A Tale Of Two Heroes
By Kathleen Eagle
This is one of my favorite covers. Sunrise Song is a serious story, and this is a serious guy. It’s also a Romance. The heroes–two for the price of one–are irresistible. The title fits the story, which is romantically uplifting. And the setting is wild and wondrous. It’s all here, on the face of a work of fiction, the proverbial lie that tells the truth.
Years ago my husband, Clyde, participated in a conference that featured a presentation on Hiawatha Asylum For Insane Indians in Canton, SD. It was operated by the government from 1903 to 1935, when a new administration investigated it and shut it down. Clyde–who is Lakota grew up on the South Dakota side of Standing Rock Sioux Reservation–had never heard of any asylum for “insane Indians.” We were intrigued and decided to drive down to take a look. The buildings were long ago replaced by a community hospital adjacent to a 9-hole golf course, which surrounds the burial place for at least 121 asylum “patients,” whose names are engraved on a single memorial. A golf tournament was going on around us as we read the names, and a ball dropped over the fence. I could almost hear the ghosts laughing.
I think those spirits helped me come up with an idea for a story. It would invite readers to walk in Indian Country with two sets of flesh-and-blood characters in a story that tugs at the heartstrings, at once gritty and hopeful, as women’s fiction is wont to be.
Researching the place proved challenging. Nothing had been written about it. Back home the elders who remembered hearing of the asylum said people spoke of it in whispers back in the day for fear of “being taken away.” You didn’t have to be insane, they said. Just uncooperative. Maybe you were as traditional as your grandparents, and you“spoke Indian”or you ran away from boarding school. I needed to know all that and much more. Both sides. With the help of a librarian at the SD State Library I got copies of old reports from their historical files.
In the years since we did our research, the site has been added to the National Registry of Historic Places. Sunrise Song was favorably reviewed in the Canton SD newspaper. And I received a letter from a woman who grew up in Canton. Her family lived close to the asylum, parents worked there. They admired Dr. Hummer, the supervisor of the asylum, who was fired after the D.C. administrators got around investigating the program. The letter writer said she’d read my book, and she was deeply moved. She remembered visiting with patients–inmates, really–through the fence. And now she wondered whether anything her parents told her was true. She couldn’t ask them. Her father, a local farmer hired to manage the asylum’s farm, and her mother, a cook, had long since passed away. Now it was my turn to be deeply moved by someone who was there, and who was able to look back at her own story and turn the coin over, really look at the other side. She thanked me for writing Sunrise Song.
Fiction is written to entertain, but it can do much more. It can allow us to walk the road less traveled wearing the shoes of someone living in a place among people we know little about. Books, books, books–surely you are the salt of the earth.
Happy reading!
Kathleen Eagle
Sunrise Song by Kathleen Eagle is only $0.99 until the 31st! Find it on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google, and Apple!
