My Ancestors Are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting In Extinction - by Ron Riekki

About the Book

Book Synopsis

In My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I am Melting in Extinction, Ron Riekki presents a collection of non-fiction, short stories, and poetry about the Karelian- and Saami-American experience.

In true nomadic fashion, his writing takes the reader to Kuusamo, Utah, Berkeley, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Lake Mohave, Yosemite, Karelia, and a hazmat facility where all the animals on site have been forgotten.

A mix of Anselm Hollo, Gregory Orr, Eric Torgersen, and Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, Riekki's writing forces the Saami-American voice to be heard, a voice that some might not even realize exists. It does. Furiously.

Review Quotes

"Exploring the deep call of a Saami blood line, Riekki couples wonder, spirit, loss and anger in skilled poetry and gripping prose, all laced with North--the place where the water is--as a force of identity. His multi-genre collection will absorb readers with the power of both a totemic story and the deep lyricism of a lost people. He is perhaps a reindeer, and if you follow him into this book, you may, briefly and purely, enter their world." -- Anne-Marie Oomen, author of Love, Sex and 4-H (Next Generation Indie Award for Memoir); Uncoded Woman, a collection of poetry; and co-author of Lake Michigan Mermaid

"In My Ancestors Are Reindeer Herders And I Am Melting In Extinction, Ron Riekki's Saami-American voice gives shape to the questions that haunt all of us. The book begins with a shriek and a howl and a warning about human-made dangers, including radiation, prison, war, metaphors, and suicide. He then teaches us to pay attention to things that can seep into our souls. He asks us to think about what we have allowed to become endangered and tangled. As he writes around themes of survival and identity, he recognizes the way language, love, and listening can be antidotes for the stress of needing to un-know what the world has become. In his poems and stories there is pain but also dancing beneath the blinking stars, across land we know is medicine, knowing not every hunger can be satisfied and somewhere there are still reindeer herders circling the arctic." -- Margaret Noodin, author of Weweni: Poems in Anishinaabemowin and English

"With his latest collection of verse and prose, Ron Riekki depicts a compelling and powerful new vision of Sámi America, a hidden landscape of nonrecognition, intersectional identities, and Indigenous ways of being threatened by the modern world. Riekki's raw, confessional verse is reflective and fresh, like the stirring breath of thawing earth in the spring. Within this world of displaced Indigeneity, of culture fragmented and reconfigured, we are surrounded by ghosts--metaphorical and literal--that live alongside us in a poisoned world on the brink of collapse. Staring unwaveringly into the deep uncertainty of a present not of our own making, Riekki begins the arduous work of resisting extinction by building new futures from the fragments of the past, listening to the whispers of ghosts, carried to us beneath the chickadee's wing, on the back of the brisk winter wind." -- Dr. Tim Frandy, Assistant Professor of Folk Studies at Western Kentucky University

"To write with full knowledge of all sides of your being--not just sing with it, but cry out with it, and yes, yell with thousands of your ancestors when needed...Ron Riekki has done this. To fight daily for the existence of your people through the war on words, Riekki is in the thick of the Indigenous struggle. Loss of language, culture, pain of boarding schools...Indigenous is Indigenous." -- Sally Brunk, Keweenaw Bay Indian Community-Anishinaabe poet, writer, and storyteller, author of The Cliffs: Summer Soundings