An Enchanting Story Cycle Traces Tales of California Indians from the Missions to Modern-Day, Recalling Timeless Truths
Award-winning author and long-time tribal chairman Greg Sarris debuts an incantatory new fiction collection rooted in the ancestral homelands of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo.
“Greg Sarris once again tells us a story filled with stories that lift the spirits in troubled times. A wonderful read that transports us to a realm of beauty, kindness, and love of life.”
—ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
BERKELEY, CALIF. — Celebrated storyteller and tribal leader Greg Sarris offers a contemplative and enchanting story cycle in The Forgetters (April 2024), a collection that blends into an unsuspected harmony shimmering dream trance with waking life, human and animal forms, and eras bygone and still-to-come. Borrowing from the cadence of Native American creation stories and the quiet enchantment of magical realism, these tales combine to reveal the foibles and folly that beset us and the lessons that recall us to ourselves and the world.
The Forgetters excavates multilayered tales of California’s Indigenous exiles, camp workers, shapeshifters, and medicine people as they interweave with the paths of settlers, migrants, and other wayfarers across the arc of recent centuries and beyond. Narrated by the enigmatic crow sisters, Question Woman and Answer Woman (who first appeared in Sarris’ 2017 How a Mountain Was Made—lauded as “a stunning array of […] contemporary allegories” by the Los Angeles Review of Books), this collection returns to Sonoma Mountain and traverses the homelands of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo. Rooted in today’s Marin and Sonoma counties, these transporting tales glimmer with an intimate connection to place and past—from ancient mythic time when all the animals were people to a speculative future when the people return as environmental refugees to the mountain from which they came.
“Greg Sarris once again tells us a story filled with stories that lift the spirits in troubled times,” says Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. “[The Forgetters is] a wonderful read that transports us to a realm of beauty, kindness, and love of life.”
This collection of tales, interwoven with the memorable banter of the crow sisters, chimes a moral chord that reminds us why we need each other, that all our stories are connected, and that the words we remember become the words we live by—and to forget them is to risk peril. Heralded as a “fine storyteller” by former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, Sarris’ latest is a triumph of craft that showcases the enduring power of story to make and remake our world anew.
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Greg Sarris is an accomplished author, university professor, and tribal leader serving his sixteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and his first term as board chair of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. His political activism in the 1990s culminated in the Graton Rancheria Restoration Act, which he co-authored, providing federal recognition and associated rights to the Coast Miwok and Pomo Native Americans of California, including the restoration of land to the Tribe, which had been without a homeland for over fifty years.
Sarris graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English from the University of California, Los Angeles and received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford. He has taught English, American and American Indian Literature, and Creative Writing at UCLA, Stanford, Loyola Marymount University, and Sonoma State University. Currently, he serves as a member of the Board of Regents for the University of California and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sarris is also a producer, playwright, and the author of several books, including the award-winning How a Mountain Was Made (2017), Kirkus Book Prize finalist Becoming Story (2022), and Grand Avenue (1995), which was adapted to an HBO film, co-produced by Sarris with Robert Redford. He is co-executive producer of Joan Baez: I Am A Noise (2023) and his most recent play, Citizen (2023) debuted at San Francisco’s Word for Word theater and was lauded as a “lush […] linguistic feast” by the San Francisco Chronicle.
