East Lansing author and law Professor Matthew Fletcher has taken bits and pieces from his life and consolidated them into his first collection of short stories, “Stick Houses,” which he hit out of the park.
Fletcher, a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, is a noted expert on Indigenous law and has been a professor at the University of Michigan since 2022. Prior to that, he taught at Michigan State University for 16 years.
His new book, published by MSU Press, contains 12 short stories that revolve around modern Indigenous culture and involve themes like land loss, alcoholism, reservation life and intergenerational trauma resulting from families being broken up. Fletcher observed many of these things happening to his own family and friends and deftly worked them into his clever, funny and often heartbreaking collection.
The title of the book even has a backstory. In his preface, Fletcher tells how his mother, who worked at Grand Valley State University, would be approached by well-meaning researchers who would ask her where she grew up and what kind of homes she lived in. He writes: “They wanted her to answer wigwams and teepees. She would tell them every time they lived in ‘stick houses.’ Indians living in stick houses didn’t fit a narrative these researchers wanted to believe. It appears.”
Dispelling longstanding narratives like this is something Fletcher does well without being heavy handed. In fact, he does it with aplomb and humor.
“Knuckle Curve,” his tale of a high school baseball team, is a gem of a sports story laced with some biting incidents experienced by the three Native Americans on the team. The author resurrected some of the stories from his days playing backyard Wiffle ball and high school baseball.
In “Truck Stop,” he writes about George, a lawyer like himself who’s in search of his lost daughter. George flies to North Dakota to meet with a young woman he believes to be her. The story is set in a typical expressway truck stop and will tug at your heart.
Fletcher’s stories often contain tales of the loss of family members who were sent to Indian boarding schools like the notorious Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School or Holy Childhood of Jesus School in Harbor Springs. It seems every Native American family had at least one of those breathtaking losses.
Fletcher’s great-aunts were snatched and sent to an Indian school; his grandmother only escaped the same fate because she had tuberculosis.
The author said he grew up in a traditional family with two parents, but he calls that “the eye of the hurricane.”
“All around us, folks were going to prison, being adopted out, there were suicides and addiction,” he said.
One of Fletcher’s most ambitious short stories is “An Iranian in De Gaulle,” which is based on the phantasmagoric and somewhat well-known story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who took up residence in France’s Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years after allegedly losing his papers. Nasseri’s plight was the topic of numerous documentaries and the movie “The Terminal,” starring Tom Hanks.
Fletcher, who was at the airport during Nasseri’s residence, deftly recreates conversations between Nasseri and airport goers and occasionally slips Indigenous stories into the tale.
Fletcher’s short stories were written over decades, and when he resurrected them to polish them for publication, he said he “didn’t recognize the person I was when I wrote them.”
“I started them when I was 25 and had just graduated from law school, and I wanted to be a creative,” he said.
Fletcher said he has two more writing projects underway.
“I’m always writing,” he said.
One is a novel set on a campus with a law school and is seriously dystopian. The other is a graphic novel centered around the wendigo, a horrific cannibalistic creature of Native mythology that roams the world, and a teen warrior girl who is sent out to destroy it.
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