A Council of Dolls

A Council of Dolls is a 2023 historical fiction novel about multiple generations of Yanktonai Dakota women grappling with the effects of settler colonialism, told partially through the point of view of their dolls. The novel is by Mona Susan Power (Standing Rock Sioux), PEN Award-winning author of several works related to Native identity, such as The Grass Dancer. The book was released through Mariner Books August 2023. A Council of Dolls was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction.

Plot summary
Three generations of Dakota girls and their dolls live through family and societal change. The girls and dolls can talk to each other, and the dolls have powers to help the girls through the tragedies they face.

Concept and creation
Author Mona Susan Power was guided by her family's own history with unwelcome government intervention into Native society and multigenerational experiences with Indian boarding schools. At times writing the novel was so emotional she would cry. The book was written during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. The first draft was completed in four months following recovery from a broken arm. She was completing copy-edits in 2022.

A Council of Dolls was an expansion of an earlier story about dolls published in the Missouri Review called Naming Ceremony. Naming Ceremony was runner-up for the 2020 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize.

Release
Power held a launch party on publication day 8 August 2023 at the Birchbark Books event space Birchbark Bizhew in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Reception
Kirkus Reviews panned the book as "occasionally moving" but "steeped a little bit too long in sentimentality." A starred review by Publishers Weekly calls it a "story of survival that shines brightly," and says Power reveals a "deep knowledge of Indigenous history" and the book is a "keen" and "wrenching" depiction of boarding schools. Booklist describes the novel as a "heart-wrenching account of inherited trauma and resilience" that "is perceptively told."

Dakota author Gabrielle Tateyuskanskan of the Oceti Sakowin Writers Society praised A Council of Dolls for bringing to light the experiences of boarding school survivors and their descendants, and relates events in the book to recorded abuses at boarding schools raised in legal cases and academic studies.

"A Council of Dolls illustrates the horrible legacy and emotional toll of medical neglect, mental abuse, disease, malnourishment, use of child labor, sexual abuse, and physically abusive conditions that wakaneja [children] endured while attending boarding school. Due to adverse childhood experiences, many young people did not survive boarding school and their resting places are in marked and unmarked school graveyards across America. These children were never returned to their grieving families. In many cases the records of burial sites and their locations have been lost. Families then suffer as a result of those wakaneja who have disappeared. This story describes the results of 150 years of stress, anguish, and feelings of powerlessness of parents, the tiwahe [family] and the Oyate [nation] due to the loss of their cherished children to inhumane educational institutions. These schools were places where wakaneja should have been protected, educated and nurtured."

- Gabrielle Tateyuskanskan (Oceti Sakowin Writers Society)

The novel was featured in New Yorkers Best Books of 2023. Good Housekeeping recommended it as part of their GH Book Club, which features "feel-good reads." People and Washington Post also highlighted the novel.

Awards
A Council of Dolls was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, and won the 2024 Minnesota Book Awards category for novels. The novel is a finalist in the fiction, indigenous writer, and woman writer categories for the High Plains Book Awards, which honors books about the High Plains region in the U.S. and Canada.

Editions
A Council of Dolls is also available as an audiobook from HarperAudio, read by actress Isabella Star LaBlanc (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate) (ISBN 9780063281127), and in ebook (ISBN 9780063281110) and large print format (ISBN 9798885796194).

Minnesota State Services for the Blind read the book live on-air in a twelve part broadcast series starting May 28, 2024, part of their Radio Talking Book program, which communicates publications such as newspapers, magazines, and popular books via radio 24-hours a day.