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Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for

Winter 2000

States Of Being In The Dark Removal And Survival In Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit

Eric Gary Anderson Oklahoma State University, [email protected]

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Anderson, Eric Gary, "States Of Being In The Dark Removal And Survival In Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit" (2000). Great Plains Quarterly. 2160. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2160

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. STATES OF BEING IN THE DARK REMOVAL AND SURVIVAL IN LINDA HOGAN'S MEAN SPIRIT

ERIC GARY ANDERSON

[Fliction is a vertical descent; it's a drop into an event or into history or into the depths of some kind of meaning in order to understand humans, and to somehow decipher what history speaks, the story beneath the story.! -Linda Hogan (1994)

In 1990, Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan pub­ depicts as a wide-ranging confusion and un­ lished her first novel, Mean Spirit, a well-re­ certainty that afflicts many of her characters ceived and yet controversial account of the and demonstrates the period's turbulence to Osage oil boom of the 1920s and the subse­ her readers. But the story is also resolutely and quent rash of criminal conspiracies and mur­ respectfully grounded in her home place, the ders that has come to be known as the "Osage southern plains. As Cherokee novelist and Reign of Terror."2 The story she tells is often critic Betty Louise Bell explains, Hogan cen­ grim and violent; it returns again and again to ters on "states of being in the dark" (44), which Hogan the land she knows and loves: the Red Earth of Oklahoma. From chickens to oil, the reader inhabits the land of removal: pick­ up trucks and stomp dances, rodeos and Eric Gary Anderson is Assistant Professor of English powwows, family histories and cultural his­ at Oklahoma State University, where he teaches American and American Indian literatures. His book, tories in a tight, neverending weave from American Indian Literature and the Southwest: one generation to the next."3 Contexts and Dispositions, was published in 1999 by the University of Texas Press. Removal and survival: Indian country in Hogan's hands is a physical and historical pro­ cess articulated metaphorically and charac­ [GPQ 20 (Winter 2000): 55-67] terized by a seemingly infinite continuity across

55 56 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 2000 generations, crosshatched by discrete yet dan­ motion a terrifying and confusing and wrench­ gerously contagious episodes of cultural dis­ ing dis ruption of Indian identity in Indian ruption. Incarnated in stories, Indian country country. When "fiction as a vertical descent" and its inhabitants sometimes achieve a highly crashes into a variety of man-made confu­ valued and spirited connectedness to each sions and obstructions, including the obstruc­ other, a rootedness. Historian Terry Wilson tions invented and enforced by history itself, points out that in common local parlance, "the tribal identity does not always necessarily or Osage" refers both to the place (the county) consistently work-even though, as Hogan has and to the people.4 Moses Graycloud in Mean remarked of the Osage oil boom stories, "In Spirit sees Stace Red Hawk as "a good man" in some way, when you hear something from your large part because Stace is a "man rooted in family it becomes a part of your cell struc­ life" (367); likewise, a respected Hill Indian's ture."6 "legs looked rooted to earth" (30). Conversely, As various literary critics have noted, the town ofWatona (Pawhuska, Oklahoma)­ Hogan's version of the historical events is not "the quick and wobbly world of mixed-blood entirely "faithful" to the known facts of either Indians, white loggers, cattle ranchers, and Osage culture or the illicit activities of terror­ most recently, the oil barons" (5 )-is less ists working against it, most aggressively in grounded and in some ways weaker, structur­ the 1920s; she distorts or even falsifies Osage ally. So when Hogan says that "fiction is a tribal identity. But these critics presuppose vertical descent," she has in mind an explora­ that fiction works less as a "vertical descent" tion of the power as well as the vulnerability than as a progressive, "horizontal," linear nar­ of rootedness; she wants to move below and rative, while my argument is that Hogan in inside the spoken and written surfaces of his­ effect dives into notions of history not widely tory. Rather than perpetuating a notion of recognized as mainstream, seeing these "alter­ history as a more or less horizontal, more or native" historiographies as particularly suited less irreversible time liI).e, she defines history to the resources and arguments of Mean Spirit. as a process that functions as a sort of gateway, Some of the characters she draws, such as the an opening to deeper vertical passages and oilman Hale and the Osage hermit John Stink, complex, vital circulatory systems. In this sense actually participated in the events, and some the storyteller can be seen as analogous to of the events actually happened, but many of (among others) the heroic Earth Diver who the details and characters, however vividly penetrates surfaces, negotiating a vertical pas­ drawn, are products of Hogan's politically sageway and axis that leads to solid yet shift­ charged literary imagination.7 In part because ing earth, the stuff that life and home place is many of the crimes are still unsolved and un­ made of: removal and survival.s resolved, she freely combines "fact" and "fic­ This "vertical descent" is of course particu­ tion."8 She fills in some but by no means all of larly loaded in Mean Spirit, not least because the narrative spaces, exploiting the tensions the technological extraction of oil from north­ between a linear-historical imperative and her eastern Oklahoma, like the genealogical ex­ own resistance to the compulsory linearity and tractions of Indians in Oklahoma, involves a authority of western history; she strategically penetration of the surface plains and a close evokes an atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and examination of the roots and veins, the body uncertainty. She also suggests that various of the place as it both connects to and vio­ Native characters-like various Native people lently detaches from the bodies of the people who survived or did not survive the "Reign of who live on and in the place. But this com­ Terror"-could not tell their stories about parison between technology and genealogy what was happening, for fear of reprisal, and must not be nudged too far, for the very vio­ so Osage perspectives on these events are lence of Euro-American land abuse sets in guarded if available at all. In fact, the phrase STATES OF BEING 57

"Osage Reign of Terror" does not clearly illu­ of these catastrophes. Again, in this sense she minate who did what to whom-although it takes up the actual uncertainty, the absence does raise the misleading possibility that the of specific factual knowledge, and transforms Osage held the political control and power this absence and uncertainty into a politically necessary to reign and even terrorize, when in loaded and often tense interpretation of what fact the Osage were more often than not the happened in Osage County. She does not go terrorized. as far as various canonical Native American In a similar way, and for similar reasons, novelists-N. Scott Momaday in House Made "Mean Spirit" is not a clearly identified entity of Dawn (1968), Leslie Marmon Silko in Cer­ in the novel. It may be a cold-blooded, heart­ emony (1977), and Louise Erdrich in Tracks less, altogether unrepentant killer of Indians, (1988), for example-in affirming tentative or it may be a cranky and malevolent appari­ survival and the possibility of personal and tion, or it may be someone or something more cultural recentering at story's end. stingy than angry-a miser or a spiritually And in the process, some critics argue, she bankrupt figure-or it may be some combina­ runs into trouble. In the eyes of Osage critic tion of these characteristics or something else Robert Allen Warrior, Hogan's novel is care­ altogether, something more nebulous and elu­ less and irresponsible rather than designedly sive even than a ghost or a soul, something ambiguous; Hogan, he writes, perhaps most clearly described as a pervasive atmosphere or mood. Because it deceives and in effect, de-Osaged the story, picking and confuses, it is certainly implicated heavily in choosing what she liked about the par­ "states of being in the dark." As Alix Casteel ticulars of history and inventing new mate­ explains in an insightful recent essay on rial for what she didn't. . . . In place of Hogan's novel: Osage spirituality, for instance, Hogan uses a sort of pan-tribal New Age-ism with Mean spirit. These are important words. Southern Plains and Southeastern (Hogan "Mean" can interchange with the follow­ is Chickasaw) features, presumably making ing adjectives: paltry, contemptible, shabby, it easier for her inter-tribal cast of charac­ petty, stingy, selfish, grudging, mercenary, ters to interact but losing the specificity of greedy, grasping, or rapacious. It also car­ Osages in the process. 10 ries the connotation of being low: low­ minded, lowborn, low-bred, low class. It Warrior offers John Joseph Mathews's 1934 conveys a sense both of worthlessness and novel Sundown as an alternative to Mean Spirit, unworthiness. A mean spirit is not only an in part because "Mathews allows the Osages inferior and deficient spirit, it is a small to be Osages and presents a picture of a com­ one in every way.9 munity in spiritual, social, and psychic crisis" (52). Although Warrior in his book Tribal Whatever we decide to call it, it is clearly not Secrets criticizes "American Indian and Na­ "objective" history. Instead, for a variety of tive Americanist discourses [that] continue to reasons, Hogan works heroically and not alto­ be preoccupied with parochial questions of gether successfully to decenter the linear-his­ identity and authenticity" (xix), he also urges torical logic of an ambiguous but undeniably a Native American intellectual sovereignty plot-driven narrative. Working against the that is grounded specifically in land and com­ impervious form and style of government docu­ munity: ments about the Osage tribe, working (to some extent) with tribal stories about these events, land and community are necessary starting she sets into motion metaphors that are crafted points for the process of coming to a deep to evoke the terror, confusion, and magnitude perception of the conflicts and challenges 58 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 2000

that face American Indian people and complicity with History; as a writer, she communities. They take into account the insists on the primacy of the imagination.!4 various groups of people, Native and non­ Native, whose choices and actions influ­ To Bell, as to Warrior, Hogan writes of Osage ence a situation as well as the historical experience from a Chickasaw perspective; both and biological backdrop-in-process that also would basically concur that, in Bell's words, has its influence. To fail to find a way of Hogan "as a novelist ... dared to rewrite his­ keeping these many factors in place, espe­ tory." Hogan herself says of Mean Spirit: cially the ones internal to Native commu­ nities, is to fall easily into romantic excesses I realized that I had to do something stron­ regarding Native traditions. l1 ger than history to reach the emotions of readers. It had to be more than just a record Thus, even though Hogan is Native Ameri­ of the facts; it had to get larger. That's when can, and even though she grew up in Okla­ it became a novel-when it stopped being homa, her novel runs into problems because history.!S she filters Osage cultural experiences through a Chickasaw and "pan-tribal" lens; she does Far from serving as any kind of authoritative not allow the Osages a grounded, sovereign final word or arbiter, history limits and dimin­ position, and she romanticizes rather than in­ ishes, tells the wrong stories and doesn't tell quiring skeptically and criticallyY To use them particularly well.!6 But Warrior would Warrior's own verb, she does not "cross-fertil­ criticize Hogan's ways of decentering history, ize" Chickasaw and Osage in specific, com­ while Bell identifies them as strategic and plex, and productive ways. Neither does she praises them wholeheartedly. Bell explicitly present an accurate historical account of the rejects the assumptions that "only an Osage internal complexities of Osage politics, the can tell the story of the greedy destruction of network of conflicts and tensions that are both the Osage, and a story, if founded on history, distinct from and deeply implicated in the must rely completely on history as its muse."!7 highly problematic relationships between In a sense, the question is not so much whether Osages and Euro-Americans. As Terry Wilson Hogan is guilty as charged, but whether she, as has amply demonstrated, Osage versus Osage an American Indian novelist, knows what she (sometimes full-blood versus mixed-blood) is doing. As Bell suggests, the question also often was as sticky and painful and divisive as has a lot to do with gender issues, particularly Indian versus white. 13 the relationship between a Native American On the other hand, Warrior perhaps de­ woman writer and a prescriptive critical ap­ mands too much allegiance to "the particulars proach that in effect robs her of creative au­ of history." As Betty Bell writes, tonomy in the name of claiming critical and intellectual sovereignty. Bell also shrewdly Hogan has been criticized for her deviation observes that "It would be difficult to privi­ from some historical facts in Mean Spirit. lege any theoretical practice in a reading of This assumes that there is a sole and accu­ Hogan's works. Often ... such application is rate historical narrative to every event and interrupted by Hogan swerving from the ex­ that truth resides only in that narrative. In pected narrative,"!B perhaps veering away from fact, to the advantage of all peoples once expected historical trajectories in the process. absent from History, the privileged voice Still, both Warrior's charges against Hogan of History has long been reduced to its nar­ and Bell's celebration of Hogan raise similar rative form and content. It is just another questions and issues about the nature and in­ way of telling a story. As a Native Ameri­ deed the reliability of both history and liter­ can woman, Hogan knows the dangers of ary criticism, considered as western systems of STATES OF BEING 59 thought and knowledge. These questions and particular darknesses-in the cave, in the bat issues are of course directly relevant to Native medicine bundles, in vertical descents to base­ and non-Native readers, teachers, and schol­ ments, and in each other. ars, as we reflect on past and present, cultural and personal, masculine and feminine "states No one felt safe, but there was nothing they of being in the dark." could put a finger on, and that state of be­ Catherine Rainwater provides one way of ing in the dark made the situation even conducting these reflections without eradicat­ worse (44). ing this crucial if sometimes troubling dark­ ness. 19 As she points out, there are really two In this sentence, Hogan introduces the very overlapping and competing narratives in the slippery phrase that I have elected to use as a novel, an "outer" narrative that develops across way of reflecting on the power and the perils linear time as it tells the historical story of the of being in, or near, the novel's broad variety Osage oil boom, and an "inner" narrative, "The of physical and metaphysical darknesses. In Book of Horse," in which water diviner and one sense, "that state of being in the dark" traditionalist Michael Horse writes down all refers to Oklahoma, the physical location of that he sees and experiences, toward the sub­ the Osage oil boom; as Hogan puts it, "Okla­ versive goal of rethinking the Bible and, more homa seemed a dark burial ground if there generally, keeping track of things from a non­ ever was one" (127). During the "Osage Reign linear, more traditional, and quite autonomous of Terror," dozens of Indians were systemati­ Native point of view. (He has autonomy be­ cally murdered by greedy white opportunists. cause no Osage character presumes to inter­ Angie Debo writes that there were "twenty­ fere, and no outsider imagines that he might four unsolved [murder] cases, including shoot­ be literate.) Hogan not only provides this ing, poisoning, and blowing up a house with Native insider's point of view; she also in­ nitroglycerine, in three years ... and the Indi­ cludes several Indian and non-Indian charac­ ans lived in terror of the next strike."20 And ters who gradually, over the long course of the Robert Warrior adds that "Walking through novel, begin to learn how to understand this an Osage cemetery and seeing the gravestones point of view. Throughout the book, readers that show the inordinate numbers of young are also, gradually, afforded an opportunity to people who died in the period is chilling."21 In begin learning how to read the inner narra­ the novel, the subterranean cavities and spaces tive, how to recognize what Rainwater calls also intensify "states of being in the dark," as "Indian" cues and acquire something like in­ do the illicit extractions of dead bodies and sider knowledge that helps to illuminate if not their accompanying gifts (beads, medicines, eliminate states of being in the dark about the etc.) from graves; grave robbing looms large as goings-on in Osage County. Still, as Rainwa­ silent testimony to criminal greed, and Indi­ ter explains, "inside" knowledge can take read­ ans find that they cannot report these crimes ers only so far; although the outsides of for. fear of inadvertently stimulating further medicine bundles are sometimes visible and grievous acts. "States of being in the dark" the omniscient narrator makes it possible for multiply contagiously; confusion and fear readers to join a group of Osage in rediscover­ dominate. ing an ancient, sacred cavern, the interiors (of But "being in the dark" also has to do with caves, of medicine bundles) are clearly marked being in the money, because one of the other as Osage spaces possessed by Osage charac­ dark presences in the novel is oil. The "dark ters. Each reader's personal and cultural states burial ground" of Oklahoma is at the same of being in the dark are identified and drama­ time the location of rich subterranean depos­ tized, as they are differentiated from the holi­ its, which through a complicated series of ness and power the Indians find in these transactions and extractions simultaneously 60 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 2000 bury the Osage and "reveal" them to America tedly, darkness in Mean Spirit often conjures and Europe as celebrities. Terry Wilson even up danger-it is associated with terror and calls Osage County "the underground reserva­ confusion, with evil, with crime, with the oil­ tion" (in fact, this is the title of his study), saturated industrial wasteland-but "darkness" perhaps as a way of getting at these darkly also refers racially to the continuing presence paradoxical power relations. This oil boom of Osage Indians in Oklahoma. Again, Hogan contributes to the economic strength of the exposes and exploits these tensions as a way of Osages-as Oklahoma historian Kenny representing and testifying to both the power Franks points out, in the first half of the twen­ and the peril of states of being in the dark. tieth century, the Osage Nation received The very flexibility of just one of Hogan's $298,237,149 from its mineral rights-and to metaphors accents the difficulties of reading, some extent helps them redefine a sovereign writing, and interpreting the people, the and powerful Indian identityY But it also ac­ events, the issues, the crimes; because it is so celerates the internal and external conflicts powerfully and at the same time so sneakily that had been plaguing the tribe for several complicit in so many different (and often com­ generations prior to the discovery of oil in peting) positions, this metaphor at times slips Osage land.23 out of control. It has an element of danger-it Yet throughout the novel, "that state of both confers and confuses identities. And that being in the dark" also refers quite directly to is a big part of Hogan's point. "The world had being dark-skinned, to being Indian. Hogan gone crazy" (39), and consequently people and quite explicitly and frequently racializes things get dislodged, circumstances are liable Indianness; she is remarkably careful and spe­ to change very suddenly, and many of the In­ cific in describing characters' skin tones. She dian characters in the novel lose track of the almost always says what color a character's answers to the questions "Who am I?" and skin is. She calls attention to race; she makes "How do I know who I am?" In this sense, an issue of it. In this way, Mean Spirit is part of Hogan does not answer Robert Warrior's call the deeper political project Hogan has under­ for a sovereign Native intellectual tradition taken in much of her work. In her autobio­ because there is no such sovereign tradition to graphical piece, "The Two Lives," for example, be found, for her, in this Oklahoma story. In­ she argues that because she is "a light-skinned stead, she demonstrates the causes and the Indian person," aftermaths of various, often premeditated strat­ egies for confusing, dismantling, and splinter­ Non-Indians are more comfortable with me ing anything like a sovereign or autonomous than they are with my darker sisters and Osage identity. Her complex metaphors pro­ brothers, for they assume I am similar to vide readers with a powerful if not always clear them, or somehow not as real as other In­ sense of a very uneasy and unsettling experi­ dian people.... But I want to point out ence; "states of being in the dark" resonates how exclusion works in a divided society with pride and community as well as with con­ and how color affects us all. To be darker fusion and fragmentation, and the metaphor means to experience more pain, more rac­ resists any fumbling attempt to organize things ism, less hope, less self-esteem, less advan­ into neat binary categories. As Betty Bell tage. 24 points out, "Linda Hogan's poetry and prose concerns itself with the detritus of loss and Compelling explicit awareness of skin colors the need to take and create life from the rem­ throughout Mean Spirit, she tenaciously inter­ nants of personal and cultural histories."25 In rogates and disables racist valuations of lighter this way, the metaphors can be dramatically, or darker pigmentation in favor of an insis­ rhetorically, and didactically persuasive, but tent, repeated, proud inclusiveness. Admit- they do not necessarily describe or guarantee STATES OF BEING 61 a harmonious, balanced algebra of losses and heritage to use the conflict between the races recoveries. Her words teach readers things that for their own economic advantage."27 The are not necessarily codified or authenticated Osages were relocated to northeastern Okla­ by history, things that are nonetheless highly homa from southern Kansas around 1871. instructive to a clearer understanding of a Compared to the Trail of Tears, for example, murky, complicated situation. it was a relatively short migration in miles, but it was a migration nonetheless, and an The phrase "that state of being in the unhappy one. By 1874 the move from Kansas dark" billows outward so far and so often was mostly complete, and things were not go­ that it takes on a frightening figurative plu­ ing well for the people. Assimilation had many ralism, referring at various times and places discontents for them; in Wilson's view, "[c]o­ to economic states, psychological states, optation of the Osages to the Anglo-Ameri­ spiritual states, states of connectedness, can political system so that the tribe could states of confusion, and so on. It encapsu­ contribute to its own demise seemed eminently lates a sometimes reluctant, mixed condi­ logical and consistent with acculturation tion in which the Osages seem to be both policy."28 Indeed, as he bitingly points out, present and absent, enrolled and erased, before the oil boom "the resource most readily powerful and powerless, insiders and out­ accessible for exploitation was the Osages siders. They are difficult to read and always themselves,"29 and they were exploited in vari­ at risk of being neither here nor there: "there ous ways by farmers, ranchers, builders, trad­ was nothing they could put a finger on," ers, mixed-bloods, and government agents. and yet the danger and fear seem almost Throughout these three decades (1870-1900), palpable. Hogan deliberately works the federal officials typically regarded themselves metaphor as a way of representing Osage as agents of assimilation and American experience in Oklahoma in the early twen­ progress; in their view, the government was tieth century, a time and place that remains doing just fine and the Osages were the clueless very confusing and fragmentary and full of ones: "The entire bureaucratic apparatus of unanswered as well as unasked questions. the federal government was unable or unwill­ ing to protect what it viewed as a doomed In some ways, the Osages have been "nei­ Osage culture in the face of continuous white ther here nor there" for a fairly long time. As pressure for the annihilation of the tribal Terry Wilson points out, "By 1700 and life."30 throughout the eighteenth century, both In­ And then, in 1897, oil was discovered on dians and whites recognized that the Osages the Osage reservation. I will not dwell at length had military control of Missouri, Arkansas, on the detailed technological, economic, le­ and eastern Oklahoma and Kansas."26 But be­ gal, and criminal complexities that grew out cause of this geographical range, the tribe was of this discovery, except as they play out in easy to divide, and the French went ahead and Mean Spirit. First, the Osages insisted on, and did so, in ways that served French interests were granted, tribal ownership of the oil, and and compromised Osage sovereignty. Ironi­ of any other subsurface minerals. As Wilson cally, the very flexibility of Osage government writes, "Like other Indians, they suffered the made it more vulnerable to outside influences, trauma of rapid change brought about by the expanding the mixed-blood population and intrusions of white culture during the reserva­ consequently increasing the level of full-blood tion and postreservation periods. Because of ambivalence about the ways things were go­ the presence of petroleum, however, the in­ ing, culturally. For, as Wilson observes, truders were especially numerous and included "mixed-bloods, the offspring of Indian-white many who ruthlessly sought to separate the liaisons ... took advantage of their bicultural tribe from its wealth by any means available."3! 62 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 2000

Most sensational was the "Osage Reign of smile on their faces. They believed they T error" in the 1920s. This period in Okla­ had beaks. They believed they had claws. homa history is sometimes misidentified as an They believed they had feathers. They be­ example of the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, lieved they were safe (150-51). with Osage flappers and philosophers driving brand new roadsters and partying till dawn; in In this carnivalesque night scene, poised some­ fact, as Robert Warrior argues, "there was no where between delusory entertainment and unitary Osage experience in the early part of surreal terror, racialized identities artificially this century."3Z Terry Wilson agrees with War­ shift. White Rotarians play "Indians" simply rior but points out that the Osages did share by changing their clothes, while the Indians the experience of Anglo-American mistreat­ are acted upon, transformed-not into "white ment; the "sensational murders and elaborate people" but into domesticated barnyard birds. confidence schemes," and the international But they also resist transformation; they pre­ media attention given them, were really "not serve their seriousness even while clucking like a temporary and forgivable break in a nor­ chickens (and, for Hogan, even at the risk of mally peaceful coexistence between Native stereotyping them as stoic, wooden Indians). and Anglo Americans [but rather,] part of a The whites "make-believe"; the Indians be­ long history of the majority culture's exploita­ lieve. Who is in the dark? tion of the Osage tribe."33 It is a more spec­ Throughout Mean Spirit, Hogan represents tacular, and more famous, exaggeration of what racialized identity as a complicated give-and­ , had been going on between whites and Osages take, an economy of actions and reactions, for years and years: a confused and confusing preconceptions and reconstructions. With race culture war in which states of being in the as with various other issues, she illuminates, dark predominated. Throughout the 1920s, critiques, and celebrates states of being in the things just escalated. The Osages were granted dark. Hogan often calls attention to the physi­ American citizenship in·1921 and at the same cal, material nature of racialized identity by time subjected to concerted and deadly at­ specifying not only skin colors but also the tacks by representative Americans who sought color of a character's hair and the style of his to compromise if not destroy Osage tribal cul­ or her clothing. Cross-racing becomes fash­ ture and sovereignty. ionable: Creek girls at the Indian school grow In Mean Spirit, a very strange scene takes fascinated with "white heaven," dye their hair place one night as the "highest priced oil sale yellow, and begin to wear white gowns. Mean­ in history" (150) winds down and the celebra­ while, one of the school's white matrons "be­ tions get underway in Watona, Oklahoma. gan dying her hair black, and asked if she could Hogan introduces this place as "that limbo attend the peyote church" (171). Similarly, in between the worlds, that town named Watona" "real" history, when Federal Bureau of Inves­ (6), although the very name of the town is tigation agents began looking into the "Osage being contested: the Indians call it Watona, Reign of Terror," they found disguises neces­ the whites call it Talbert, and the town limit sary; as Kenny Franks notes, federal agents sign keeps getting vandalized as the name gets dressed up as "cowboys, insurance salesmen, tossed back and forth. On the night of the big and Indian traders" when in Oklahoma.34 In oil sale, "The white members of the Rotary the novel, Reverend Joe Billy, an Indian by Club were dressed up as Indians," and blood and a Christian by trade, moves away from that church and back toward the sacred A hypnotist had entranced a handful of very (and probably fictionaPS) bat medicine and serious Indian people to believe they were traditional ways of his people as the novel chickens and they goose-stepped and develops; first he "wore braids and moccasins clucked at each other without so much as a to deliver his sermons and he finally wrote the STATES OF BEING 63 main church offices that he was resigning from little fun with the idea that Indians become the ministry" (170). And Joe Billy's white wife, trendy to some whites and whites become Martha, gradually grows closer to Osage ways, trendy to some Indians. Actually, she has a lot to the extent that she has a key dream about of fun with the effects of the Bijou Theater bats; along the way, "Martha had begun to and its silent movies on local residents: look, in some peculiar way, like an Indian" "Valentino and Fairbanks at the Bijou had (175). Michael Horse, the character who is changed the love lives of people around probably the most perceptive observer of his Watona" (143). After white suitor Will Forrest own people, even remarks that "She looks drives Osage suitee Nola Blanket "out to the darker every day. You'd swear she was In­ country, he put a new fur coat around her dian" (272). Indeed, Hogan writes, "It seemed shoulders and held her in the latest position as though, toward the end of that year, people Rudolph Valentino had used for seducing star­ became the opposite of what they had previ­ lets on the screen at the Bijou. He was irresist­ ously been, as if the earth's polar axis had ible and he knew it. And she was like a soft shifted" (171). Assimilation is presented as a animal" (163). But even this role-playing, process not absolutely dependent on white engendered in the dark space of a movie the­ Euro-American culture, a crossing of perme­ ater, mixes parody and bemusement with con­ able boundaries, sometimes unsettling and fusing questions about identity formation and sometimes rejuvenating and sometimes both, gender and even species: why does Hogan de­ with intertwining and often competing per­ scribe Nola as "like a soft animal"? Who sees sonal, familial, tribal, and cultural ramifica­ Nola that way? The phrase resonates with both tions. It is capable of polarizing, though, as I Indian traditions and racist assumptions; have been arguing, Hogan does not typically Hogan plays this scene for assimilationist com­ polarize simplistically. Assimilationists engi­ edy but does not suppress troubling "fictional" neer both removal and survival: Euro-Ameri­ depths. can assimilationists set out to remove Neither does she restrict her investigation Indianness by removing Indians from tribe to to "white" and "Indian" identity-swapping by reservation and from tribal sovereignty to way of costumes, hair color, impersonations, cultural dependency or some version of self­ or class pretensions. All sorts of transforma­ determination. But sometimes Indians strate­ tions occur throughout the novel, and all sorts gically move and remove themselves, often of characters experience all sorts of in-be­ for purposes of surviving, and sometimes Euro­ tweenness. Sometimes characters position Americans assimilate into Indian cultures. themselves in between light and darkness by Various characters in Mean Spirit resist com­ submerging themselves in caves, basements, pulsory, government-directed assimilation or moonlit rooms. Sometimes Hogan explores while openly assimilating when it seems the the uncanny in-betweenness of apparitions: appropriate thing to do. ghosts unexpectedly and visibly emerge as a Parodying self-determination and critiqu­ presence to be reckoned with, ephemeral and ing polarized thinking about both Indian and yet embodied. John Stink, for example, dies white cultures, Hogan suggests that these and is buried, but that is nowhere near the end physical and material changes are inextricable of his story: from the less tangible qualities of racialized identity. In transforming their appearances, [F]rom inside the grave, John Stink felt the these and other characters must also adapt or rock thump earth. He began to work his suppress or perpetuate their preconceptions arms out of the ropes that held him. If about "white" or "Indian" identity. They must Houdini could do it, the old man thought do more than merely apply "redface" or "white­ to himself, so could the soul of old Ho-Tah­ face." Yes, in a sense Hogan is simply having a Moie .... The dogs were the only witnesses 64 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 2000

to the miraculous return ofJohn Stink. They the stairs, up through the wood and ceiling, were overjoyed that their master rose up clear up, they hoped, to sky's heaven" (118), from the grave, and when the old man's on a vertical ascent, grieving and recovering, pockmarked face emerged, they yapped and removing herself and surviving. But when she licked him, and with their aid, Stink man­ sees that white hunters have killed 317 sacred aged to pull himself up out of the coffin.... eagles-"They looked like a tribe of small, gone Resurrected, he examined himself. His people, murdered and taken away in the back hands were raw, the thick nails broken. He of a truck" (110 )-she fights back: was dressed like a ghost, all right, in a wind­ ing sheet. His joints ached. But for a man She screamed, "You naholies! What have who had just been in death's handhold, he you gone and done this time?" She began was in fairly decent shape. (106- 7) removing the dead eagles from the truck. She placed one on a plot of grass. She was Although he is a ghost, and is understood to crying and talking in a language they didn't be such by everyone who spots him after his understand. They tried to stop her, but even reemergence, John Stink is very definitely also three men couldn't hold her back. She was a spirit with a body.36 He is extraordinarily ruining the eagles they planned to sell, un­ physical; he still desires cigars and food and damaged, as souvenirs. drink, and in fact he gets involved with a liv­ "They're just birds," one of them said, ing, breathing white woman named China. trying to reason with the hysterical old Late in the book, he is able to write but not woman, but at his words, she became even speak the words "I am dead" and "I am a ghost," more agitated. (110) and he is able to ask, again on paper, very interesting questions: "Is that why my body is When she tells her husband, Moses, and their missing? I am wearing it?" (316). But he can­ friend Horse about this massacre, "they looked not reassimilate. For him,.identity seems to be foreign and strange, like visitors from another irreversible. And he knows it. world, a world that eats itself and uses up the For the powerful matriarch Belle Graycloud, earth" (114). Alien acts of unimaginable one of the elders of the novel's central family, wrongheadedness and cruelty threaten to darkness also entails a complicated network transform these three Osage elders into aliens of removals and survivals. "We act like it's any and their world into an alienated and alienat­ day," she says to Michael Horse early in the ing and altogether contaminated manifesta­ story, shortly after they learn that Grace Blan­ tion of home. ket has been killed, "like our daily chores are Similarly, in a later scene, Belle defends planted in us with long roots, like a devil's sacred bats from white poachers, standing in claw in a field of wheat" (33). But Belle nearly the mouth of Sorrow Cave to stop the men always knows exactly who she is and what she from shooting and killing the animals. Rooted, is about, so much so that the numbing accu­ "[s]he looked like a mountain. A raven flew in mulation of extraordinary removals, lies, and front of her and cawed" (279). Gradually, Indi­ criminal schemes often (though not always) ans and various sympathetic mixed-bloods and galvanizes her into action rather than lulling cross-racing whites join her, and together they her into the false perception that everything put up a strong, united front. Then, upon en­ is normal or frustrating her into submission. tering deeper into the cave, they find ancient Granted, after some of the most devastating red clay pots and kernels of corn and paintings setbacks, she retreats to her dark cellar, to the and a medicine bundle. "It was a sacred world "darkness" of her "holy cave" (118), from they entered and everyone became silent and which she sings "a slow song in a deep voice. heard a distant dripping of water in the They [her daughters] felt her misery rise, up caveways, the echoing sounds, the breathing STATES OF BEING 65 of earth" (284). Still, they realize that they absence and presence reflects, for better and/ themselves are intruders, "[i]nvading an older or for worse, her political as well as her literary world, the silent places of the ancient ones" understanding of Indian-white relations in (284). 1920s Oklahoma and in general. Along with In a variety of ways in both of these impor­ Betty Bell and Robert Warrior, she exposes tant scenes of Indian resistance and female various unsettling apparitions, inversions, and power, most if not all of the characters in­ transformations as politically motivated. She volved are "in the dark" in at least one signifi­ tries as well to challenge and lessen the au­ cant way. And in both scenes, Hogan does not thoritative explanatory force of western his­ illuminate or bridge the huge gulf that sepa­ tory, and all the power relations it represents rates Belle Graycloud (and her allies) from and reproduces, seeking instead to "drop into the white authorities. The two opposing forces an event or into history or into the depths of do not come to understand each other; nei­ some kind of meaning in order to understand ther do the twentieth-century Indians presume humans, and to somehow decipher what his­ to infiltrate the spaces of the ancient Indians tory speaks, the story beneath the story."37 By in any physically permanent way, although so critiquing and diminishing the centrality of their experience of the deep cavern teaches received historical explanations, by construct­ intangible spiritual lessons. The claims Hogan ing interwoven patterns of racialized identity, makes through her portrayal of Belle Gray­ and by speaking so powerfully to the physical cloud are risky as well as powerful, in part and metaphysical complexities of all the sto­ because the darknesses in and of Mean Spirit, ries and spirits, both mean and generous, both the darknesses Belle takes on, represent the buried and unburied, Hogan partially illumi­ unresolved and often unsatisfactory truth of nates, and takes at least partial control of, the story they both tell. The Osage oil boom these states of being in the dark. In a 1994 and "Reign of Terror" remain so ambiguous, interview, she strongly states: so confusing, and so uninterpretable that any­ thing other than a "state of being in the dark" It's like Angie Debo saying, 'I violated his­ would be a violation of the events and of the tory to tell the truth.' It's the story that's people who participated in them. Although been repressed. In the case of Mean Spirit, a she is one of the most solidly grounded char­ lot of the story will always be repressed be­ acters in the novel, Belle Graycloud also takes cause the FBI reports themselves are so thor­ on some of the qualities of a gray cloud: some­ oughly blacked out in order to protect times legible, sometimes indecipherable, national secrets. Some of it's just not there. sometimes invisible, sometimes dominant, But the content of the story is truth, fic­ sometimes tremendously inspiring and pow­ tionalized. Reimagined, I've created many erful, and often in motion. For all the re­ characters that don't, in fact, exist. But the movals, though, there is finally, though events are real.38 provisionally, survival; Belle Graycloud's first words in the novel are "Go on" (3), and her And survival in the face of removal-in the last words in the novel are "What about us?" face of extractions that again and again dis­ (375). rupt extraction-is real, so much so that in So who is in the dark? Least of all, Linda the end there is also a beginning; there is, Hogan herself. Certainly, shadows, invisibil­ finally, a measure of power in the darkness: ity, and silences haunt the book and its writer, "They traveled past houses that were like caves as does this unsettling state of being in-be­ of light in the black world," she writes at the tween and uncertain. Hogan's metaphorical very end of the novel. "The night was on fire playing in and out of light and darkness and with their pasts and they were alive" (375). 66 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 2000

NOTES 7. The best source for understanding Hogan's politically charged literary imagination is Hogan Thanks to Lauren Muller for providing a key herself. See especially "The Two Lives," printed in source and to Shelley Reid, Michael Wilson, and Arnold Krupat and Brian Swann, eds., I Tell You the anonymous readers for Great Plains Quarterly Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American for commenting so helpfully on drafts of this essay. Writers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, For their generosity and encouragement, thanks to 1987), and reprinted in Krupat, ed., Native Ameri­ audiences at Southeastern Oklahoma State Uni­ can Autobiography: An Anthology (Madison: Uni­ versity and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, versity of Wisconsin Press, 1994). Also useful is and my students at Oklahoma State University, Studies in American Indian Literatures 6, no. 3 (fall particularly Geraldine Baker-Little. 1994), a special issue titled "Linda Hogan: Calling Us Home," and guest edited by Betty Louise Bell. 1. From "An Interview with Linda Hogan," Mis­ And interviews with Hogan often cover her politi­ souri Review 17: no. 2 (1994): 124-25. cal convictions and actions; see the Missouri Re­ 2. Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit (New York: Ivy view interview (note 1 above) and Laura Coltelli's Books, 1990). Further citations to Mean Spirit are interview with Hogan in Winged Words: American given in parentheses in the text. Indian Writers Speak (Lincoln: University of Ne­ 3. Betty Louise Bell, Introduction: Linda braska Press, 1990) for two good examples. Hogan's Lessons in Making Do," Studies in Ameri­ 8. By combining fact and fiction so freely, she can Indian Literatures 6, no. 3 (fall 1994): 3. takes the same sort of reconstructive license that 4. Terry Wilson, The Underground Reservation: Truman Capote takes in a "true crime" documen­ Osage Oil, Lincoln (University of Nebraska Press, tary/novel set on and in the southwestern plains of 1985), p. 9: "Osage County-'the Osage,' as cattle­ Kansas, In Cold Blood (1965; New York: Vintage, men, oilmen, journalists, and many resident Indi­ 1993). Like Capote, Hogan powerfully evokes an ans call it-is situated in northeastern Oklahoma." atmosphere of terror, suspicion, and uncertainty 5. Sam D. Gill writes that "All over the Ameri­ and suggests that such an atmosphere overwhelmed cas tribes told about the creation of the world in a particular place during a particular time. In a stories that said that in the beginning there was sense, though, Hogan's office differs from Capote's. nothing but an expanse of water. The first beings Indian-white affairs differ in cultural status from were perched on the back of a water turtle. Among popular crimes that break certain boundaries (such these beings were animals y.rho took turns diving as social class) and speak to contemporary issues into the water to try to swim to the bottom, where (such as capital punishment), but also, unlike the they might get a bit of soil to use in creating the murders committed and explained by Perry Smith earth. Animal after animal attempted the task. Each and Dick Hickock and the Kansas Bureau of Inves­ was gone longer and longer. Each returned ex­ tigation and Truman Capote, many of the Okla­ hausted, almost dead, and without any soil. One homa crimes are still unsolved and unresolved and animal was finally able to bring up just a tiny bit of unnamed, some seventy years after their commis­ soil beneath its claw. The earth maker took this bit sion. Lacking the neat closure of Capote's narra­ of dirt and made the earth out of it. But the whole tive, Hogan invests heavily in the long-standing earth still rested on the back of the turtle." See mysteriousness of the Oklahoma conspiracies, mur­ Gill's essay "Religious Forms and Themes" in ders, and investigations. America in 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples 9. Alix Casteel, "Dark Wealth in Linda Hogan's Before the Arrival of Columbus, ed. Alvin M. Josephy Mean Spirit," Studies in American Indian Literatures Jr. (New York: Vintage, 1991), pp. 281-82. Arrell 6, no. 3 (fall 1994): 56. M. Gibson explains that, for the Chickasaws, Earth 10. Robert Allen Warrior, "Review Essay of The Diver was the crawfish; see The Chickasaws Deaths of Sybil Bolton," Wicazo Sa Review 11: 1 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), p. (spring 1995): 52. Warrior's important critique of 9. The Osages, however, believe that they were Mean Spirit appears in this review essay, which also descended from the sky. As John Joseph Mathews sharply interrogates another controversial book explains in The Osages: Children of the Middle Wa­ associated with the Osage, Dennis McAuliffe's The ters (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), Deaths of Sybil Bolton: An American History (New no reason was given for this descent, and those York: Times Books, 1994). While the relationships who came down to earth found one group of indig­ between Hogan's novel and McAuliffe's personal enous people, the Isolated Earth People, already narrative are really a topic for another essay, I would here (see especially pp. 3 -19). point out here that Warrior lambasts McAuliffe 6. "Interview with Linda Hogan" (note 1 for factual errors and sentimentality, among other above), p. 116. things, and so the critical distinctions he makes STATES OF BEING 67 between McAuliffe's failings and Hogan's are sig­ 23. Wilson in The Underground Reservation (note nificant. 4 above) provides an excellent discussion of these 11. Robert Allen Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recov­ pre-oil boom conflicts (see especially chaps. 1-3). ering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Min­ 24. Linda Hogan, "The Two Lives," in Native neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. American Autobiography: An Anthology, ed. Arnold 85. Krupat (Madison: University of Madison Press, 12. Louis Owens seems to agree with Warrior 1994), pp. 435-49. about Hogan. Although Mean Spirit came out too 25. Bell, "Linda Hogan's Lessons" (note 3 above), late to be discussed at length in his critical study p.3. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian 26. Wilson, The Underground Reservation (note Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 4 above), p. 2. 1992), Owens is nonetheless able to make a brief 27. Ibid., p. 12. comparison between Hogan's novel and John Jo­ 28. Ibid., p. 25. seph Mathews's 1934 novel of the Osage oil boom 29. Ibid., p. 49. and related matters, Sundown. He writes that 30. Ibid., pp. 72-73. "Hogan's novel pays more attention to the tribal 31. Ibid., pp. ix. community than does Mathews's and is consider­ 32. Warrior, "Review Essay" (note 10 above), p. ably more romantic in its methods and conclu­ 53. sions" (p. 261 n.l). 33. Wilson, The Underground Reservation (note 13. In The Underground Reservation (note 4 4 above), p. xii. above), Terry Wilson gives a detailed account of 34. Franks, The Osage Oil Boom (note 22 above), these frequent disruptions among the Osages in p. 118. the early twentieth century (see chap. 4 especially). 35. An Osage student in my Native American 14. Bell, "Linda Hogan's Lessons" (note 3 above), Literature class in spring 1997 visited with elders p.5. in Pawhuska and interviewed them about the bat 15. "Interview with Linda Hogan" (note 1 medicine; none of the elders recognized bat medi­ above), p. 116. cine as Osage. Likewise, none of the written sources 16. Among others, Calvin Luther Martin argues I've consulted discusses bat medicine among the passionately that western linear history tells the Osages. Interested readers might turn to Hogan's wrong stories and needs to be radically rethought. chapter on "The Bats" in her nonfiction book See In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History and Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, (New York: Touchstone, 1995), pp. 21-28. Hogan 1992), especially chap. 5. writes that "bats have been a key element in the 17. Bell, "Linda Hogan's Lessons" (note 3 above), medicine bundles of some southern tribes" (26), p.5. but does not specifically link bats with the Osages 18. Ibid. here. 19. For the material in this paragraph, I am in­ 36. It is not quite clear why this ghost returns; debted to Catherine Rainwater's unpublished pa­ neither is it clear whether Hogan is honoring or per, "Re-signing Boundaries: Silko, Walters, and dishonoring or flat-out appropriating the actual Hogan" (presented to the South Central Modern John Stink, who died in 1938 after years offamous Language Association, San Antonio, November indifference to his own personal oil headright and 1996). See also Rainwater's Dreams of Fiery Stars: wealth. According to Terry Wilson, "Reporters The Transformations of Native American Fiction from a variety of newspapers filed stories about (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, John Stink, the Osage shunned by his tribe, whose 1999), which develops her arguments about Hogan members stubbornly believed he was a ghost, ig­ but was published too recently to be consulted in noring the obvious explanation that he had recov­ detail here. ered from a deathlike coma" (The Underground 20. Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the Reservation [note 4 above], p. 169). Unusually (for United States (Norman: University of Oklahoma him), Wilson does not explore why the people ig­ Press, 1970), p. 285. nore the official explanation and regard this limi­ 21. Allen, "Review Essay" (note 10 above), p. nal figure as a ghost, a shadow person. 52. 37. "Interview with Linda Hogan" (note 22. Kenny A. Franks, The Osage Oil Boom (Okla­ above), pp. 124-25. homa City: Oklahoma Heritage Association, 1989), 38. "Interview with Linda Hogan" (note p. 111. above), p. 123.