The Bones: A Novel-in-Progress

HE BONES IS A NOVEL-IN-PROGRESS about two girls' fight to survive after they are kidnapped at the Minnesota State Fair and taken to New York City.Fourteen-year-old Kris and her cousin Sher leave their home on the Goodhue Reservation in northern Minnesota in the summer of 1969.While at the Minnesota State Fair, after several weeks living on the streets of Minneapolis, Kris is abducted by three men in a sex trafficking ring.As Sher searches for Kris, the abductors rape and drug Kris in a house for several days before taking Kris to New York City to be sex trafficked in Hell's Kitchen.Kris and Sher's journey on the streets during the summer of the moon landing and the social and political turbulence of 1969 is set among the historical and political backdrop of colonization that caused intergenerational harm in their family and tribe.Intertwined with Kris and Sher's story are government and military employees, immigrants, and Ojibwe families, who carry out and are influenced by a true historical event called Project Man High.Man High was a US Air Force project that sent a man 19 miles into the stratosphere using a gondola the size of a phone booth and a polyethylene balloon manufactured in St. Paul, Minnesota, by former General Mills employees.A precursor to NASA, Project Man High launched out of an open mine pit in 1957 on the Cuyuna Iron Range, near the girls' reservation.The characters in The Bones are connected across time, land, and space--via floating through the skies in a balloon, traveling to the moon, and the mental experience of dissociation.The mining of rocks and minerals ("the bones" of the earth), ancestral bones, and memories buried within the characters' psyches also link the characters.The excerpt below, from the novel-in-progress, The Bones, focuses on Kris being transported in an old trunk to New York City, where the men plan on selling her as either American Indian or Puerto Rican, given her ambiguous racial identity due to her white and Ojibwe heritage.