Click on Cover for Amazon Purchase Link

by Stan Rushworth

US $17.95

ISBN-13: 978-0-9983443-3-1

Nonfiction

Diaspora's Children

In his latest work, author, teacher and Vietnam-era veteran Stan Rushworth has written a memoir that is a collection of stories, reflections and prayers, and a “survival manual, a way to remember that serves the heart.” Using the experiences of his life as a springboard for illustrating the effects of genocide, war, colonization, and traumatic stress disorder, Rushworth brings to our eyes the deep suffering (and resilience) of generations of Native people, and the mindset that decimated 90% of the Native population in California alone in the first 25 years of  White “settlers”.  

With brilliant storytelling that is full of heart and wisdom, Rushworth brings us toward a spiritual awareness that is at once a story of grief and suffering as well as a path toward redemption, as we face the truth of war, genocide, climate destruction, and the continuing colonial mindset, and find in our hearts a right relationship to the Earth and each other.

Available in Paperback or eBook edition.

This book is a long awaited message to the world, and more importantly, to Native people who are themselves a diaspora here on their own homelands. Through beautiful, fluid language, Rushworth graciously invites readers to understand the complexity of that lived reality, to reflect and engage, and find connection with story, a long held tradition in Indian communities that has served us well for centuries. In these pages we encounter what we know to be true of ourselves, our families and friends, and a place to celebrate all that is good and lasting.

                         — Rebecca Hernandez, PhD

Director,  American Indian Resource Center

University of California, Santa Cruz

As an Arab-American and veteran Iraq War Reporter, it took reading this book for me to see and feel how living with both Colonial and Traumatic Stress Disorders has thoroughly infiltrated and impacted my spirit.  Healing begins only when we know we are wounded, as is the Earth itself. In this sublime work, Rushworth gifts us this knowledge in the most profound, poetic way we could hope for.

— Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone:

Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq; and The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption.

The brilliance of Stan Rushworth’s writing is that he lets us feel and experience his life and our lives together. When we read his work, we are not observers, we are in it. He is in it and we are in it, listening to all the voices needed to survive our world today. This immersion is what must be, if we are ever to get out of the destruction we are creating.

I thought I understood. Having read extensively, thought and written about war, having worked with individuals who were veterans for forty years, I thought I understood. Having worked closely in Liberia with former child soldiers and rebel generals, I thought I understood. But I didn’t know that I didn’t understand until I read Diaspora’s Children.

There is no book like it. Here is war as we have devised it. And here is genocide as we have enacted it, where it all began. War and genocide that are living here right now, in our parking lots and small towns. How horrifically ordinary. And yet we don’t see it.

And so this book, so we will see and understand it, all of it. In this book we are immersed in the truth of what tears us apart, and in the teachings that can make us whole.  Diaspora’s Children offers the vision, and the desire, that we may live accordingly.  

— Deena Metzger, author of A Rain of Night Birds, Writing for Your Life,

La Negra y Blanca (winner of the Oakland PEN award for literature)