Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land

I have learned so much from this book. I am very glad that I read it. I am from South Dakota and now live in Iowa. I have recommended this book to my sister.

This memoir is beautifully written and and an important narrative to familiarize yourself with. I was moved to read these life experiences that are so similar to my own as an indigenous woman living in the midwest.

Wonderful, poetic depiction of life on the wrong side of repression and prejudice.

I don’t like to rate memoirs. It seems strange to put a star rating on someone’s real-life story, something they’ve written how they remember it, and how they interpreted it. And I always seem to get something out of every memoir I read. Carry is powerful, so very current, and a poetic expression of the violence Toni Jensen has experienced so far in her life. Violence that is hard to read.

I read Carry quickly, speeding through it almost like ripping off a band-aid, knowing it would be difficult and wanting to just be done. So I don’t think I even appreciated it as much as I should have. But being two months away from a terrifying election, I didn’t know if my head was in the right space for such an important message. But reading about the shocking experiences Toni Jensen has been subjected to, instance after instance of gun violence that has touched her life, it further impressed upon me the importance of telling stories such as these.

This memoir is told in a collection of essays, and they’re not in chronological order–which was a bit distracting until I accepted that the order didn’t matter. Each story is separate, but woven together with a common thread—violence. Gun violence, physical violence, violence against women, violence stemming from racism. It should be unacceptable. It should not have become the norm. Jensen examines her own experiences, as well as historical ones, even taking a look at the literal definitions of certain words. It’s this focused attention that carries throughout the essays that kept me reading and learning.

And when I say this memoir is current, I mean current. It includes mentions of Covid-19 and George Floyd’s murder. There is something almost comforting about seeing these events we’re currently living in mentioned and discussed. Strangely, it made my negative headspace more tolerable, less lonely, I think.

While your instinct may be to skip over this one because of the heavy material, I encourage you to read it. It’s only through the personal stories of victims that I think minds and hearts can be changed.

This was a very hard book for me to read. And Im not talking about difficult in the sense of not being able to get through it – on the contrary, Carry is a beautifully written collection of essays and memoir, and I didnt want to put it down. But I recognized a lot of myself and my own life and traumas in Toni Jensens, and for that reason I had to set it aside from time to time, and read it slowly. I also dont know how on earth I am going to be able to do this book justice in a review

There are so many layers to Carry. It is the authors personal journey in life, living as an Indigenous woman on land that has been stolen over and over again from Indigenous people. It is also the authors personal journey of growing up in an abusive home, with an abusive father, and, later on, a fractured family. Carry is also a memoir of gun violence in the US, both the authors own encounters with gun violence, as well as gun violence in general.

Toni Jensen does an amazing job of weaving the personal with the more general, painting a difficult image of how entrenched violence is in this country, especially violence against women and children, especially violence against Native American women and children. But there is also so much more embedded within the authors words: her travels around the US, her amazing descriptions of the land that she travels over, that she has lived on, and that was stolen from so many different tribes. The violence and indifference that women of color confront so often in healthcare, education, housing, and so on. The trauma passed through generations due to displacement, violence, and systemic racism, and how this trauma affects our children. (The latter is something that I have personally lived with and I am glad that I grew up in a country where obtaining a firearm isnt an easy feat as I have no idea what that would have meant for us if it had been).

There is even more to Carry, such as the way the author uses the dictionary to define words, and then portrays what they are used to mean and what they really mean. This is one of those books that you can read multiple times, and every single time you will discover something new. One of the best memoirs and collections of essays that you can read this year in my opinion! And the cover is just gorgeous!

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