Weaving History into Fiction: Antoinette Godin’s Native Brush Strokes

Today we’re speaking with Antoinette Godin about her remarkable debut novel, Native Brush Strokes. Written later in life, this book is the culmination of decades of experience—as a voracious reader from childhood, a journalist, a legal scholar with over thirty years of practice, and a keen observer of the human spirit. Drawing on her personal history, her deep roots in the Native community, and her years working in Indian law, Antoinette has created a story that is both intimate and far‑reaching, weaving together themes of identity, resilience, and the lasting impact of history.

Interview by Rebekah Meola

Rebekah Meola: Antoinette, thank you so much for joining me. Your debut novel, Native Brush Strokes, follows Cordi, a Native American artist navigating love, identity, and resilience in post‑relocation Los Angeles. To begin, what inspired you to write this story, and how did it first come to you? 

Antoinette Godin: Oddly enough, I've been an avid reader since I was seven years old. My grandmother and mother were both avid readers as well. I became addicted to reading, and then I eventually thought I love reading so much that I'm going to write a book, I think I can do it. 

I was watching Stephen King on YouTube and he said, if you don't read, don't even bother to write, because reading teaches you how to write. 

I also have over 30 years experience in law, I’ve done a lot of legal writing, and I worked at some really top firms in LA. I learned how to write from them as well. I started picking up their writing style. I was also a journalism major for a while too, so I combined all of that to the book. 

How about the characters? How did Cordi and her storyline come to you? 

I’ve lived in Los Angeles most of my life—I went to high school there, went to UCLA, and lived in a little cottage in Santa Monica. I’ve always loved artists, and I thought it would be interesting to tell the story of a Native American woman who’s a struggling artist with all these challenges. I hoped people would find her compelling.

I made Cordi a member of my own tribe, because that’s the community I know best. The other characters are a blend of people I’ve known throughout my life—interesting, compelling individuals I wanted to bring together. I wanted to show both the grittier side of life in Indian Country and the hopeful side. 

I also drew on my years of work in Indian law—without using specifics, I wove in elements from many of the cases I’ve worked on. 

This isn't  related to the book, but since you mentioned tribes, how many tribes are there in the U.S. now? 

Oh gosh. I'm just going off the top of my head, but I think there are 527 federally recognized tribes in the United States, and then there are a bunch of little tribes that aren't vying for federal recognition. So there are a lot of tribes out there and they are all very different. I always tell people, tribes are as different as people from Sweden all the way to Italy. They're varied in the way they look, their cultures. Everything depends on what part of the country you're in. [Editor’s note: Antoinette fact-checked herself, and there are 574 federally recognized tribes.]

Did you have to research the tribes in the book, or were those characterizations from your personal knowledge? 

Having lived in Los Angeles, there was a gargantuan native community. There were people from Oklahoma, there were a whole bunch of southern people. There was the southern drum at powwows, which is a totally different drum. There was competition between the southern and northern drums. There was always this attitude of oh, those Northerners are doing this again, or the Southerners are doing that. And then you'd have the southwest tribes that were sort of cowboys from the desert areas, cowboys from Oklahoma, and then other cowboys from the Dakotas and Montana. Then the powwow crowd. I was exposed to so many different tribes, hundreds of them. It was really fun. 

One of the upsides of living in Los Angeles or perhaps any Metropolis is the chance to interact with a diversity of people and cultures. 

Godin: I feel very fortunate I lived at that time period because I am older now, and I don't know how much of the intertribal stuff is going on, but it was a super exciting period because there was the activism, there were all of the relocation people. It was a huge menagerie of every tribe you could think of. And I really feel like I was in a very special time and I got to see it. I don't know if we'll ever repeat that time again.

Tell me what you mean by “the relocation people.” 

From the late sixties all the way to the eighties, there was the Indian relocation program. So natives from all over the country had been relocated to LA. When I was in college, my roommate was relocated. She was Navajo, very traditional, and had a heavy accent. Her tribe had sent her out to LA to study fashion. And so she was like, I'm going to become the best fashion designer you've ever seen. There were all these people coming out to learn something. They were designing clothes or coming out for college, tons of different things, machinists, actors, lots of actors coming out—I'm going to be a star. They were all out here trying to get movie parts, writing, you name it, they were here. 

Then you had the American Indian Movement, which I might add started in Minnesota where I'm from. It started in Minneapolis. It was an urban Indian movement to fight oppression. People really wanted to get out of feeling ashamed of who they were. There was a little group, a nucleus that started in Minneapolis, and it spread all over the country. Groups of them moved to LA, some moved to the Bay Area, which I might add, Tommy Orange talks about that group. A whole group relocated to Seattle. They were in New York. There were natives everywhere who were activists. 

I think it got inspired by the Black Panthers and different activist groups. Everybody was going to change the world, and everybody thought oppression was going to go away and people were going to get their rights back. It was just a really idealistic, exciting time. 

It was also a scary time because there were the leftovers of the Hoover years, so a lot of people were also getting spied on. 

You’ve said you wanted to show people who were having struggles. Why was that important? 

I’ve noticed in a lot of books and films, you don’t really see why someone becomes the “bad guy.” He’s just presented as wicked or selfish, and you’re left thinking, what a damaged person. But I wanted to show there’s more to it—that often they’re carrying deep struggles, sometimes rooted in really painful childhood experiences. And I wanted to show it to Native Americans.

There’s so much historic trauma we don’t talk about. Researchers are uncovering the lasting effects of the boarding school era, the Indian Wars, and the extreme poverty many Native families endured, often among the poorest people in America. I wanted to explore how they survived? Why was having money so important for some?

My male character, Merlin, for example, was driven by this desperate need to be rich. For him, it was about revenge on society. In some ways, I saw him like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights—a character shaped by hardship, determined to rise above it and get even. Merlin grew up dirt poor, living on buffalo stew—“slipper stew” made from hooves. That kind of poverty fueled his obsession: I’m going to be rich. I’ll wear the gold, I’ll have the clothes, I’ll show everyone.

That ambition gave him a sense of power. He wanted control. His hunger for wealth and power made him selfish, but it also made him complex. That’s what gave him dimension.

Trauma is more openly discussed today than it was 20 years ago.  In light of this shift, do you see trauma as a major issue in the Native community, and how is the community working toward healing?

There's a huge trauma factor in native communities. And what I mean by that is so many people don't even realize they've gone through it. They're discovering epigenetically that it actually has gone through family trees.  They discovered it by studying Jewish society, people in the Holocaust, and they studied all the different things that had happened, maybe even two generations down, where people were trying to deal with the fact that a lot of their ancestors were killed in these camps and things. With natives, it's very similar. 

A lot of people were also sent to these boarding schools, and culture was lost. People couldn't speak the language. They lost everything. And so now there's this huge Indian renaissance where a lot of the tribes are learning their languages, they're doing their dances, they're trading customs. It's a rebirth. 

Cordi’s relationship with her mother is a powerful element in the book. Can you share how you explored the intergenerational trauma woven into that dynamic?

In my own family history, my great grandmother went to the first boarding school, Carlisle, which is the very first one that General Pratt established.  It was back east in Pennsylvania, and it was very militaristic. And then my grandmother was placed in one of the Catholic boarding schools. It was very strict, very abusive in many ways and completely wiped out native culture. 

I think the nuns thought they were doing a good thing at that time. I always tried to figure out what they were doing, but I think they thought, oh, we're teaching 'em how to survive. We're going to show 'em how to do this and this and this. 

And then my mother went to another boarding school. What those schools did emotionally was shut people down. You weren’t allowed to feel. Emotions weren’t discussed. They trained you to keep everything bottled up.

I reflect that in the book, in relationships where everything is contained and certain subjects are completely off-limits. You couldn’t talk about them—they were too sensitive—so you pretended they didn’t exist. Everything was kept quiet, as if speaking about anything painful would tear open a raw wound and hurt those around you. So you carried on pretending everything was fine, even when it wasn’t.

Silence brings its own trauma. 

In Harry Potter, you weren't allowed to say Voldemort’s name because you were afraid Voldemort would get you. 

It's almost as if there were things you just couldn't talk about otherwise it might come and bite all of us. So we had to pretend all this stuff never happened. 

It was really, I think, very sick. Now that I look back on it. In the present time, we talk about stuff, we don't hide everything. In their era you just kept it hush hush. You pretended everything was great, and nobody ever discussed any trauma. 

Why is this book relevant today? 

The problem is that we’re wiping out history and pretending nothing bad ever happened. It’s like we’re living in a fantasy world where this country was empty, everyone got along, and settlers just arrived in a beautiful land. We know that’s not true. 

This isn’t about blame or anger. It’s about recognizing that we can’t heal as a country without facing our full history. It reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, where books were burned to erase knowledge. Today, books are being banned for not being “politically correct.”

For example, a friend told me she doesn’t want her daughter exposed to race theory because she doesn’t want her to be traumatized. She only wants her to learn pleasant history. She’s a wonderful person and I adore her, but I found it so sad. That child will eventually grow up and ask, Why was this hidden from me? Why didn’t I know my country’s real history? And I believe many young people will fight to learn everything they can.

We cannot allow our history or our literature to be erased. If I had to, I’d keep a bunker full of hidden books just to preserve knowledge. The idea that we live in a time when books are being banned is frightening. If I were oppressed, I’d find a way—reading in a dark room if I had to. And I believe many kids will do just that. The hunger for truth and knowledge can’t be stamped out.

I love that. Maybe this time will inspire a generation of avid truth seekers. 

I’ll give you a good example. A close friend of mine was a Hasidic Jew from New York. In her community, she was expected to marry, keep her hair covered, and live under very strict rules. She felt deeply oppressed.

She used to hide books in her room, reading them under the covers at night with a flashlight so her parents wouldn’t know. Eventually, she had enough. She left the community—an act so serious they even held a mock funeral for her.

She went on to law school, which is where I met her, and I’ll never forget her story. She had been expected to live a life without knowledge, limited to raising children and nothing more, and she refused. To me, she’s a prototype of what’s coming: people breaking free and seeking truth, no matter the cost.

Perhaps the real reason that people want to block knowledge is control. So ‘the children’ don't leave. It's kind of coming full circle now. To end off, going back to reading. is reading healing, is it activism? 

Reading can do so many things for a person. It can heal you. It can give you an insight that opens your world. Through a book, you can step out of your own life—you can fall in love when a character does, or find yourself in the middle of a war. You can be anywhere. That’s what I love about reading.

At the same time, it teaches us about politics and history—about what we want to carry forward and what we never want to repeat. There’s so much we need to learn so we don’t make the same mistakes. We have to open our minds. We can’t just say, I hate this person because they’re not like me. That way of thinking doesn’t work. We need to embrace everyone, and let people live according to their culture and their truth. It’s not for us to force them into a mold.

For me, reading is expansion. Whether it’s a book, an audiobook, or even a film, it opens our minds to worlds we’ve never known and helps us see life through other perspectives.

Native Brush Strokes is available now in paperback and ebook. You can order your copy through Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Come meet her in person this November at the Twentynine Palms Book Festival.