To some, the word “apple” might evoke an image of their favorite teacher, the story of Snow White, or maybe even pie. To Native Americans, however, this word has a much more negative connotation.
An “apple” is “red on the outside and white on the inside,” and it is used as a slur among Native American communities to accuse another Indigenous person of not being Indigenous enough.
Using the term as a starting point, Eric Gansworth wrote this week’s Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selection Apple: Skin to the Core.
Apple — which Gansworth will discuss and read from at 3:30 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy — is a memoir, written in verse, prose and imagery that explores Gansworth’s life as a Native person in America.
Apple — which contains sections that give nod to The Beatles’ label Apple Records — also ties in with this week’s Chautauqua Lecture Series theme “Exploring the Transformative Power of Music with Renée Fleming,” said Manager of Literary Arts Stephine Hunt.
“It’s about how music, in different ways, has gotten him through different stages of his life,” she said. “Each section starts with a really beautiful image (of an apple) that each has little chunks … taken out. (Gansworth is) really exploring this stereotype, in addition to how music helped him live through this — exploring and breaking down the (internalized) stereotype that colonization has made Indigenous people white on the inside.”
Gansworth has always been influenced by music and, as the youngest of six siblings, said he “inherited” their music taste.
“Every time I would ask them as a kid, ‘Oh, who is this?,’ The answer was almost always The Beatles,” he said. “I was also fascinated by that overlap. I think that a lot of my work is looking at things that exist in popular culture in one particular way, and how they often exist in very different ways within the Indigenous communities.”
Gansworth is a poet, writer and visual artist, who is an enrolled member of the Onondaga Nation, but was raised in the Tuscarora Nation.
He is the author of 12 books, and has had solo exhibitions at the Castellani Museum, Colgate University, Westfield State University, SUNY Oneonta and Bright Hill Center. He was selected for inclusion in the public arts project LIT CITY, celebrating Buffalo’s literary legacy in 2017, and currently teaches English at Canisius College where he is also Lowery Writer-in-Residence.
Apple also has a visual element, with paintings and drawings included in the book, using the imagery of an apple being bitten to the core to represent breaking down the stereotype perpetuated by the slur.
“He’s doing a lot of work addressing some significant historical events, and Indigenous history that not a lot of people know about or they’re not as connected to,” said Hunt. “Gansworth offers them a lens, … so it’s multifaceted.”
During Gansworth’s presentation today, he will discuss the influence of music in his work and the writing process, as well as some details he omitted from his memoir.
Apple is a Michael L. Printz Award honor book, winner of the American Indian Youth Literature Award for Young Adult, and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. It was also chosen as the 2024 Chautauqua County Book Read for this year by the YWCA of Jamestown and Chautauqua Institution. Over the course of one week in April, book discussions were held virtually and in-person across the county.
The memoir was one of the first CLSC selections for this summer, announced last August at the 2023 Bryant Day celebration. The book is a joint selection for both the CLSC and the CLSC Young Readers Program and the reason for that, said Hunt, was to elevate the CLSC Young Readers list — and to show “grown-up” CLSC readers that just because a book is marketed as “Young Adult” doesn’t mean it isn’t a good story.
“We did that purposefully so that we could start to break down some of these walls of genre in the way that it’s playing with memoir and verse, but also the way it breaks down these boxes around what we declare as young adult books,” said Hunt.
With Apple, Gansworth hopes to change people’s ideas about memoirs, and inspire them to open up about their own stories.
“Generally speaking, in culture, the larger idea is that you’re operating with … seven generations in mind, the three that came before you and three that come after you, for any major decision of your life. I think memoir, in general, doesn’t do that very much,” he said. “I think our story is very much about the people we’ve come from and the people who are going after us within our limited scope of connection. I hope that people understand the multi-generational aspect of it.”
