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http://archives.seattletimes.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?storyID=38b00fa24&query=native+american

Copyright © 1999 The Seattle Times Company
Entertainment News : Sunday, February 20, 2000

'Storm Riders' tells of a father's struggles with his
son's Fetal Alcohol Syndrome

by Irene Wanner
Special to The Seattle Times

He was uncooperative, willful, stubborn, and careless. He continually forgot
the combination to his locker, he touched other students "inappropriately,"
he was perpetually late to class, he ate his lunch before arriving at
school, he would not stay in his seat, he did not ask questions.

It wasn't so much that Adam did anything so bad, but that he was passive
toward learning, incurious, maddening about his intellectual immobility.
- Michael Dorris, The Broken Cord
 

Michael Dorris's 1989 nonfiction account of raising a child who suffered
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) introduced the public to birth defects the
medical community and government-service agencies were only beginning to
understand. In 1971, when Dorris adopted Adam, a Sioux Indian, few realized
how profoundly maternal drinking could affect a fetus. It's now estimated
that one of four children in Native American communities has FAS-related
handicaps. Many also suffer abuse or neglect. Often hyperactive, with
attention deficits, low IQs and learning disabilities, they require
medications for their entire lives as well as constant monitoring.
 

"Storm Riders"
by Craig Lesley

------------------------------------------------------------
Picador, $24

Like Michael Dorris, Oregon writer Craig Lesley adopted a FAS child. While
Dorris' work was nonfiction, Lesley has based his new novel, "Storm Riders,"
on his challenging parental experiences, lending heartbreaking authority to
his characters' hopes and frustrations.

"Storm Riders" opens in 1977, but the story, told partly in flashbacks,
begins three years earlier, when Clark Woods and his first wife, Payette,
adopt Wade White Fish. Wade is a 6-year-old Tlingit child with FAS. The
couple has come to Sitka for the funeral of the boy's father, also Payette's
uncle, who has been killed in a fishing accident (Wade's alcoholic mother
abandoned him, left their remote village of Angoon on Admiralty Island in
southeast Alaska and vanished).

Recalling his own lonely childhood without a father, Clark feels sorry for
Wade. Although Payette doesn't want children, Clark "thought a child, even a
damaged child, would help bridge the drift he was starting to feel between
them." Because Wade had already been returned from many foster homes, Clark
manages to convince Payette they should adopt the boy.

When they fly to Oregon, Wade pants, licks the window, screams, then cries.
Six weeks later, he "has calmed down a little, but . . . his teachers
complained that Wade disrupted class . . . wouldn't listen or follow
instructions." Nor can he read, tell time or tie his shoes. He feigns
deafness and other disabilities.

However, despite an IQ of 65, Wade has a sweet disposition, which convinces
Clark that the boy will "blossom" once doctors devise strategies to help
Wade learn better.

Even at this early stage, a therapist who is also Native American tells
Clark, "Tribal background is pretty important." She recommends a trip to
Alaskan Indian healers, saying clan bonds, old ceremonies, medicine bundles,
chants and guardian spirits might somehow restore the boy's spiritual
harmony, since "good homes and love may not help enough." But Wade's
troubles began in Alaska, Clark thinks, so for the next three years he
consults specialists, as his marriage falls apart.

By 1977, Clark is living in University of Massachusetts married-student
housing (cynically called "divorced-student housing"). He is now divorced,
having come east from Oregon with his mother, who serves as Wade's
caregiver.

One rainy afternoon, Clark greets another tenant. She's worried: Her
daughter is missing. Later, the child's body is found. Police, noting Wade's
strange behavior, ask if he saw the little girl fall into the culvert where
she drowned. Wade denies seeing her, but his behavior raises troubling
questions.

FAS children have difficulty comprehending cause and effect, so while Clark
prays that Wade would never hurt anyone, chapters that alternate past and
present gradually reveal the boy as both innocently violent and lacking good
judgment.

As investigations proceed, Clark becomes involved with a fellow student,
Natalie Kravtchenko. Wade complicates their tentative romance. At the same
time, Clark finds evidence that makes him doubt his son's innocence.

In the summer of 1978, they go to Chicago, where Clark has a grant to study
Tlingit culture at the Newberry Library. There, he reads about the
destruction of the tiny village of Angoon by the U.S. Navy in 1893. These
once proud and powerful people are Wade's ancestors, Clark learns, and he
considers taking Wade there as advised years earlier.

>From there, the story follows the troubled family as they move back west to
Oregon. Clark marries Natalie and they have a child, but Wade's disturbed
and disturbing behavior continue to defy any solution that will enable the
family to live together in peace.

"Storm Riders" ends in Angoon. In Lesley's poignant conclusion, Wade has at
last found spiritual haven there, and accepting people. Even in this faraway
village, though, drugs and alcohol threaten. Lesley's novel exposes the
mixed blessings when modern life clashes with ancient culture, and the
unconscionable damage so easily done to the unborn innocent as a result.
 

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