It’s always enlightening to be able to walk in the shoes of another. Dovetails in the Grass is a powerful book that affords that unique opportunity among the Dakota Sioux as they collide with white settlers on the Minnesota prairie in the early 1860s. Samantha Specks’ moving story begins just hours after the tragic real-life execution of thirty-eight Dakota men. This documented historic death sentence is remembered and commemorated by some down to this day, however, to so many others the events surrounding this mass hanging are just another page in a history book. Specks sheds light on this sensitive topic in a tactful and discerning manner, allowing readers to form their own opinions by presenting the fictionalized version of the story from two very different viewpoints.
Emma is a young woman helping her family survive on their farmstead. She is dutiful and respectful, yet she secretly longs for independence with her progressive ideas. Oenikika desperately wants to please her powerful father, but at the same time, her heart and the calling to be a healer pull her in a different direction. The two women are from completely different worlds, one with four rigid walls and the other with her feet planted reverently in the mud of the earth, yet their journey is strikingly similar. The politics of the day and traditional expectations are just a couple of the obstacles these daring women face as their paths intersect in the cruelest of ways.
Dovetails in the Grass is a melancholy piece of historical fiction that is as sincere as it is emotive. Whether you are familiar with the Dakota 38 and the treaty that pushed them away from their nomadic lifestyle or not, this novel provides perspective from a different time in a beautiful and respectful manner. For example, I never considered how cold and sterile a house with wooden walls might seem to a person used to the sturdy familiarity of a well-crafted tipi. How jarring and painful these kinds of adjustments must have been for the natives as their lives and lands were transformed. The powerful story will draw you in, but it is the intimate storytelling that will keep you absorbed as you experience Dovetails in the Grass.
