‘Stealing’ finds its moment - Pasadena Star-News

INTERVIEW

‘Stealing’ finds its moment

Based on actual events, the story of an Indigenous child torn from her family languished for years

Policies of separating Indigenous children from families and sending them to boarding schools are central to “Stealing,” by Margaret Verble, who is of Cherokee heritage. COURTESY OF TIM WALDEN

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By Liz Ohanesian

Correspondent

A decade before Margaret Verble’s first published novel, 2015’s “Maud’s Line,” was named as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, she was still working a day job, trying to get published and working on a book called “Stealing.”

She knew how difficult the process could be, recalling the journey of another of her novels, “Cherokee America,” which won the Spur Award for best traditional Western and appeared on the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2020.

“I had been turned down again and again for ‘Cherokee America.’ In fact, in total, I was turned down about 92 times for ‘Cherokee America,’ ” recalls Verble, who is herself an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, during a phone conversation.

“I realized in that process, and I had some advice on this, that the market wasn’t ready for that book,” Verble says. “When I started on ‘Stealing,’ I sent it out maybe 10 times and I realized pretty soon that the market wasn’t ready for that book either.”

In “Stealing,” Kit is a Cherokee girl who has been sent by authorities to a Christian boarding school despite having a family to care for her. In diarylike prose, she recounts the incident leading up to that decision, as well as the abuse that has occurred at the school.

Verble says the voice of this narrator came to her almost immediately.

“I would have to say that almost this entire novel came to me whole, straight from the sky,” the author says. “That voice was absolutely pounding in my head.”

But still, she faced resistance to her work and the history she was writing about.

“I realized pretty quickly, because of my previous experience with ‘Cherokee America,’ that the people I was sending it to didn’t really understand that I was writing about a real problem,” says Verble.

“I did not know if New York would ever figure that out. So, I just stuffed the manuscript into a drawer. I knew it was a good manuscript.”

Years passed, and Verble’s career unexpectedly took off with “Maud’s Line.”

“Obviously, most first novels don’t get much attention. ‘Maude’s Line’ received very little attention from the publisher,” says Verble. “I was not happy with the way that it was handled. In spite of all that, it was a finalist for the Pulitzer.”

Verble notes her agent told her that being a Pulitzer Prize finalist would change her life, and it did. “That gave me a great deal of credibility,” she acknowledges. “Also, at the time, New York was becoming receptive to stories by Native Americans.”

First, that paved the way for the publication of “Cherokee America.”

“Something that was unpublishable, because the market had changed, was publishable,” says Verble. “It was written the same way it was when it had been turned down all those times.”

She adds, “I think that a lot, in literature, we say it’s all about the writing, but that’s not true. Good writing certainly helps, but you’ve got to have a market.”

Meanwhile, the real-life discovery of unmarked graves at a residential school in Canada shed light on the abuses suffered by Indigenous children in North America as a result of government-funded institutions; more graves were found in January in Ottawa. (The United States Department of the Interior launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative in 2021 to investigate the “troubled legacy” of this country’s own system of schools, which existed from 1819 until 1979.)

With many being made aware of Indigenous boarding schools, Verble mentioned her manuscript for “Stealing” to her agent.

“By then, the market was ready for it,” says Verble, who also wrote the 2021 novel “When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky.” “It was obvious that Native children were in danger and had been in danger for a couple of centuries, frankly, of being taken away from their families and sent out to either government boarding schools or, initially and continually, Christian boarding schools.”

Verble describes “Stealing” as a way of “building a bridge of empathy” toward the young people who were taken from their families and suffered from abuse in these educational systems.

“There were hundreds and hundreds, thousands of these children removed one way or another from Native homes,” Verble notes. “It was a policy of the United States government to do this and it was absolutely devastating.”