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m. s. RedCherries

And when the woman ran from her house to the front of the BIAbuilding, and was told that she could not see her daughter because herdaughter was on her way to a residential school with the Dakotas and thatshe would stay there because she was going to learn and stay with thepeople who took her from the woman’s house and onto a bus waiting at thefront of the BIA building, and when the woman tried to know where herdaughter was, she was taken and put on a bus to a hospital in the dakotasbecause she was told she had too much sadness and that she would behealed from the sadness which had taken her from her house to the frontof the BIA building and onto a waiting bus that would take her from themountains into the flat plains onto a gravel road up to a big brick buildingwith an american flag in front, where she would stay until her sadness wentaway and when it didn’t go away, her daughter, forty years later, seeking tofind her in her own sadness, found the woman’s hospital records whichshowed the woman being diagnosed with ‘delusional melancholia,’ andwhen the woman died in her bed at twenty-six, she was laid alongsideanother one hundred and twenty patients, all of whom now lay buriedbetween the 4th and 5th fairway of the Hiawatha Golf Club in canton,south dakota.

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Headshot of m.s. RedCherries
Photo:
Barb Danielson

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 New York City.

Her debut, mother (Penguin Books) was a finalist for the National Book Award.

“mother is at once a story, a memory, and a dream. ‘Riddled with shadowed humor that would bait the consciousness,’ these poems tenderly, vulnerably, and fearlessly sequence threads of familial bonds, heredity, and Indigenous identity. With a captivating and conversant voice, m.s. RedCherries maps the intersections of the historical with the personal and deftly binds the two like strands of DNA, creating the spark of life that courses through this vital work.”
—2024 National Book Awards Judges’ Citation

“mother presents a poignant exploration of Indigenous identity, the relationship between daughters and mothers, and the universal desire to find a way home.”
—National Book Foundation

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