across the entire Great Lakes region in our world that encompasses a number of states in two different countries. So it's a large area. And so I settled on basically a bullet train would go from place to place. So the geography is very important in determining that.
AMANDA: I love it.
BROOKE: Yeah. You know, settling on the European side, you know, figuring out where borders would be drawn is another thing I'm working on because in that book, people are going from, you know, physic, you know, actual border drawn country to actual border drawn country, but the borders are in very different places. So thinking about that, you know, N. K. Jemisin, one of my favorite authors, she talks about this in a masterclass she teaches about how to develop a speculative world, knowing the geography is essential because that will determine everything, it can determine the politics, it can determine where the societal fractures are. And I thought that her statement on that was really, really accurate and kind of spoke to why I think maps are very important. And they're important for understanding our world too. Seeing where people are where our borders, I studied geography and college, you know, it's so much more than where capitals and borders and natural resources. It's what if you have a natural resource? What do you do with it? Do you export it? Do you keep it? It can, you know, impact your wealth, it can impact if you go to war with someone. It's I think it's fascinating.
JULIA: I absolutely love that. One, we don't talk a lot about how geography and history are so intrinsically linked. And that's why maps are so important. Did you have like, a moment where you're like, I yes, maps. This is my jam now.
BROOKE: Yes, absolutely. And that was one of the one– of the first things I asked when speaking with my publisher is can we have a map? Because I've drawn one?
JULIA: Yes.
BROOKE: And I want to show it to everybody, like a little kid. [9:48] really look at the awesome map that I drew. But I do think it's important, you know, especially in an alternate world, first off to show the diversity of native societies in the Americas. There's, you know, amongst some people, there's a thought that this is a monolithic culture, just say Native Americans, and you're done. And it's very, very diverse. It's very rich. And so I wanted to show just visually, this is a world that's very different. Another thing about the map we put in the book is it is going to look sideways compared to what we typically think of it's orientated toward the East, as opposed to toward the North, because that's the Ojibwa. The East is the focal point, it's not the North. And if you dig into this a little bit, Eastern-oriented maps were the standard until around the 13th/14th century across a number of societies. So fun, nerdy thing I discovered in doing– in doing that.
AMANDA: I didn't know that.
BROOKE: Neither did I.
AMANDA: But it makes sense. I mean, I would orient my map toward where the sun comes from, that makes total sense to me.
BROOKE: Exactly. That's exactly the reason behind it. I think maps are fun, I can look at them all day, Maps can visually show so much history and what's important to a society and can share a lot of information very quickly if you're, you know, if you just spend some time with them. So maybe I need better hobbies but I think maps are fun.
JULIA: No, I think maps a good hobby.
AMANDA: No, this is perhaps the most obvious insight of ever sharing a podcast but maps are world-building, right?
BROOKE: Yes.
AMANDA: Like maps are literally doing the project of constructing how we see/view divide the world. Like they are statecraft, they are political project they are cultural messaging, like maps are, are truly where it all begins.
BROOKE: Correct and I think what you leave out of a map is almost as important as what you put in it. So like I said, we don't have any borders in this world. And I thought that was very important because this is about people. This is about nations. This is not about drawing a circle around a piece of land and saying this is ours. That's not the perspective I wanted to show. So it's more focused on who lives there as opposed to what patches of land they claim ownership over because that's just not– not the perspective that I wanted to come from– from with this. But then in the second book I'm writing we got very disputed borders everywhere.
JULIA: Obviously, I would love to talk about maps for the rest of the episode, because this is such a fascinating conversation. I feel like I don't get to geek out about maps as much as I should.
[midroll]
AMANDA: Julia, welcome to the refill.
JULIA: Amanda, thank you. What have we got today? What snacks are we- are we snacking on what- what are we doing?
AMANDA: Well, I have made a sort of like house pickled Giardiniera. I like to call things that I make it home- House made like house made Bread House made pickles just because I made in my house and I think it's really fancy.
JULIA: That's true.
AMANDA: So today we have some pickled cauliflower, radish, carrot, and cucumber.
JULIA: I love it. Amanda, I'm like really excited because one day I'm gonna have like a real like big garden in my backyard, and then I can make pickles for the winter, and now you're just making me even more excited for that.
AMANDA: Yes, yes, yes, kind of green beans in there. So much to do. But first, Julia, we have to just like how you fertilize your garden every day. We are metaphorically and like financially supported and enriched by the people who choose to use their human dollars to support an independent podcast that they value on Patreon. So thank you to the many many hundreds of you who do so specifically those whose rewards include getting mentioned in every episode, Uhleeseeuh, Anne, Daisy, Froody Chick, Hannah, Jack Marie, Jane, Jessica Stewart, Kneazlekins, Lily, Little Vomit Spiders Running Around, Megan Moon, Phil Fresh, Captain Jonathan MAL-uh-kye Cosmos, Sarah, Scott, and Zazi. and those legend level patrons Arianna, Audra, Bex, Clara, Iron Havoc, Morgan, Mother of Vikings, Sarah, & Bea Me Up Scotty.
JULIA: You know that feeling? Amanda when you find a new leaf on your beautiful, beautiful plant that you have in your home?
AMANDA: Just my favorite feeling.
JULIA: That's how I feel when I hear those patron names.
AMANDA: So good. So good.
JULIA: Now Amanda, what have you been watching listening to reading lately? What's– what's been keeping your interest?
AMANDA: Julia, normally my recommendations include things that bring me joy that helped me escape that sort of distract me from the world. But that's not always what I need and something that I have found a lot of meaning in over the last couple of years and learned a lot from is the anti-racism daily newsletter at the-ard.com. And I've recommended this on the show several times before I recommend it all the time to anybody who will listen, I support them on Patreon and they are an incredibly important and instructive resource. And if like me, you are feeling helpless and overwhelmed and like you know there is nothing you can do to prevent tragedy or to make things in the world better. I ensure you, I insist that you can. And every single issue of anti-racism daily newsletter includes concrete steps, whether it's signing a petition, making a donation, learning something, having a conversation with somebody in your life, and they are providing an incredible free resource. So go ahead and sign up learn and support them financially if you can.
JULIA: Absolutely. And I second that. It's a really great idea. It's a great newsletter and I feel like anyone would benefit from signing up for it.
AMANDA: Totally.
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JULIA: I would love to kind of talk about your background growing up kind of the– the stories that you heard and like learned about when you were younger, would you mind sharing a little bit of that with us?
BROOKE: I have to share it. I wasn't really raised within native culture. I'm originally from the Upper Peninsula from Sault Ste Marie, which is where part of this book is set. But we moved to California when I was I was about six, and I haven't lived there since I'm very much a Californian in a lot of ways. I can't handle any cold weather, it's about 55 degrees here in San Diego. That's nothing short of apocalyptic. I didn't meet my father's side of the family and my Ojibwa side until I was almost 20. So I just grew up very disconnected from it. And I wish I hadn't. It's a shame that it worked out that way. I've connected with them since and we now have a very close relationship. Yeah, I grew up, you know, learning about a lot of the folktales that kids in America grew up listening to all the Disney ones, the Grimm fairy tales, all of those. And I was always a very, very voracious reader. So I started reading adult books when I was about 9 or 10. And boy, and I learned some things. Just definitely was part of the Oregon Trail generation who never had any supervised reading time.
AMANDA: Oh, yeah.
BROOKE: I was always drawn to the stories where there's a lot of depth in the world. And where you know that what's in the world, what you're seeing on the page is, you know, only a sliver of what's actually going on, and you feel that there's more of a history, and you feel that there's more of a world than you're actually seeing. And that's always really, really appealed to me. And I always try to think which ones have are the books that I think are movies that I think about long after I finished consuming them. And it's ones where I get to think about the world beyond what I saw on the page, what's happening to the characters, where are they going, imagining, you know, new parts of the world that you didn't see. And so that's, that's always been very, very interesting to me. And that's what I love is a book where you see it on the page, or you see it on the screen. But you can imagine so much more because you've been given enough to kind of take it and run with it and think about your own or you can think about more than what– what you've seen.
AMANDA: To put it in map terms, it's beyond the board. It's beyond the edges of the map, right? Like, what– what goes on there.
BROOKE: Exactly.
JULIA: I 100% feel the Hey, I was reading stuff that probably wasn't appropriate for my age. I like historically, I've said on the podcast many times that like I read Edith Hamilton a little bit too early. And I remember a distinct conversation with my mother being like, "What's a virgin?" and her being like, "I don't know how to tell you this. We haven't had that talk yet."
AMANDA: Well, and I think a lot of us too, turn to fantasy in those times. I know for me before young adult was really a genre or certainly middle grade or anything like that in bookstores in the mid-90s. Looking for those kinds of things. It was like Tamora Pierce, it was Diane Duane. Like, it was all of the kind of fantasy books are my parents were like, seems fine, probably dragons. I doubt their sex in that. Well, usually not right. But they're– they're at least like fantasy kind of existed, at least for me. And that's why I found myself kind of drawn to those kinds of books when I was young.
BROOKE: No, I think that's a good point. And I was, I think more on the science fiction side than on the fantasy side. I remember I think I read Jurassic Park 10 times before I finished elementary school.
JULIA: Wow.
BROOKE: And a lot of it went over my head, like I have to emphasize a lot of the science went over my head. But I don't know, there's just something so engaging about it and so interesting about and it's still one of my favorite movies, still one of my favorite books, you know, because dinosaurs probably has all the explanation we need for it, but just sort of seeing, you know, I loved learning. And again, a lot of it went over my head, but sort of how you came up with the idea to genetically engineer dinosaurs and how they're created and where they're created, that there's a lot of detail in the books about that, that they don't really go into in the movies, and I absolutely love it.
JULIA: The prologue of that book is just explaining what corporate espionage is. So I'm just picturing, you know, grade school you being like, yes, yes, but where are the dinosaurs?
BROOKE: I knew they were coming. I knew they'd be there eventually. But yes, I mean, that there's a whole lot of stuff that you know, as a little kid, you're exposed to sort of the dark side of the adult world. And as far as you know, violence and sex, there's not I mean, it's safe for the dinosaurs coming after people. There's not a ton of it in the book. So it's almost like a really good one for a kid to start because a lot of what I think parents might find objectionable isn't really in there. But there are other things that you know, it does open your eyes to and I think it's, you know, my attitude is, I have two kids, if you can read it, you can read it. I'm not, you know, not police anything. And I hope, you know a lot of kids are still reading things they shouldn't, I don't know that I would be thrilled with them reading some of the Jackie Collins books I read when I was around 11. But, again, if they can read it, they can read and I'm here to answer your questions.
JULIA: I also feel like there's probably a little bit something to the idea that a lot of people consider fantasy and science fiction as soft and therefore, like, not adult, you know what I mean?
BROOKE: Yeah, and I could not disagree with that more, we need stories as adults, as much if not more than kids do. I don't think it's soft at all, there's no greater way to shine a light on the truth of our world than to create a different world and either show it explicitly or by can, you know, say you have a portal fantasy or someone's going from our world to another one and can directly compare the two or even one we're, you know, you just kind of show the difference more subtly. You know, in my book, no one at any point says, "Boy, wouldn't it have sucked if people from Europe had come over and colonized and committed genocide? Boy, aren't we lucky that didn't happen."
AMANDA: Yeah, why would they think that that was an option for any human being to [26:13] another?
BROOKE: I think so. So it's a world where colonization didn't happen. But instead, you do see through the way the world is built, you see what you see the similarities, but you also see the differences. You know, it's been interesting for me to see what some early readers of the book have said about it. I remember one of the first things that they drew as interesting. So one person who was read one of the very first people to read– first people to read an early draft said, you know, I, in one of your early pages, you show a character using their cell phone, I just love showing that in your world, but Chippewa have cell phones. And I just wanted to say, I'm a Chippewa with a cell phone. That's not-
AMANDA: Yeah.
BROOKE: -news. But they're, I think what it does, you know, if any part of you know, showing indigenous people in a technologically advanced society sounds odd, that's how most of us live. We live in the year 2022 like anyone else does. And most of us live in cities, I think, you know, the majority of us by a lot, I don't even think it's close. So I know, in my tribe, it's about 70:30 70% of our tribe lives outside the tribal area, and I don't think we're an outlier. So that's, I think, what's really, you know, a really good way for speculative fiction to show us some truths, if you're seeing in a book that indigenous people are using technology and that's news to you, you know, maybe that's a good opportunity to learn about how indigenous people live in our real world. But I also think it shows possibilities, you know, how things could have gone very differently, had history turned out a bit differently, you know, climate change is not a concern in this book, the book doesn't really get into it. But in my world building, I decided a few nations were heavily reliant on fossil fuels, but the majority were not. So that's where I think it can, it can be interesting is to just sort of show the difference in, you know, hope that people make, make the connection. And I think most, you know, most readers do, showing people the difference between our world and the world of a book, or, you know, any other medium where it's a fantasy world or a speculative world, anytime you– you show subtle differences, and you can and if people are thinking about it and experiencing it, that's, I think, only a positive thing, because we all I think, especially now need an escape from the real world. And it can, I think, give you possibilities and ideas of how the world could be different.
AMANDA: What is that experience like for you emotionally, in writing and building out this world? I would assume that there is a mix of, you know, kind of, it's thrilling, you know, it's optimistic, it's escapist. But there must be a moment to or perhaps many moments of, you know, grief, regret, like anger at the fact that these worlds are in your imagination and not- not in your live reality.
BROOKE: I keep fantasizing that, I'll have an opportunity to jump into this world. I'm sure we've all felt that in any book we love. But I've certainly felt about books that I didn't write. I mean, I'm sure I'm not the only one who figured out which Hogwarts house I'd be in and stuff like that.
AMANDA: I always look at the back of the wardrobe. I know. It'll never have a portal, but like maybe Mr. Tumnus is there.
BROOKE: Exactly, exactly. So in terms of anger or grief, we spend a lot of time in the criminal justice system in this book. And my background is as a lawyer, I don't do criminal law. But that's my background. And one way the story is very personal is my own father has been in prison for parts of my life. So I have some firsthand experience that our hero does, which is, you know, a parent who's been incarcerated. And I reached out to some of the elders and were members of my tribe to find out what did the pre-Columbian justice system look in our tribe and no one really had any insight for me so I modeled it after Navajo Peacekeeper courts, which to be clear is a very is a different culture, different nation. But in the absence of anyone saying, here's what we did, I thought, Okay, here's what I'm going to create. And it's very much based. It's a mediation system, it's not a punishment system, it's tailored. So you're it's a system where everyone sits in a circle. So it's not like you have a judge presiding over two sides who are facing the judge not each other. And it's in a circle, and the goal is, how is someone hurt? And what would it take to help make them whole? There's what is not factored into this at all is how do we punish this person for what they've done? That I think has been a huge missed opportunity in a lot of justice systems around the world. You know, before I went to law school, I worked as an auditor for the State of California, I, I know you're very jealous, and because that sounds pretty exciting.
AMANDA: I am a spreadsheet lady. So I, you know, a part of you–
BROOKE: Okay.
AMANDA: –speaks to a part of me.
BROOKE: I definitely did my fair share of spreadsheets. But I also worked on audits of prisons in– the in California. And so I spent, I've actually visited quite a few of the prisons in California as part of my audit work. And in law school I worked for or interned for, I should say, a nonprofit that helps prisoners exercise their civil rights. So I've been to quite a few in Massachusetts, where I went to law school, I even now do quite a bit of pro bono work for the Innocence Project. So I'm, you know, this is a world I'm very familiar with, and just what breaks my heart is that so many people you actually meet in the prisons, they're very nice, they are humans, they want to call their family, you know, so many have been so wronged by society, or their families or the police and I think seeing the human side of that is very difficult. And I think it's always been easy for me to do, just because one of my parents has been in that system in and out for a lot of my life. So I think the anger I've really felt in writing the book is, this is the justice system I want to create, where it emphasizes making people whole, it doesn't punish people, lock them away, create a system where it's going to be very difficult, if not impossible to find a job, you know, you kind of get that that scarlet letter on you for a lot of your life. And that I think is such, that's, you know, if there was only one thing I could change about society, that's pretty, pretty high on the list. And it was one of the first things I wrote into this world is a much better justice system. And again, it's emphasizing on, you know, encouraging people to take responsibility, rather than assigning it and, you know, figuring out what would make someone whole, and we don't factor in the punishment. In fact, we fairly early on in the book we see in a mediation completely unrelated to our characters, and it's the sort of thing that would probably land someone in jail in our world. And instead, you know, they arranged what would make someone what would make the most sense. And that's it, that's the end of it, and someone wants, you know, is pushing for even more, and they're reprimanded by the mediator, which is the role of judge who says, "That's not- we're not here to punish people don't- don't try to do that. That's against everything that the system stands for and it was– it was important for me to, to emphasize that."
AMANDA: Totally. And to your point, I think that, you know, will leave a lot of readers thinking, why isn't it this way? How can I look for opportunities in my own life to ask reconciliation instead of punishment, or to assume that a infraction against another is from a place of need, or being slighted in some other way, and not necessarily a bad intent? And I think that it is, you know, as you said, so often through stories and through fiction that we come to recognize kind of the scaffold of state building in our own lives and kind of ask what– what was the intent and the project and the aims behind the things that we are raised to think of as normal?
BROOKE: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, so much of what's in the book, I had to really pause and think, wait, where is this coming from, for example, how time is handled? You know, I thought, wait a minute, hours, seconds, those are constructs would that be used in this society, in terms of how we, you know, a day is a day a year as the year those are set by, you know, the rotation of the earth and, you know, revolutions around the sun, I can't do a whole lot about that. But how do we break down weeks or months, you know, so I dove into what other societies done, I learned that in France, right after the French Revolution, they try to institute a 10 day week, because they're trying to base everything on as well as a breakdown hour, the day they're trying to base it on the metric system that didn't last obviously. But to see how you know where things come from, and how would you break it down differently. No, I'm not advanced enough to create my own timekeeping system, but I was trying to be very conscious of not putting in things that I didn't think would be there, but for colonization. Similarly, first few lines of the book are the date written in, I think it's six or seven different calendar systems. This is a world where I think you'd have sort of regional dominant ones and then local ones, but I didn't think that you'd have the same Gregorian Christian calendar used worldwide the way it is today.
JULIA: That- that seems fair.
AMANDA: No archaic daylight savings that make kids go to school in the dark, no?
BROOKE: There's no daylight savings in this book.
JULIA: At the time of recording, we're like a week away from it not being Daylight Savings anymore. And thank God, let's just say. Earlier before you talked about how when you were around 20, you kind of reconnected with your Ojibwa side of the family. Can you kind of tell us a little bit about that experience? Like, if that's not like, too personal? Because I know that's probably like a very personal, maybe emotional experience for you?
BROOKE: No, not at all. When I was really young, my dad became estranged from his family from really from everyone except his mother. And we grew up seeing her she would come out to California and visit us. And that's always when you heard the real stories, in every– every sense. And she was a really cool, really cool lady, she lived to 95. And when I say lived, I mean lived, she went to every party, every graduation, every wedding.
AMANDA: Wow.
BROOKE: And I'm convinced the secret to her longevity was she just didn't want to miss a thing. And she passed away about five years ago. But when I was about 19, she had a heart attack and very nearly died. My thought was, oh my gosh, if we lose, and you know, you never think anything's going to happen to your grandparents, right? Because they've been in your lives for so long. But I thought, oh my gosh, if she had died, I wouldn't have like, that's it, I lose that connection to my family forever. And so I decided I wanted to go to we call it the up the Upper Peninsula, were they everyone come outside the family still lives and I want to meet them and my family, my dad especially was they were completely supportive of it. And I was nervous about it just I didn't think I knew that it would go well, but you know, it's still nervous to go do it and getting to, they live in a very remote part of the UP, It's called Gould City. You know, if you're going you can fly into an airport in the UP, but even if you fly up there, it's still good, you know, two, three hours from any airport, even a small one. I flew into Chicago and drove up along Lake Michigan, all the way up there and it's a gorgeous gorgeous drive and the topography the trees in the UP, just they're very distinct from anywhere else I've I've ever been. There's a great mixture of birch trees and different types of pine trees. And it's kind of hard to explain that just it's very, it's like, yes, you're in the Upper Peninsula now. The- the way it looks, and it really felt like it was kind of calling me home. And I got there and I hadn't been there since I was probably five or six. And I, you know, I had I was I think just a week or so away from turning 20 When I went up there and it felt like I'd never left and that's kind of the attitude everyone had is good, you're back, sit down. Let's catch you up. And one person in particular, my Uncle Jim, he was a Chippewa elder and he was also a nature photographer. He had a gallery, he's taken some of the most beautiful pictures if he has one that's famous in the UP called the Thunderbird where it's a lightning strike. But it's very clearly a bird outline and the Thunderbird is very important part of Ojibwa culture. And he just he had some off road vehicles and he said, Let's go explore together and just took me everywhere and told me family stories and showed me everything and it was just it was such a wonderful, wonderful experience and I'm so glad I did it. My sister reconnected with them a couple years later. So my aunt and my grandmother had houses right next door to each other for pretty much their whole lives since my aunt moved out, she got married moved next door, there was one house behind them on the same little block, my dad bought that one while still not speaking to his siblings. So they all live in very close quarters to each other close enough that you can open one window and you know have a conversation with someone. So now he lives up there and has for, I guess about 15 years now. So all the Blanchards are back in the up where– where we belong.
JULIA: Awesome. I love that for you guys. That's- that's fantastic.
BROOKE: My advice to people who are nervous about reconnecting with family who want to it's, I thought that risk was was worth it. It was worth taking the leap and it's been a very rewarding relationship.
JULIA: I had one more question kind of regarding the book. It's both a book question and also a Ojibwa question. You mentioned in kind of the– the summary of the book and also when you were talking about earlier Mahnomen? The Mahnomen Harvest. Can you tell me a little bit about that? I think it's a wild rice, am I right in that?
BROOKE: Yes, it is wild rice
JULIA: Okay.
BROOKE: And it's the only rice that grows naturally in North America. If you read any Ojibwa history, the history is that they were you know they started on the East Coast and moved west until they found the grain growing on the water which is Mahnomen and stopped and lived there ever since. The harvest time was and still is an event. You harvest it by taking some canoes out into the water and using a couple of long sticks to take the husk the grains off of the stems And then come back and you separate them by what's called dancing the rice. And I have, you know, some video of my dad doing it. So that's what I based it on, it was a much smaller gathering than appears in the book in the book, you know, the whole town does it. And it's a huge, huge holiday for the entire nation. But in this one, he's it with a group of about, you know, 10/12 people, and you lay some here, they're using tarps, or, you know, in real in our world, we use tarps. And on some very soft moccasins, you dig a little hole, you put the tarp on top, you put the Mahnomen in a couple long logs to hold your balance, and then you kind of dance on it, you stand a new kind of shift your ankles, and you do that to kind of separate the husk from the grain, and then it goes into a barrel with some heat to further separate it. And then you sifted around, and you've got, you've got the rice, you know, It's not something that you it's not ceremony, it's not, you know, but it is something that I thought, oh, this is this is a good tradition to show everybody and it's still practice today. Like I said, I modeled this based on, you know, my dad sent me some video of him doing it. And it happened, you know, in the late summer, which was also, I thought a good thing to show because I wanted to start the book in the summer in that part of the world, because it's just so beautiful in the summer. There's, you know, three, four week period where just you know, the sun is out very, very late till probably 10 at night, there's fireflies, there's just everything is so beautiful. I don't go back there in the winter. I want to end in the dead of winter, when it's again, I've lived in California too long to be able to handle a lot of snow. But that I thought was really good introduction to the world to some tradition. But also I wanted it to be something that is still practice now and still done now. And so yeah, I thought that would be a fun thing to show.
JULIA: Food is one of my favorite, like things to talk about, both in world building and in culture. And like culturally significant food is one of like, my favorite, like, not anything I ever studied, but something I always wanted to study being like, oh, yeah, you know, that's why olives are so important in Greek tradition and why it was the gift that Athena gave and the naming of Athens, like, you know, that kind of thing.
AMANDA: Harvest and food prep is also you know, it's sort of the– the mundanity of daily life, right? Where like, you know, of course, you have like a special tool you use and the song you sang or the you know, the– the technique you use for doing it and technology. One of my friends recently, it was like, what do you call the motion when you swish the rice on her Instagram story? She's a caterer and chef. And there were, you know, dozens of responses from people all over the world of like rice-based and not rice-based cultures being like, Oh, yes, it's Swish, it's washed. It's agitate. It's swirl. It's finger dance. It's all kinds of things because it's, you know, something that we're all familiar with.
JULIA: Yeah.
BROOKE: Oh, absolutely. And I think it's one of the best ways you can connect with someone you've never met before. I don't think it's, you know, coincidence that a lot of introductions happen over lunch or dinner, you know, or that's the suggestion and it's just a good way to connect with people is eat with them, offer them some of your food and you know, they'll offer you some of theirs and I just, you know, who doesn't love food? I love food.
JULIA: Who doesn't love food? And the thing that we also love all these podcasts, obviously, is cocktails. Do you have a favorite cocktail?
BROOKE: I love spicy margaritas.
AMANDA: Yes!
JULIA: Join the spicy margarita squad though.
AMANDA: So good.
BROOKE: So good. Yes, it's got jalapenos in it, if it's got tajin on the rim, I'm all in, so.
AMANDA AND JULIA: Yeah.
JULIA: Oh, God.
AMANDA: So good. I've done like a sumac salt sugar combo for a rim recently which I got. I know. I'm like super crossing like cultural streams here. Like the fruitiness of it, I think goes really well with– with the spicy margarita vibe.
BROOKE: I'm gonna have to look- try that. That sounds amazing.
AMANDA: I recommend it.
JULIA: Yeah. I haven't really played around with sumac that much Amanda, you're gonna have to show me next time I see you. Thank you so much for being on the show. Can you tell people where they can find you on the internet and where they can pick up The Peacekeeper?
BROOKE: Absolutely. So you can find me on Twitter @blblanchard. That's my instagram handle is @blblanchard_writes. I also have a website, blblanchard.com. And you can find The Peacekeeper anywhere books are sold. Please do pick up a copy of this looks interesting to you. It's out from 47North and it's my work is published under B. L. Blanchard
JULIA: And we're so excited and so glad that we got to talk to you about it and listeners. Remember, go pick up the book, and as always remember–
JULIA: Stay creepy.
AMANDA: Stay cool.
[outro]
AMANDA: Spirits was created by Amanda McLoughlin, Julia Schifini, and Eric Schneider with music by Kevin MacLeod and visual design by Alison Wakeman.
JULIA: Keep up with all things creepy and cool by following us @SpiritsPodcast on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. We also have all of our episode transcripts, guest appearances, and merch on our website. As well as a form to send us in your urban legends and your advice from folklore questions at spiritspodcast.com.
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JULIA: Thanks for listening to Spirits. We'll see you next week.
AMANDA: Bye!
Transcriptionist: KM