The Middle of Everywhere

Helping Refugees Enter the American Community

By: Mary Pipher

Narrated by: Karen White

Over the past decade, Mary Pipher has been a great source of wisdom, helping us to better understand our family members. Now she connects us with the newest members of the American family - refugees.

In cities all over the country, refugees arrive daily. Lost Boys from Sudan, survivors from Kosovo, families fleeing Afghanistan and Vietnam: they come with nothing but the desire to experience the American dream. Their endurance in the face of tragedy and their ability to hold on to the virtues of family, love, and joy are a lesson for Americans. Their stories will make you laugh and weep - and give you a deeper understanding of the wider world in which we live.

The Middle of Everywhere moves beyond the headlines into the homes of refugees from around the world. Working as a cultural broker, teacher, and therapist, Mary Pipher has once again opened our eyes - and our hearts - to those with whom we share the future.

©2002 Mary Pipher (P)2018 Tantor

Touching, but with one enormous blindspot

I work for a human rights organization, and any book that ends with the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights would ordinarily have gotten a 5-star review from me. I am reluctant to criticize Pipher because of the thousands of hours of work she has put in with refugees. I think the book provides good information for people who want to help refugees resettle and makes a good case for why people should do so.

However, I was frankly appalled that Pipher taught refugees about U.S. Thanksgiving using the myth of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. (See Loewen's Lies My Teacher told Me.) I found her teaching this myth to refugees especially pernicious given that six sovereign Indigenous nations actually have reservations in Nebraska. Why should Kurds, who have been subject to genocide, learn that Pilgrims, some of whom went on to commit genocide, are the heroes of the U.S. narrative?

The comparing of White Clay with her hometown (Oak-something, Nebraska), I thought, showed willful ignorance or what AL Stoler calls "Colonial Aphasia." The purpose of White Clay, located on the edge of the Pine Ridge reservation, is to sell alcohol to alcoholics because alcohol is banned on the reservation. The Lakota people have held protests in White Clay and have tried to get White Clay shut down because of the damage it does. Pipher talks about Oak? as a wholesome close-knit, thriving community and even refers to the people who first settled Nebraska as refugees looking for their own quiet place to live.

But you know what? Those settlers, the first inhabitants of Oak? and White Clay, as well as the Ingalls family in the Little House on the Prairie books, whom she mentions fondly, all have something in common. They knew they were stealing land from Indigenous people. They thought they had a right to do so because they were white. That phenomenon is called settler colonialism. The term wasn't in use in the late 1990s, but theft of Indigenous land was common knowledge.

Two decades later, now that Indigenous people in the U.S. are claiming their power in new ways, Pipher might very well have changed her outlook on this matter because she seems like a decent person who cares about justice. In addition to the U.N, Declaration of Human Rights, I hope she has read the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Chapters mislabeled

The chapters are not correctly labeled how they are labeled in the book- the actual book had about 12 chapters and the audio book has 17
Good educational story otherwise