Thomas C.
The result is a rich reflection not only on one man\'s life but on the transformative power of building a deeper relationship with the natural world..
An acerbic observer--of birds, the environment, the aftershocks of history, and human nature--Gannon navigates his obsession with the ostensibly objective avocation of Birding and his own Mixed-Blood subjectivity, searching for that elusive Snowy Owl and his own identity.
He draws on both throughout this expansive, hilarious, and humane memoir.
He later found similar solace in literature, particularly by Native authors.
Birding has always been Gannon\'s escape and solace.
Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, Dickcissel: such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannon\'s traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mother\'s devastation at racist bullying from coworkers, and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the people and other animals indigenous to the United States.
Gannon\'s Birding While Indian spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author\'s life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains.
Thomas C