Note, this is by no means a complete list, and I'm not even capable of that; this is merely a list of some things on my mind right now, that are useful to ask when reading fiction about American Indians.

- Are the people in the book noted as having a specific tribe/nation?

- Are the facts of their lives consistent with the real lives of that specific tribe/nation?

- Whether or not a specific tribe/nation is named, does the book use details from various parts of Indian Country all at once, for example clothing from one tribe and religion from another, as if it were pick-and-choose by the author's decision?

- Does the geography match the tribe/nation?

- If the people are contemporary, are the details of their lives entirely traditional? Entirely modern? A mixture?

- If the book is set in the past, does the text imply that the people won't be around until contemporary times?

- Does the book value modern technology and modern culture over older, traditional ways? Does it do the opposite? Does it imply that the two are in conflict? Does it make anyone choose? Does anyone get punished or rewarded for such a choice?

- Does the book show traditional ways to be thriving or under threat? If they're under threat, whose fault is it?

- Are the people mystically wise, such that they seem more like archtypes than fully complex humans?

- Do the people exist to teach some white person/people or any non-Native person/people a particular lesson?

- Do the people exist to enact anything that is for the especial benefit (in-book) or plot-advancement (textually speaking) of white people or any non-Native people?

- Do the people live in Indian communities, or is there a focus on one lone Indian?

Those are the things on my mind right now. Feel free to question, disagree, or add. Be sure to go read, and pass around, Beverly Slapin's HOW TO WRITE A HISTORICAL YOUNG ADULT NOVEL WITH AN INDIAN THEME FOR FUN AND PROFIT at Debbie Reese's blog American Indians in Children's Literature.

It's rare for me to post about a book I've not yet read myself, but here's one in case you have a chance to read it before I do: Happy Families by Tanita S. Davis (link goes to Kirkus review) is about two kids and their trans parent. The family is African-American. I hope I have a chance to read it this summer.

Racialicious: A Historical Guide To Hipster Racism.

In the USA, the offical name for my disability is CFS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Everyone even tangentially connected to this illness knows the name is ludicrous. This name has done us vast material harm in layperson comprehension, medical acknowledgment, research interest, research funding, and patient care -- all because the name sounds like "Hey man, I'm tired." People hear the name and think we're not really SICK. I promise you, we are. We are sick as a dog. I can't tell you how many people over the years have said to me, "I'm tired too!" So, patients (myself included) and advocates often use the acronym CFIDS, for Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome. We don't know whether immune dysfunction is the heart of our illness (it's one of many theories), yet many of us prefer this possible red herring that sounds slightly more medical over the "Hey man I'm tired" label.

We don't know medically what the core physiological problem is. What causes CFIDS? What are its biological mechanisms? Don't we deserve the research to figure that out and some respect in the meantime? CFIDS could even possibly turn out to be more than one illness. Yet we desperately need a better name, even before understanding it medically. I propose keeping the official acronym and changing the name to Chronic Flu Syndrome. It doesn't claim to know any more than we know, and it's a dense nugget of description of what our lives are like.

It's Blogging Against Disablism Day! That link instructs you how to join in if you want; it also archives the event, which means it links you to all the disablism posts that people send in to Diary of a Goldfish. They're divided into categories. Goldfish will update as posts keep rolling in, so I recommend wandering over there more than once. Go at your own pace; you don't need to read everything today or even this week. If you read BADD things that you like or that make you think, consider leaving some love behind in comment form.

One place my fatness and disability intersect is in other people’s perceptions and assumptions. People sometimes want me to rank the two categories, to choose between them, or to explain the dynamic between them. People yearn, especially, for causality.

Am I disabled because I am fat? Nope. We don’t know what causes CFIDS/ME, but it sure isn’t fatness.

Am I fat because I’m disabled? Oh, who knows. It’s possible, but, not being a character on Star Trek: The Next Generation, I’ll never know what other paths my life might have taken if x, if y. Most importantly, deeply and critically, I do not care.

Also, I’m unwilling to place “blame” for my fatness on CFIDS because my fatness is just fine. To blame it on something, on anything at all, frames fatness as not only cause-traceable but a problem. Society thinks it is, but they’re prejudiced. The medical establishment thinks it is, but they’re soaking in centuries-old scientific bias. As we say in fatpol communities, the only thing you can tell by looking at a fat person is your level of bias against fat people.

(ETA: If I did know, via timing or some other life detail, that CFIDS had caused my fatness, I wouldn't mind saying so if a situation required it. But I would call it a neutral result, not a negative one, and I would take care not to use it to distance myself from other fatties nor to strengthen the destructive good fatty / bad fatty binary that pops up in fatpol communities sometimes.)

Another way my fatness and disability intersect is in my presentation to the world on days I’m well enough to leave the house. I’m awfully sick. Daily actions that healthy folks take for granted are struggles. I need to rest between tooth brushing and face washing. That’s my reality. My hair is short because it requires less water to reach presentability. If I don’t shave my legs this summer, I might be having a butch (or butch/femme pastiche) mood, but more likely I can’t afford the spoons. Clothing hurts. I happen to possess an inborn shlumpiness, it’s in my soul or somewhere, meaning that for any degree to which I do not look shlumpy, active effort has been spent. But this is the belly of the beast of the fatness/disability intersection. On the Fat Studies list, a very smart person named Kristen Dunn said:

While thin folks can look cute or casual in old ratty clothes and mussed hair, fat folks of all gender expressions face a constant barrage of messages that our clothes, hair, makeup has to all be maintained all the time lest we meet the "slob" trope that is always ready to be slapped on us. And women of all sizes have more pressure and expectation about appearance.

Yes! And being sick makes it even harder, both because of the spoons required and because my body and face sometimes look sick anyway. When my face looks sick, and because makeup is not an option for me for physical reasons, I feel more pressure for my hair to be vaguely coiffed. (Even writing that, I fear people who know me reading it and laughing at me, laughing at the notion that I have ever coiffed anything.) Because I have to wear big stompy boots for my crippy feet, femme moods be damned, I feel more pressure to wear a good bra and a fitted top. Bras of all kinds hurt me, but leaving the house without one – even were I to wear a vest thick enough for modesty – wanders too close to compete shlump territory. My illness plays into how I look and what I (literally) can wear; my fatness, as Kristen observes, leaves me extra open to a slob label. Much of my chosen presentation (which is more femme than butch but some of each) is out of my hands. Fatphobia and disablism judge.

There’s a lesson somewhere in here about how butch fat women are considered less butch and more shlumpy than butch thin women, but that’s beyond me. Someone point me to a good critical post about that?

CFIDS is officially an invisible disability. In some ways that’s true. But sometimes it shows in my face and body; and sometimes it shows in my shlumpiness; and because CFIDS is invisible, when it shows, it looks like slobbery.

Imagine that your whole life takes place while you have the flu, and that this has been true for years, and that you fall all-the-way-asleep only twice per week. I live at the slob precipice. Fatties are pressured to look put together, yet we’re permitted far less clothing choice than thin folks. Fatphobic cultural asthetics judge us harshly even when we are supremely neat. A fat body can be labeled sloppy even when neat as a pin. Being sick on top of that? Well, if you see someone shuffling down the street to the mailbox in pajama bottoms, that might be me. I’m doing the best I can. To assume anything about me because of how I look is pure disablism and fatphobia.

I recently had a chance to re-read Children in Hiding by Charlene Joy Talbot, a childhood favorite of mine. I always noticed (this is still my old copy) how the cover says "Original title: Tomás takes Charge." I'd never heard of a book having two titles and was curious about that. The original title speaks to the things I noticed this time that I didn't notice as a child: that 14-year-old Fernanda's agoraphobia (unnamed but clear -- she's specifically scared to go outdoors) blends seamlessly (and thus creepily) with the fact that she's both female and less educated than 11-year-old Tomás. When they need to sneak away and survive adultless in an abandoned city building, Tomás is unmistakably in charge. He makes the small decisions and the big decisions and all the final decisions, except those few small decisions he delegates to her because they are of the feminine realm (such as whether to buy rice or soap on given day -- but, even then, she chooses soap and he complains and they buy rice. She *does* retain decision-making power over what to sew from the yellow fabric he finds, but that's because he doesn't care, he leaves that realm to her. When he cares, he gets his way, without arguing). He is the grownup. She's less skilled at reading and speaking English than he is, but nothing about her disability implies that she's mentally younger than him. She should be making decisions too. But she's a girl, and a girl who's scared to go outdoors, so he -- well, yes, he "takes charge," as the original title says.

Occasionally (very occasionally, maybe twice) he snaps quite harshly at her. There's no resolution when this happens, no apology, nothing textual to imply it wasn't his right to do so.

Also, white adults are the ones who help in the end. Two white adults who seem mainstream American (default "plain" American, not ethnically marked, no accents, named Ransome), and two white adults who are Irish. The neighborhood has two friendly Latino families as well, and Tomás has a good relationship with them, but they're irrelevant to curing, saving, and setting up a home for the kids in the end. The saviors are white.

I love, love, love Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers. I'm tempted to dangle the phrase "assassin nuns" in front of you and leave it at that. That'd do it, right? Assassin nuns, dayenu. But that would be misleading. Not misleading on the literal level -- assassin nuns, truly, are the heart of the book. But the tantalizing phrase "assassin nuns" sounds campy, and this book isn't. It's solemn and deep and gorgeous. And exciting. It's got political intrigue, spies, religion, and history (15th-century Brittany trying to remain independent from France). Genre's a poser... it's at the very least historical fiction, historical fantasy, political thriller, action, and romance. I saw a review call the romance aspect something like "light" and my jaw fell to the floor. Nothing is light here. Everything is rich and luminous and desperately serious. Grave Mercy is long and tight. This book will glow in my mind for a long time.

The ALA has released its list of the Top Ten Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2011. Stay classy, world!