An Interview with m.s. RedCherries by Rey M. Rodríguez

The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) invited m.s. RedCherries to read from her debut book, “mother” published by Penguin Random House, which was released on July 17, 2024. The publisher describes “mother” as “a work rooted in an intimate fracture: an Indigenous child is adopted out of her tribe, and raised by a non-Indian family. As an adult finding her way back to her origins, our unnamed narrator begins to put the pieces of her birth family's history together through the stories told to her by her mother, father, sister, and brother, all of whom remained on the reservation where she was born. Through oral histories, family lore, and imagined pasts and futures, a collage of their community emerges, raising profound questions about adoption, inheritance, and Indigenous identity in America.” RedCherries kindly let me interview her over Zoom the day before the book’s release while she was on her way to the airport to pick up her parents who were flying in to celebrate her new book. What follows is a wide-ranging discussion of who she is, why she writes, the importance of mothers and the power of love. 

Please give us some background about who you are and why you write.

My name is m.s. RedCherries. I am a writer. I'm trying to resist being categorized in a certain genre only because I feel that in any genre that Native people write in, we are telling stories, in whatever form that means, and whatever that means to the writer, but also, to whatever that means to publishing at large. There's pressure for Native people to define themselves by other outside forces instead of defining themselves for themselves. And so, I just write stories. And I think a lot of other Native writers write stories.

Wonderful. How did you start writing?

When I was young, I found out I could express myself more through writing than through speaking, so I always wrote. If it was a friend’s birthday, I would write a story for them as a gift. I also liked writing letters, and so even before considering myself a writer, I was always writing. In middle school and high school, I had friends who would read everything I wrote and they supported me. I've always been blessed to have support in that way. I started writing through expression—my expression. It wasn't until after law school when I decided to pursue an MFA program.

Well, we have that in common because I went to law school. But I decided to get an MFA 30 plus years after I graduated. Ha!

Oh, my gosh! That's really cool! We share a background in law.

Yes, that's why I was excited to meet you. I feel I'm living my fullest life now. I don't know if you have had that experience after you went through your law school experience.

Oh, absolutely! The other day when I was traveling to IAIA, my flight was at 7 in the morning, and I saw the sunrise on the way to the airport, and I just thought how grateful I am for this life that I have. It's such a blessed life. And it's a life that I've always wanted. I felt proud of myself and I was very grateful for it all. I feel such gratitude to be here, to have my family, to have my friends. My grandparents are still here. My friends, I love my friends and my family. It's a good life.

Isn’t it? I was sitting in the IAIA classroom, and I told myself this is what I've always wanted to do. It’s great. Getting back to your work, I’d like to ask you about your story. Why is telling a story so important to you?

Well, I think storytelling is the root of our culture. I went to some of our summer ceremonies a couple of weeks ago - ceremonies we have held since the beginning of time. These ceremonies have endured because we have endured. It's not a religion. It's a way of life. And so, I consider storytelling and telling stories the same way. We've been telling stories for so long, and it's ensured our survival. It tells us of our place in the world, our ways, and how to interact with the people around us. It tells us how to talk to God. Stories have kept us alive. And they're the most beautiful part of our history as Indigenous people. Because at least with my Tribe, we have always been oral storytellers. Writing down our stories is something only recently done. Now, it is a way to document and capture our stories, but we were raised to listen. To listen, to sit around and listen to our grandparents during ceremonies was a part of the ceremony. If your story was good, you could hold the attention of an entire new generation of Cheyenne children and give them our way of life.  

A lot of Native people are storytellers, inherently. I have relatives, who tell the best stories, and they're funny, and they're hopeful. When we hang out, it’s always story time and I love it. Native people are also really good listeners. Now, as I get the opportunity to transcribe stories on the page, it has raised questions about the kind of stories I want to be told. I write for my people, our people, Native people. I don't take any other concerns or audience into question. But, I question the outside pressures on my writing and I try to, as Deborah Taffa said, to subvert the expectation of what an Indigenous story is or looks like. I'm constantly questioning comments from non-Indigenous people about my writing, whether it's about craft or it's about character, development or plot. It's not that I'm disinterested in them, but it’s that I'm very resistant to when someone tries to categorize or ‘Westernize’ my stories. Some of the best storytellers are Indigenous people, and we've been telling stories for thousands and thousands of years since time immemorial, and I don't think we need any help doing that. 

That's great. Thank you for that sentiment. Talk to me now about this idea of listening? I don't think we do that enough.

I have a friend who advocates for Indigenous youth in public education. She noticed a lot of our youth needed help in certain areas, more so than the general population. One of them was reading comprehension. So she asked, why do a lot of Native students struggle with reading comprehension? She realized through these studies that Native students learned better and retained information by listening and not by reading information on the page. Later, they tweaked their curriculum to allow the teachings to be recorded so that the students could listen to them back and their grades dramatically improved. It made complete sense to both of us because as Indigenous people we're really good listeners. We listen. We have a natural disposition to do it. We sit and we listen. I mean it's one of my favorite things. When I hang around with other Natives, we can sit in silence, and we can listen in silence, and we don't feel the need or have a compulsion to speak. If I'm listening to you, I'm giving you respect. And so, if you're speaking, you should take care of what you're saying. Make it worthwhile. We're quiet listeners and that’s thousands and thousands of years of culture. And we're still here, right? So, we're still listening.

Yes, I love that. As a father, I've had to become a better listener, because a father wants to impose things on children but we are usually wrong unless we've listened to what the child needs. Listening is a practice. When you mentioned this practice of listening, it reminded me of how long it took Mesoamerican people to cultivate corn. It took thousands of years. In Mesoamerica, they had to have that patience to grow domesticated corn from a weed to something that had kernels and that could be eaten. I appreciate this idea that listening is a cultivation of a practice.

It makes perfect sense to me. And I love this idea of changing the curriculum.

Can you tell me about your experience at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop? That's not an easy place to get into. What gave you the idea to go from law school to go to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop?

I was in my second year of law school, and I started taking Federal Indian Law classes. After each class, I felt such sadness and anger at the way Native people have been systemically treated in this country, and I don't want to get too radical, but I felt completely disgusted and maddened by America. Not only the judicial system, but America as a whole.

I almost dropped out because going to class would anger me, physically. It wasn't good for me. I would go home feeling hopeless, hopelessness. Hopelessness and self pity are two of the worst feelings that I feel. It’s destructive. And that's what I was feeling. So, I went to my director, and I talked to her about it. She said, “You've come this far, and you have your family, and they believe in you. Your people believe in you, you owe it to them to just finish.” And so, I listened and I finished. 

In my last semester of law school, I needed one credit hour, so I took this class called, “Creative Writing in the Law.” It was led by this writer, Gary Stuart. It sounds like a contradiction—creative writing in the law, but it was basically a class of how to make a legal brief more palatable and relatable so the judge doesn't skim the brief but is invested in the story. He gave these open-ended assignments, and I ran freely. It felt like the first time in law school that I could create freely in the classroom. At the end of the course, he came up to me, and asked what I was doing after law school? And I said, I don't know but I didn’t want to be a lawyer. He asked if I had ever considered an MFA program in creative writing. I hadn’t but I said I would. He said I think you should do it, what you've written in my class can be the start of a manuscript, or at least a work sample to get into a program, and I'll help you.

I had no idea about any MFA programs. I asked him if he had any in mind, and he gave me a list. He said we should start with Iowa. I spent the next year writing a work sample. That winter, I applied to Iowa and got in. It was incredible. I mean, I was so surprised. I'm so grateful. So many people believed in me before I did. And it's been such a beautiful journey, seeing how many people believe in me and my work. It’s a blessing. I mean, that's love. 

That's great to hear. Now tell me about the process of putting together your book.

I started the manuscript when I first got to Iowa. When I went into workshop, I had never been in a workshop before, and I didn't know what a workshop was. I didn't know what a workshop letter was. At the end of my first workshop, everyone was passing around letters, and I was like, oh, was I supposed to write that? 

When I first started at Iowa, I had no idea what I was writing, I didn't know what I was writing to, and I didn't know what I was writing about. I was writing these vignettes, I would write little scenes. 

In my final year, Sam Chang was my thesis advisor, and we had our first meeting. She told me she was excited about my project and where it was going, but her main worry at the time was producing pages. So, we had a schedule, where we met every other week.  In between weeks, I would submit pages to her, whether it was 5 pages or 10 pages, and slowly we started building the manuscript. In my final semester, it was time to organize them. And so I organized them as I would say a poet would. I put all the pages out on the ground and found how some of the pieces were in conversation with each other. Slowly, I found a thread. 

Did you feel they were poems then, or that they were stories that you were putting down on paper from your oral tradition?

Yes, these are stories, but how they look on the page, they look like poems, right? They have line breaks. Looking back at them now, I believe I was just writing stories in our tradition. I was telling stories as I had heard stories being told. 

I had this moment when I was reading one of Joy Harjo’s early collections that she was writing the same stories that I was writing in terms of form and structure. I thought to myself, why is Harjo called a poet? Why has she never been called a writer, as in a person who writes stories, short stories? There's a plot. There are characters. They're going somewhere. But why is she called a poet? I was really thinking about this and trying to intellectualize it. And then I realized that as Native people, as writers, that's the way that we tell stories. 

Do you do any prose poetry?

Yes, I believe I write what people call prose poetry.

There's this whole idea like, what is poetry?

And I think the question of what is poetry is such an interesting question. So, there's the question of what poetry is under the Western canon. But, what is poetry for Indigenous people? What does that mean? And is it a completely different form? Or do we even recognize it as a form of writing? 

Some of Harjo's works are stories told through, what the Western canon would call, prose poetry. But they’re stories, right? And I think that's where the question or interrogation begins. Who controls what is or isn’t “poetry” and how should it be defined? As of now, Indigenous writers are defined by whether they submit to the Western literary “craft” or not. If they choose not to, their work is dismissed into “other” genres of literature—ones that allow for their stories to be told through “errant” forms and met with curiosity, like poetry. But we’re writing stories. 

I have been told that genre “doesn’t matter”—that this categorization of poetry, fiction, or even nonfiction is the result of marketing within the publishing industry and is not a classification of the writing itself. I disagree with this because it falls short in addressing the fact that poetry and fiction are not aesthetically viewed or “artistically” critiqued in the same way. Poetry and modern fiction  have long been examined through different lenses, where its consequences have resulted in standardized parameters of how to interact, engage, or view the work itself—as determined by the Western literary canon.

As Indigenous writers, shouldn't we be the ones empowered to make those decisions for ourselves and define what our writing is or isn’t? The way that we tell stories is completely different from what the Western literary canon considers or defines “stories” . And so, I encourage all Indigenous writers to question any authority others may have over their work and begin to define and build the Indigenous literary canon for themselves. 

Is your new book autobiographical?

It's autobiographical. I take a lot of parts of my life and put it on the page. There are fictional elements. I would say, it's 50/50. Fifty percent is true, fifty percent not. It is a story that's based on my life. When I was very young, very, very young, I was adopted out to a family in Texas, where I was raised. I was so fortunate to be given to parents who loved me, who have supported me, and gave me every opportunity and all the love in the world. But yeah, the story kind of follows the same trajectory of my life, which is of a child who gets adopted out and then tries to restore their connection to their home and family. 

What I want to say is that I have been very fortunate to be raised by parents who've loved me and have taken care of me because that’s not always the case for Indigenous children who get adopted. The most important thing I can say is that from the moment I was born, I knew love. I knew love from my birth mother. I knew love from my birth family. I knew love from my adoptive family. I was given to my adoptive family because of my mother’s love to want a better life for me. 

But when you’re a child, it is difficult to understand that love. You don’t understand why things have to be the way they are. And I think that's the narrator's question. Why are things like this? Why does it have to be this way? Why do I have to live here? And why do I have to be away from you, mother? I think the mother’s answer, at least, for the narrator, is because of the love I gave you. I gave you out of love to this family. I gave you a life from my love. 

I’ve been told it was surprising that the narrator doesn’t hold more anger towards her mother for her adoption. I understand this, as some adoptees do feel anger toward their birth mother, but I was never angry at my mother. I was sad and angry at why things were the way they were, but I was never angry at my mother. If I had to be angry at anyone, it would be America for causing the circumstances that gave way to my adoption. Like in the story, the narrator starts interrogating who's responsible for her circumstances, and it is America.

Yes.

America's responsible for the generational terror that it's given to Native people. And we're still here dealing with their genocidal policies. As I said in the craft talk at IAIA, our existence is resistance. Our existence is protest because America has tried to kill and dismantle every part of our culture and being, starting with the actual killing of our people, and then onto the reservation and boarding school era of family separation, dislocation, and relocation. So, if there is a culprit, if there is a “person” responsible—--it's America at large. And in the story, the narrator is trying to get to that or trying to understand.

I love that sentiment. Each adoption is such a complicated story. I can’t imagine it. When they were separating children at the border I couldn’t imagine that anyone could even conceive that such a policy was possible.

That is America. When I think of family separation in those contexts, I think of how detrimental and how traumatic it must be for the parent and child. I can’t imagine. 

How did you grow through the process of writing the book?

When it started to take shape, these characters came out, especially the grandmother and mother figure in the opening scene at the Hiawatha Golf Club, which is this country club in South Dakota that has a cemetery in the middle of it with victims of the Canton Indian Insane Asylum. Reading records from the victims at this asylum was horrific. It encapsulated the horror felt by Native people during the 20th century. 

Yes.

The government made these victims wards of the state and effectively did whatever they wanted to them. They locked them up, abused them, took away their rights, and left them there. Most patients died there. I read something where it had a near zero percent recovery rate. When you're operating a hospital and none of your patients recover and most of them die, I think something is wrong. Some victims were sent there as punishment for not surrendering their children to BIA boarding school agents or because they got into an argument with a BIA officer. I think this dark moment in our Native history, the operation of this hospital, is a testament of how America treats its Native people, showing again that America refuses to give Native people their humanity. It was just a horrific reality for these victims who were killed in this hospital, including babies. Babies who were born and didn't survive.

It's my dream that in the future, the remains of these victims will be returned to their nations and repatriated. Right now, they're in the middle of a golf course in South Dakota. There's a little cedar fence that denotes the border of the cemetery, and they're just there in the middle of a cemetery. People are playing golf around them. It's bizarre. 

I’m sorry, I think I lost your question. I’m just passionate about their return. To your question, I believe the growing process began when the story took a turn towards my mother. That’s when it started getting difficult. 

I was eating lunch with this Tribal elder once, and he asked me about my life. I told him when I was young, I was adopted out. He sat still, and after this long pause, he looked up at me and said, do you still feel that loss? And I said, yes, every day. And then, we just started eating again. And that's the way it feels. I feel like this book is trying to help me reconcile the loss that I've had in my life with not being raised with my family, my culture and my people.

The question now is, will I ever reconcile that? And I don't think I ever will. I think I'll spend my entire lifetime thinking about it. And there's only so much healing I can do from it without just saying, you know, that's the way it is, and that's the way it was. This book was written with that in mind. A difficult challenge in writing this story was knowing when to stop writing it, because, again, my own reconciliation and healing is going to take my entire lifetime, and so, I could write this book for the rest of my life. To me, grief is a testament of love. Every day, in a way, I grieve. I think of grieving in the same vein as I love you so much.

Yes.

I miss you because I love you. 

“mother”|m.s. RedCherries, published by Penguin Random House, 2024.

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a non-fiction history of a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute for American Indian Arts' MFA Program. This fall his poetry will be published in Huizache. His other book reviews are at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Blog, IAIA's literary journal, and Los Angeles Review.

m.s. RedCherries received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a JD from Arizona State University College of Law. She is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her debut collection, "mother," was released in July 2024 from Penguin Books.