Book completed

Made Things, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (or Czajkowski, his real name, as on the copyright notice). A novella. Since the main character is named Coppelia, I expected some relation to the opera named Coppelia, but no. It's a fantasy story about a girl who makes puppets (and is a thief), her friends who are all small homunculi, and the need to right some social inequities in their semi-wizardly city. It was fine, but I'm not bouncing up and down eager to recommend it to everyone. Maybe I'll try some of his other books.

Day 937: Kalapuya talk, book club

Although I woke to very smoky air again, it cleared up by late afternoon! This was great, because we'd already rescheduled book club and didn't want to have to move it again. I was especially looking forward to visiting our host's back yard, which I hadn't seen before, and she has such nice snacks for us (she's from Italy).

First, I went to a talk on campus by David Lewis, an anthropologist at Oregon State. He's a Native researcher studying the Kalapuya people, who are the people who lived throughout our valley before the white settlers, and he's at least part Kalapuya himself. We learned about some of the ecological changes associated with white agriculture, which greatly cut back the wetlands needed to grow wapato, which I'd never heard of, but it's one of the Kalapuya staples, in addition to the tubers from the camas flowers, with which I'm well familiar, and acorns. They also ate deer, elk, fish, and berries, as well as other native plants - including another one I don't know, called tarweed. They are working toward "decolonization," which he didn't define for us until an audience member asked - he sees it as being more fully included in decision-making at the systemic level, and having more rights and access for their people to do things traditionally. It was a very interesting talk and well attended - I'd guess there were 90-100 people, pretty much filling the room.

I drove from there directly to book club. They were interested to hear about the talk; one of the members knows Prof. Lewis professionally as she's involved in several organizations protecting local ecosystems. Then we had a much more thorough discussion of the book than usual (Finding Nouf). We got more caught up on what people's young adult children are doing andd heard a long but interesting story from BHW about having to call the police when someone broke a window at the water treatment plant where she works - she actually confronted the man and was only a few feet away from him when she called the police and was surprised that her intuitive reaction was more "fight" than "flight." Then afterwards, JS and I made plans to get together tomorrow! Yay.