Toni Jensen ist eine Autorin, deren Essays und Erzählungen sich mit den tiefgreifenden Auswirkungen von Waffengewalt auseinandersetzen. Ihre Arbeit, die tief in indigenen Traditionen verwurzelt ist, untersucht die komplexen Verbindungen zwischen Menschen, Land und Geschichte. Jensen verbindet meisterhaft persönliche Erfahrungen mit breiteren gesellschaftlichen Themen und schafft Prosa, die sowohl roh als auch lyrisch ist und bei den Lesern tief Anklang findet. Ihr Schreiben ist ein Zeugnis für die Kraft des Geschichtenerzählens bei der Verarbeitung von Traumata und der Förderung von Verbindungen.
For readers of Jesmyn Ward and Terese Marie Mailhot, 'Carrie' is a poetic memoir about what it means to exist as an indigenous woman in America, told in snapshots of the authors encounters with gun violence. Toni Jenson is Metis and teaches in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Toni Jensen grew up in the Midwest, immersed in a culture of guns, learning to shoot with her NRA-member father. As an adult, she has encountered the threat of guns in various settings, including the fracklands near Standing Rock and her concealed-carry campus. As a Métis woman, Jensen is acutely aware of the violence against indigenous women and the erasure of their experiences. In her work, she intertwines personal narratives with historical context, exploring how history manifests in the body and reshaping our understanding of violence in America. In one chapter, she reflects on the discrimination she faced as a Native American student, while "The Worry Line" addresses the gun and gang violence in her neighborhood during her daughter's birth. "At the Workshop" recounts her graduate school experience, where a classmate wrote stories that mirrored her own struggles. "Women in the Fracklands" takes readers into the heart of the Dakota Access pipeline protests and highlights the dangers faced by women in fracking-affected areas. Jensen's prose is both analytical and deeply emotional, establishing her as a courageous voice and witness to her challenging history and the violent cultural landscape surrounding her as a Native American woman. Each chapter serves as a poignant reminder that surviving in one’s country does not equate to surviving the country itself.
For the characters we meet in Toni Jensen’s stories, the past is very much the present. Theirs are American Indian lives off the reservation, lives lived beyond the usual boundaries set for American Indian migratory, often overlooked, yet carrying tradition with them into a future of difference and possibility. Drawing on American Indian oral traditions and her own Métis upbringing, Jensen tells stories that mix many lives and voices to offer fleeting perspectives on a world that reconfigures the tragedy and disconnection often found in narratives of American Indian life. A brother falls off the roof of an abandoned hotel, a young bride tries to connect with a family she’s never met, and an adopted teenage girl seeks acceptance where she is viewed as an outsider. The reader also encounters a kidnapped nephew, strangers in a hotel, and even a stray these are the souls that populate Jensen’s stories, finding tentative connections with the past, the future, one another, and finally us.