Native American History Month

by Abigail Hardison  Rowan Public Library

 

This is a busy time for many of us. Leaves need raking, food needs preparing, winter clothes need to be pulled and swapped out with our flip-flops and tank tops. Election Day, Veteran’s Day, and Thanksgiving and the impending Christmas season can take up a lot of space in our schedules and our minds. But let us take a moment and look out our windows at the majestic fall foliage and imagine what our beautiful land was like a few hundred years ago and those people who made it home first.

November is Native American History Month, and it is easy to see how it could pass unnoticed by all of us. What is now Rowan County was home in a much earlier time to native people who lived, loved, fought, farmed and raised families here. It is not impossible to imagine what their world may have looked like considering the miles of undeveloped farmland and forests still intact in much of Rowan County.

North Carolina historically has several tribes associated with it, and the Cherokee, Catawbans and the Tuscarora are the most well-known. The lesser-known tribe that populated the Pee Dee River Basin from South Carolina all the way up to the Yadkin River was the Cheraw tribe, now considered extinct, but if you find an arrowhead in your backyard, it might be from a Cheraw. All of these tribes are considered to be part of the “South Appalachian Mississippian Culture” which was a loosely interconnected trade network in the Southeast, sharing similar languages and customs.

Here at Rowan Public Library, we have a sizeable collection of materials on the local native peoples in our History Room. Anyone interested can view historical books such as “History of the Old Cheraws” by Alexander Gregg, or “Natives & Newcomers: The Way We Lived In North Carolina before 1770” by Elizabeth A. Fenn and Peter H. Wood. The Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Smithsonian, and the National Park Service are all providing exhibits and collections to celebrate our first peoples this month. More information is available at the website: nativeamericanheritagemonth.gov.

Though the legacy of our Native tribes can be hard to see at first glance, it is important to remember that for many of us, that legacy is within. Part of the reason so many of the tribes are “extinct” is because they intermarried with the incoming settlers, or with other tribes. Many of us do not know that when we celebrate and acknowledge the native tribes we are celebrating ourselves. When we eat many of the delicious foods that we know and love, such as corn, squash, blueberries and cranberries, peanuts and yes, our thanksgiving turkey, remember these are foods that were not on the dinner tables of our European ancestors across the ocean. These foods were shared with us by the first people here, and in the ensuing years they have become ours. Yes, we have heralded many a celebration with apple pies and hamburgers, but it was the squash, the corn, and the pole beans that got us through centuries of long, hungry winters. If our ancestors had not learned how to survive here from those first peoples they might not have lasted very long. Just ask the Lost Colony of Roanoke.

So as we feast this season, take a moment to consider what life would have been like, in that exact spot, three hundred years ago. Your central heat and smart phone would seem mighty strange to those Cheraws that were here back then, but the foods on your dinner plate might seem quite familiar.

New Overdrive website

by Edward Hirst  Rowan Public Library

North Carolina Digital Library recently unveiled a new website and mobile app that will make your experience with digital content from Rowan Public Library faster and easier to navigate.  The redesign includes an easy to understand availability status and links that allow for the ease of borrowing and placing requests for titles that are currently checked out.

Users can continue to use the quick search, advanced search or filters to focus their search among the many different titles and formats available. In addition, there is also a new subjects link that allows users to quickly scan all of the available subjects. A new collections menu facilitates exploring the library’s featured content. Search results are easily sorted by date added, relevance and many others. While browsing the collections menu you can use the media tabs to sort by the following formats: ebooks, audiobooks, video and magazines.

Audience filters allow users to set account level filters for certain audiences while browsing or searching. For example, parents may want to limit their children to only be able to view Juvenile or Young Adult titles with this filter.

Borrowers can now browse and search the library’s entire digital collection on any device. Previously any title that didn’t work on the device you were using at the time was hidden from your view.  Now you can borrow or place a request on any title, no matter where you are or the device you are using.

Users can now sign in to NCDigital Library with a library card number, Facebook account, or Overdrive account.  Just make sure you sign in the same way each time on that device.

Borrowers can choose the lending period for a single title right from the title details page if they want to shorten or extend the loan without changing their default lending periods.

When borrowing a title from its details page, you'll see a button suggesting the best way to get that title on your device (whether that's opening the title right in your browser or adding it to the OverDrive app).

Visit https://ncdigital.overdrive.com/ncdigital-rowan/content or http://www.rowanpubliclibrary.org to experience the new Overdrive.

Moving to Canada

    by Jenny Hubbard  Rowan Public Library

The election is over—hooray!—so for some of you, it’s time to learn about a little about the literature available to you in your new adopted homeland of Canada. 

The heavy hitters there write fiction.  Alice Munro, arguably the most masterful short-story writer alive or dead, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. (Unlike Bob Dylan, she earned it.)  The only Canadian-born-and-bred author to win it, Munro grew up in rural Ontario, where most of her stories are set.  Razor-sharp, vivid, and often astonishing, these stories concern themselves not with what happens but the way it happens, and why.   What takes some novelists hundreds of pages to say, Munro can crystallize in twenty.  Her story “The Found Boat,” which I read thirty years ago, haunts me to this day.

Equally haunting is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a dynamite dystopian novel.  Although it first appeared in 1985, it has garnered recent attention because with The Donald holding the reins, the vision Atwood lays out seems entirely plausible   A prolific writer, Atwood has won every award, it seems, but the Nobel.  Her latest endeavor, Hag-Seed, published last month, is a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with Prospero as an artistic director of an Ontario theatre director.  (Check out the New York Times review by fellow Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel, whose own scarily realistic dystopian novel, Station Eleven, imagines a world devastated by a pandemic.) 

But of course one of the reasons you are moving north is to seek sources of hope and light, not doom and despair. Perhaps no Canadian author is more beloved and optimistic than Lucy Maud Montgomery, whose Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908, is one of the great classics in children’s literature and one of my personal favorites.  The sunny and irrepressible Anne Shirley brings nearly 150,000 tourists annually to Prince Edward Island, where most of the Anne books are set.  I have, in fact, been there, and it truly is idyllic, so if you haven’t yet chosen your new home and you’re fond of lobster, church suppers, and starry night skies, you might want to investigate the smallest of Canada’s provinces.

Although I’ve know Anne Shirley since I was ten, I’ve only recently met Chief Inspector Armand Gamache.  His creator Louise Penny (who scores extra points from me because she’s a dog rescuer) has written a dozen best-selling mysteries featuring Gamache, head of homicide, who resides in the village of Three Pines, Quebec.  Though it looks peaceful, Three Pines roils below the surface with dark and deadly secrets. If you start with the first one, Still Life, you can track Gamache’s small victories and inner struggles through A Great Reckoning, Penny’s latest.  Her books, smart and satisfying, are also nice way to bone up on your French, which you’ll be needing if you choose to set up shop in Montreal. 

So many male Canadian writers, too, are worthy of your attention:  Robertson Davies, Yann Martel, Douglas Coupland, Michael Ondaatje.  Thank you, Canada, for not building a wall to keep your southerly neighbors out.   

Leaf Crafts

 by  Amy Notarius  Rowan Public Library

Fall is the time to check out the leaf crafts in the children’s book Look What I Did With a Leaf! by Morteza Sohi, available at Rowan Public Library.   Sohi uses leaves of different shapes, colors, and sizes to design leaf animals.  Sohi shows you how to make everything from a mouse to a lion out of different types of leaves.  He begins with photographs describing the different shapes and sizes of leaves, from round or fan-shaped to wavy-edged or pointed.  Sohi describes how to collect and prepare the leaves for the leaf animal projects, and then lists the other materials you will need. 

He even includes information about the life cycle of a leaf and a field guide to identifying different leaves, so there is a lot to learn while you’re having fun creating your leaf animals! 

Crafty T-Shirts by Petra Boase shows children how to create a fun item they can wear.  Boase begins with an illustrated glossary of materials you will need, including fabric paints, paintbrushes, fabric glue, and tracing paper. Then she offers tips on using fabric paints and explains how to make and use templates and stencils.  Boase provides illustrated step-by-step directions for each t-shirt. The t-shirt designs are fun and unique, ranging from crazy spirals to outer space and sea life themes. 

In Easy Bead Crafts in 5 Steps Anna Llimos shows children how to create jewelry and other items with beads. In addition to necklaces, bracelets, and rings, Llimos uses clay and beads to produce a great-looking peacock. She also shows how to make a bookmark, a belt, flowers, and more.  These illustrated projects have clear and simple directions that are easy to follow. 

An adult’s help may be needed for certain parts of the projects described in each book. Get creative with these and other great craft resources available from Rowan Public Library.