‘I’ I S N O T F O R I N D I A N: F E M A L E S E L F-P O R T R A I T S I N C O N T E M P O R A R Y N A T I V E A M E R I C A N A U T O B I O G R A P H I C A L W R I T I N G
Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
eingereicht von Mag. Maria Theresia E R N S T
am
Institut für Amerikanistik
Erstbegutachter/in: tit. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Walter W. Hölbling Zweitbegutachter/in: Ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. Roberta Maierhofer
2012
f o r w o m e n
No girl child born today should responsibly be brought up to be a housewife. Too much has been made of defining human personality and destiny in terms of the sex organs. After all, we share the human brain.
Betty Friedan, 1968
CONTENTS
1. Introduction 7
2. The Subject of Men’s Autobiography 11
3. The Subject of Women’s Autobiography 15
4. Language is Privative – Language is Present 28
5. The Origin of the Word 36
6. New Voices: Native American Women Telling their Lives 44
6.1 The Subject of Native American Women’s Autobiography 44
6.2 Native American Women’s Autobiography 49
7. The Lived World of Native American Women 54
7.1 Inventing Identity in Contemporary Native American Autobiography 55
7.2 The Women’s Unique Themes 58
7.2.1 Wilma Mankiller: A Prized Woman 58
7.2.2 Mary Crow Dog: A Struggling Woman 68
7.2.3 Mary Brave Bird: A Harmonious Woman 90
7.2.4 Janet Hale: A Vigilant Woman 105
7.3 The Women’s Shared Themes 117
7.3.1 Theme One: Spirituality 118
7.3.2 Theme Two: Indianness 146
7.3.3 Theme Three: Mother-Daughter Bonding Relationships 166
7.3.4 Theme Four: Racial Discrimination 192
7.3.5 Theme Five: Reciprocity and Inclusiveness 213
7.4 Connections to Other Women 223
7.4.1 Connection 224
7.4.2 Creation 240
7.4.3 Oppression 257
7.4.4 Voice 258
8. Conclusion 263
9. Bibliography 276
10. Picture Credits 288
The following abbreviations will be used for frequently referenced titles:
Mankiller: A Chief and Her People – MK
Mary Crow Dog: Lakota Woman – CD
Mary Brave Bird: Ohitika Woman – BB
Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter – BL
1. Introduction
The advent of female literature promises woman’s view of life, woman’s experience: in other words, a new element. Make what distinctions you please in the social world; it still remains true that men and women have different organizations, consequently different experiences. … But hitherto … the literature of women has fallen short of its functions owing to a very natural and a very explicable weakness – it has been too much a literature of imitation. To write as men write is the aim and besetting din of women; to write as women is the real task they have to perform (G. H. Lewes 1 quoted in Showalter 3).
Just as “the real task” (G. H. Lewes quoted in Showalter 3) of women’s fictional literature is “to write [novels] as women” (ibid.), so do contemporary Native American women autobiographers attempt to achieve this very same goal. Today’s American Indian women autobiographers surely do not suffer from the lack of a reading audience, nor do they lack the attention from scholars and critics. Both of Mary Brave Bird’s autobiographies, for example, are national bestsellers. Yet, my principal incentive for writing this dissertation is the fact that critics have never been sure what separates, but also what unties them as women, or whether these Native American women share a common heritage connected to their womanhood. Writing about female creativity, Showalter (cf. 3) argues that for many decades women have had a hard time struggling to overcome the influence of male literary tradition in order to create an original and independent art. Whether this is true for the works of the autobiographers that I have chosen for this thesis will be discussed in the following chapters. Are Wilma Mankiller, Mary Brave Bird, and Janet Campbell Hale just imitators of the white male autobiographical tradition, or are they innovators? When one encounters Native American women’s autobiography, everything seems out of place: the sense of the self, of history, and of autobiographical form differs from their appearance in models handed down by the male tradition. Rather than situate American Indian women’s autobiography as a poor relative to this impressive tradition and its legacy that links the individual man to the general sweep of history, I position it in relation to women’s writing.
1 George Henry Lewes (18th of April 1817 to 28th of November 1878) was an English philosopher and critic of literature and theater (cf. Lewes at Wikipedia 1).
7 Chapter 2, “The Subject of Men’s Autobiography”, is written to inform the reader on both classical and contemporary male theories of autobiography. I attempt, for example, to demonstrate autobiography’s dialectical dynamics by acknowledging the autobiographical subject as a historical production and by recovering both the erased Native American women’s voices and their lived experiences. These efforts set the scene for Chapter 3, “The Subject of Women’s Autobiography”, in which I examine the autobiographical I of women’s self-representational writing: its history and identity, its construction and movements, where one can find it, how one can recognize it, and the contexts which make it invisible. In short, what distinguishes it and how it works. In the following chapter, “Language is Privative – Language is Present”, I use the insights created by post-structuralist theories of language to discuss the categories that have defined one’s knowledge of autobiography: the self and history. Thus, I focus on the problems with pronouns as they swirl around, and may indeed create, autobiography, especially the pronoun that conjoins ‘I read’ and ‘I write’ and also covers over the differences between the self and the text, the self in history, and the self who writes: I, the medium of autobiography. Chapter 5, “The Origin of the Word”, investigates the relationship between the self and language. The biblical account of origin supplies a foundation for this investigation, which centers on the second Genesis story of creation. It is this second story that I use to show why female language limps behind male experiments with language. Chapter 6, “New Voices: Native American Women Telling their Lives”, concentrates on Native American women writers in the contemporary United States. I illustrate their dilemma of being marked ‘other’, for example as religious minority, ethnic anomaly, national outsider, and worst of all, as woman in the profoundly well-established model of patriarchy. Next, I attempt to place the self in Native American women’s autobiography in its proper context, removing the authors of my primary literature from a white, male interpretive context in order to discover the ways in which these American Indian autobiographers create subjectivity - their self-portraits - in their texts. In material and psychological ways, these writers have removed themselves from an economy in which they would have merely functioned as objects of exchange. Wilma Mankiller’s endeavor to run for principal chief of the Cherokee Nation and Mary Brave Bird’s
8 political stand during the siege of Wounded Knee, no less than Janet Hale’s estranged life refuse the white men’s traditional narrative of a patriarchal culture with the image of woman as speechless. I locate their difference from male autobiography, and also to some extent from (white) women’s autobiography, as evidence of a difference within autobiography, a genre, in which Native American women’s writing functions as that which cannot be limited. The analysis of my primary works offers numerous answers to the question of what it means to be a Native American woman in the United States of today. I attempt to read these women’s lived experiences as demanding literary, but also deeply personal efforts at delving into problems of cultural tradition, of self-identity, of historical change, and of individual achievement. These outstanding women are literally telling stories, they are singing, so listen, listen. Read, read and interpret. Thus, in chapter 7 remarkable memories are investigated and grouped according to themes which are based on an alteration of the Translation Model which is used as a visualization of how the author’s life themes are individual yet united, interflowing, and connected. The model is divided into five sections, which cover the Native American researcher, the three American Indian autobiographers, their unique and shared themes, and the themes which connect them to other women. In chapter 7.2, “The Women’s Unique Themes”, and its subchapters, one will find cherished memories and intimate stories revealed and interpreted as the treasures they are. Some of my interpretative attempts appear to be simple and matter-of-factual, while others offer the complexity and detail of secondary literature. The analysis of the women’s shared themes - spirituality, ‘Indianness’, mother- daughter bonding relationships, racial discrimination, and reciprocity - focuses on storytelling as an artform, and the span of stories these authors have shared with their readers is a mosaic. They are breathtaking, from the cherished oral histories of the Nunnehi, that is the Immortals, Beloved Woman, Selu or Corn Woman, War or Pretty Woman, First Woman, and White Buffalo Calf Woman, recording the path the Creator has offered to indigenous women, to these autobiographers’ honest memories of their ancestors. They appear determined, deep within research documents of their people, like an onion, peeling back layer after layer of stories. For their stories – written from a
9 female Cherokee, Sioux, or Coeur d’Alene subjectivity – are those I am hungry for, the stories kept hidden by white, male writers and anthropologists, forbidden to be told for generations, never to see a publisher. For their stories are from far away landscapes, huge trees, and raging rivers I can only visit in my mind. Still, their stories are often my own as well, and in the interpreting of them I am reminded of my own femaleness. I am reminded of the joy and sorrow that fills any woman’s life. For this reason, the circle is closed with chapter 7.4, “Connections to Other Women”. And so I, like many other women, find I am compelled to read these Native American women’s life stories, and to interpret them (from a woman’s point of view). The topics that establish connections to other women include connection, creation, oppression, and voice. Closing the circle and bringing together all women is a way of honoring each other, of becoming aware of how distinctive a woman’s experience can be yet, at the same time, so alike. And I am blessed with the opportunity to analyze their writing, words, and memories, because they are amazing. Writing the last chapter of this dissertation is like a ceremony. All women come together to celebrate this new thing that is just now going out into the world to make its voice – its voices – known. My study seeks to articulate the points of convergence and conflict among kinds of female identities represented in these autobiographies: Cherokee, Sioux (Lakota), Coeur d’Alene; masculine, feminine; individual and tribal. I define Native American women’s autobiography as a scene in women’s writing characterized simply by the specific dynamics of prosopopeia as it generally figures in women’s autobiography, the gendered connection of word/body in representing identity, and the emphasis on writing itself as constitutive of autobiographical identity. These native women’s self-portraits prove that native nations still exist, but they and their people have suffered greatly throughout history. Nevertheless, as long as they remain who they are and keep their languages, cultures, and land, they will continue to stand and fight for the next generations.
10 2. The Subject of Men’s Autobiography
The increased attention and curiosity in autobiography in the popular consciousness in recent years, as well as the interest in theorizing autobiography in the academy, may reflect the writers’ concern for inscribing themselves upon the world in a time when representation is suspect and subjectivities are slippery (cf. Morgan 14). Autobiography is the ultimate challenge to express the real through language. For Gusdorf and his followers, autobiography represents a search for and a creation of subjective meaning, an absolute unity of being away from the instability of temporal existence. The dependence of subjectivity and autobiography on social, literary, or even personal demands is but slight for these critics, who greatly believe in the efficiency of individual consciousness to transcend all that might circumscribe it. Barrett J. Mandel, for example, claims that “Autobiography is a passage because, like all genuine experience, it rises from a ground of being that transcends one’s memories, petty lies, grand deceptions, and even one’s desire to be honest” (Mandel 64). Gusdorf himself admits that “certainly events influence us; they sometimes determine us, and they always limit us” (Gusdorf 37); even so, he insists “memoirs look to an essence beyond existence, and in manifesting it they serve to create it” (Gusdorf 47). Autobiography, in these theories, not only transfigures life into text, but existence into meaning and truth, wholeness and unity. Therefore, they present with remarkable clarity the desire for transcendence that animates the autobiographical act, and yet they barely attend to the ground from which such desire springs. In Olney’s Metaphors of Self the autobiographical writer not only transforms the past, but the whole cosmos into the image of the self. For Olney, knowledge can only be subjective; to seek the world without is ultimately to confront the self within: “Man explores the universe continually for laws and forms not of his own making, but what, in the end, he always finds is his own face” (4). Consequently, any theory or structure that brings order to the chaotic flow of experience is inherently autobiographical, a metaphorical expression of its creator. Olney extends the definition of autobiography, then, to include “all order produced and order-producing, emotion-satisfying theories and equations […] that by which the lonely subjective consciousness gives order not only to
11 itself but to as much of objective reality as it is capable of formalizing” (5). As he makes human, organizing activity the foundation of all knowledge, merging subject and object, Olney echoes Foucault’s representation of man. However, unlike Foucault, Olney presents the transformation of the empirical into the transcendental as problematic. Moreover, he extends the autobiographical impulse backward to the beginning of time:
In this view, there is no evolving autobiographical form to trace from a beginning through history to its present state because man has always cast his autobiography and has done it in that form to which his private spirit impelled him, often, however, calling the product not an autobiography but a lifework (Metaphors of Self 3).
Janet Varner Gunn, on the other hand, claims that classical autobiography theorists, such as Gusdorf and Olney, have supported an autobiographical self that knows itself only “from the inside out” (Gunn 7), by a sort of reduction that removes it from the vital worlds of intersubjectivity and historical experience.
The price exacted for the self’s access to itself is very high: nothing less than the world, from which the subject must remove itself in order to think. In the tradition of autobiography theory indirectly influenced by Descartes through Bergson, one finds this provisional act of unsituating the self from the world transformed into a condition of the self’s authentic nature (Gunn 7).
For Gunn, the basis of being from which the autobiographer writes is not transcendent, but rather it is deeply rooted in time, finitude, and community. In fact, she insists that the autobiographical writer “rejects wholeness or harmony” (Gunn 8) as false unities that would cost the self its “real life” (Gunn 8) and the “possibility of meaning that resides only in time” (Gunn 8). So Gunn denies all desire for transcendence, of forgetting that narrative is always transfiguration of the contingent, even if it is itself determined and circumscribed by culture and history. If Gunn sees the self in existential finality, poststructuralist autobiography theorists have insisted on its constitution in and through language. In fact, Foucault’s archaeological history of the appearance of man effectively denies the self any
12 metaphysical necessity. In the Classical Age that preceded the Modern, ‘human nature’ was arranged, along with nature itself, in the universal order of being, but man did not yet possess a special significance as the knower of the origin of the representations he surveyed.
In Classical thought, the personage for whom the representation exists, and who represents himself within it, recognizing himself therein as an image or reflection, he who ties together all the inter-lacing threads of the ‘representation in the form of a picture or a table’ – he is never to be found in that table himself (Foucault 308).
With Modern Age, what has been separated in classical theory – the spectator of the representation, its producer, its object and the activity of representation – all come together to create the transcendental subject, the authorizing author. Autobiography is a product of such a creation. According to Lejeune, it is in its particular configuration of the elements of representation that one can understand the genre and the special nature of its reference. He claims autobiographical reference happens in an identity between the author, narrator, and protagonist, not by a resemblance to the real. Defining autobiography in terms of identity rather than resemblance is what enables one to distinguish it on the one hand from biography and on the other from the novel. Lejeune explains that such identity is imagined by the appearance of the author’s name on the title page: Therefore, the autobiographical pact depends upon belief in the authorizing author and the capacity of the sign to refer to an empirically verifiable person (cf. Lejeune 14). However, what is still lacking is recognition of the autobiographical self as a historical production, inscribed within the narrative, dependent on both writer and reader: a cultural fiction, but not an illusion. As Lejeune remarks: “In spite of the fact that autobiography is impossible, this in no way prevents it from existing” (30). In the final chapters of The Order of Things, though, Foucault prophesizes that man, “only a recent invention” (317), may, with the reappearance of language in all its cloudiness, simply disappear into its folds. Just so Michael Sprinker argues that “no autobiography can take place except within the boundaries of a writing where concepts of subject, self and author collapse into the act of producing a text” (342). Clearly, Sprinker’s conclusion
13 prematurely forecloses the problem of the subject in autobiography. Stories of the disappearance of the subject prevent investigation into the specificities of women’s subjectivity and autobiography. Not only Foucault’s theory, but all discourses that contain the ideology of individualism are deeply androcentric in their implicit and unquestioned exclusion of women from the positions they elaborate on. Despite the invention of the self, women continued to be denied reason and passion, inherent value and hermeneutical responsibility. Moreover, as Susan Stanford Friedman (cf. 56ff.) points out, the group identity assigned to women and other marginalized people has made their access to textual individuality particularly problematic. Yet as the discourses of individualism defined the terms of public authority and authorship and provided a ground for claims to self-possession, women were not immune to the seductions of their ideology. At the same time, however, woman had long been associated with all that the newly constituted subject might wish to evade or transcend: the natural, the contingent, the uncontrollable. For this reason Sidonie Smith claims that, according to patriarchal ideology, “woman has no ‘autobiographical self’ in the same sense that man does” (50), because the woman’s story has been characterized in that ideology in terms of its “fluid, circumstantial, contingent responsiveness to others” (50). Yet to stick, as Smith does, to the idea of the transcendent, unified subject as the controlling figure of even male autobiography is to plot with the denial of the feminine, the natural, the contingent, in all its rhetorical and metaphorical traces. Women’s autobiography becomes particularly complex as gender undoes the dialectical dynamics that animate subjectivity. Female autobiographers find themselves engaged in a dialectic with the cultural fictions that determine them and with the conventions and epistemologies of autobiography itself. Yet people’s understanding of those conventions can be changed by reading their stories, for at their most rebellious, women’s autobiography threatens to undo the very episteme the genre embodies (cf. Smith 65). Therefore, in this dissertation project I read autobiography’s dialectical dynamics by acknowledging the autobiographical subject as a historical production and by recovering the erased scribbling Native American women, thus rethinking the genre itself.
14 3. The Subject of Women’s Autobiography
“Everybody knows what an autobiography is” (7), Olney has argued, “but no two observers, no matter how assured they may be, are in agreement” (7), because autobiography is the point where the two unknowns which haunt questions of self and self-identity seem written in the form of one equation: How is the self represented in the text? How is the self represented in ‘real life’? While no two people might agree on how to characterize its unknowns, autobiography’s promise appears as the coincidence of indeterminate data, the ontological being manifest in the author’s signature, the single equation “everyone knows” (Olney 7) must exist. In this circular referentiality the represented differences among and within a historical self, a fictitious self, and the writing self in the process of constructing the autobiographical text disappear into the signature’s guarantee of anchoring textual and temporal concerns. Autobiographers themselves disreputably invite such an elision of difference by calling to mind the confession, a mode one assumes aims at the truth. Confession attempts to reclaim, reappropriate or rehabilitate the past, yet never simply to record it. Although the truth is undeniably limited, autobiographers tend to declare themselves as the final authority of that limitedness. Indeed, they often pull the reader into the text as a sympathetic witness: where history has failed, the reader will succeed; where history has been biased, the reader will be judicious; where history has been blind, the reader will be perceptive. Thus, autobiography inhabits historical writing as more than a supplement because it challenges the notion that history should be interpreted as a public record of events. The confessional mode, therefore, locates its differences from historical writing not in the events themselves but in their representation. Life as the autobiographer lived it remains an insufficient contribution to history. A full and sufficient representation of the self is only possible through another form: narrative. The pressure to get it right, to tell the truth, to set the record straight have inspired the traits of the detective in many readers despite the fact that the claim to self-closure is predicated on a definition of the self as knowing more than the events in question (cf. Olney 8f.) Generally, women writers have responded to autobiography’s questions of identity and representation differently than male writers and have been situated
15 differently in regard to ‘truth telling’, even in those instances where one might expect the orthodoxy of form to neutralize difference, for example in the spiritual autobiography written under the supervision of a priest. Confession and apology are never entirely individual imperatives for women autobiographers, for the grounds of defense extend beyond those aspects of a life over which one might exercise control, choice and judgment. Women writers have been forced to defend their efforts at narrative and storytelling as well as their attempts to declare they have a self that is worth a story, because autobiography demands the story of a self, and cultures that prohibit female speech and writing by defining the self as male and writing as men’s work doubly marginalize the women autobiographer (cf. Jelinek 6f.). If one sees history as a record of public events and autobiography as the insider’s version of history, then autobiography is granted a place on the continuum between life and art somewhere closer to reality and simple reference. The common view of autobiography as an ordinary, artless form follows from the ‘outside/inside’ conceptualization of public and private history. It privileges public history’s ordering of experience as the succession of wars and governments, and thereby standardizes it as the outside to which autobiography refers. If one uses a public record from which women have been excluded as the criterion for the autobiographer’s story, it is not surprising that women’s autobiography has stood outside this model’s ‘outside’ (history) and ‘inside’ (autobiography) (cf. Jelinek 7ff.). Jelinek’s arguments about women’s autobiography mainly rely on this common sense formulation of the problem of reference in autobiography. Jelinek edited the first collection of essays and has published the first book on the tradition of women’s autobiography. While she regrets the absence of women autobiographers from critical studies, she attributes this to the blindness in method, to an inability to see women’s autobiography as interesting and legitimate, and to the refusal to acknowledge women’s lives as an appropriate area of study. Jelinek questions the formulation of public/private that reduces women’s autobiography to the ‘private’ pages of history without disturbing its form 2. That women can represent the private and men the public sphere remains the
2 Doing research for this dissertation I discovered that the confusion caused by what autobiography is manifests itself in where autobiographies are shelved in libraries and bookstores. Autobiography is often
16 original split. T. L. Broughton claims that women write discontinuous, formally fragmented autobiographies because of the discontinuous, interrupted nature of their experience; that they do not tie their personal chronology to public events and that they tend to write about their families more than men do, even when they enjoy successful careers in the public domain. Her insights are revealing in their speculation about the transformation of lived experience into formal patterns, but her position would simply restore to history all those absent voices, all those historical events without considering or theorizing the absence (cf. 77). My own ideas on this topic differ from Broughton’s in that I will try to theorize women’s absence as a constitutive feature of autobiography and history as they have been defined, and to argue that the categories themselves cannot simply be accepted if one wishes to explore the specificity of (Native American) women’s self-portraits. I am interested in discussing the construction of the subject of women’s autobiography, to develop a way of reading this body of writing, and to address issues raised by the discussion of autobiography while focusing particularly on Native American women’s self-reflexive writing. In learning to dig up the self in women’s texts, feminist critics and theorists have created the larger field of enquiry that enables this dissertation project and which can mainly be chosen as the construction of gender and subjectivity. In recent years there has been a tremendous amount of interest in the genre of autobiography itself, and according to Morgan (cf. 14), this interest has served to set up autobiography as a genre, a sort of writing with its own conventions. Contemporary autobiographical theory has obscured the self posited as origin and subject-matter of self- writing by focusing attention on the ways it is constructed by that writing, as well as by the surrounding social and cultural discussions. In addition, this kind of theory essentially emphasizes non-fictionality as one of the genre’s defining characteristics, and therefore raises the troubled image of discursive correspondence to a ‘real’ world, to the ‘truth’ of experience, and the means by which promises of truth are conveyed to readers. This emphasis on the non-fictionality of autobiography brings contemporary literary theory up against the question of the relation of representation to truth. What does it mean to assign
intermingled with biography, sometimes with history. Women’s autobiography suffers from an even deeper disrespect for this genre. In search of Wilma Mankiller’s autobiography, I turned to the bookseller for help after an unsuccessful search for it. I learned that her autobiography could be found in ‘Fiction’.
17 an account as non-fictional? What sort of agreement does such a name induce? And how does that agreement differ from the agreement required of a reader of fiction? Morgan (cf. 14) reasons that there is also fiction, if there is non-fiction – its other, counter, and opposite. In this regard, fiction begins to take on the implications that have given it a bad reputation with philosophers from Plato to John Searle, which are implications of deception, dissimulation, veiling, and also utter lying. In a wide range of cultural contexts these implications are assigned to women, too. And women not only write fiction, but also autobiography, a genre that now appears doubly problematic as it takes deception to another level, distorting the distinction between confession and fabrication, “between laying bare and cunningly draping” (Morgan 14). One might ask what kind of truth can this writing bestow upon the reader? And what of the women who write themselves in this manner, in what sort of act are they engaged? The truth any autobiography produces is always necessarily a truth restructured and revised in its telling, a mixture of past and present, a process of self-invention and self-portraits where the content of a life, the very subject of autobiography, is not a blank medium, but a growing and changeable force. Autobiography, taking the construction of the self as its explicit subject, marks a discursive spot where one can witness a woman writing her self into existence. It is characterized by a particular act of translation: lived experience is shaped, revised, constrained, and transformed by ‘re-presentation’. In telling the story of the self, the writer imposes order where there is chaos; structural coherence where there is memory and chronology; discourse where there is silence. In fact, self-writing is a kind of creativity. To the earliest, mostly male, contemporary autobiographical theorists, the poststructuralist insistence on the constructed nature of identity arrived with the force of revelation: this insight informed and occasionally transformed their readings of the mostly male autobiographers they took as cases in point. Succeeding female autobiographical theorists noted that female autobiographers are often motivated to write by their awareness of the ways their identities have been constructed. They are aware that these identities have been constructed because these identities are likewise narrower and more constricting than the identities acknowledged as belonging to (privileged) men (cf. Morgan 15).
18 The subject of women’s autobiography is simultaneously and problematically situated in the fields of history and language, and the place of women writers in both differs from the symbolic and real position of men. Consequently, both the production and reception of autobiography differs according to gender. Until recently, autobiography studies have not been interested in the specificity of women’s autobiography or the problem of reference generated by autobiography’s special relation to truth. Both had the look of an “everybody knows” (Olney 7) formulation. The repressed relationship between the relatively literal, non-fictional structure of truth as lived experience and the relatively figurative, fictional structure of the self at the center of autobiography shape discussions of the intersection of gender and genre (cf. Smith 2). In genre studies, autobiography has been located in the divided domain of fiction and non-fiction. Popular and critical attention has focused nearly entirely on the person as real individual in history - as opposed to author - rather than the text. Autobiography has been regarded as the medium through which the self speaks itself without the pretense of fiction; where language is the mirror of the writer’s life. In fact, the autobiographical self emerges in these approaches as a creation somehow independent of the pressures of writing in a way that implicitly privileges history and sameness over language and difference. And nowhere is the reliance on autobiographic realism more obvious than in the conflation of book and man on the grounds that they share the same proper name (cf. Smith 3f.) In his discussion of the author and his work, Michel Foucault has identified a relationship on which readers, writers, and critics of autobiography depend. One of the proofs that such a relationship defines and precedes autobiography is that even when the writing self disappears, which is the philosophical problem, or tradition, of the death of the author, the proper name continues to disguise the disappearance because the name refers to all the levels of subjectivity autobiography puts into play. Where the author, the text, and the protagonist share the same name, the author’s disappearance is almost unnecessary because he (the male author) is already over-represented. Proper names affirm an identity and continuity between the self and language, between signifier and signified, and conceal the differences produced by discourse (cf. “What is an Author” 143ff.). This power of the name depends on a commitment to the proper, or self-same,
19 which one might associate with autobiography. Yet this claim of a singular voice and subject, of a unique and unified self, contravenes the very dynamic that enables the autobiographical act and its characteristic play of identity in language. Moreover, such an investment in sameness follows from and is in compliance with a patriarchal model of the self, of language, and of social relations that would adapt difference, especially sexual difference, as the site of gender’s articulation in culture and the selves and stories that define this difference, with the calming, silencing comfort of sameness (cf. Broughton 79). Women’s relations to identities in autobiographies demonstrate their different relations to language and history. Women do not tend to associate their own history with the grand scale of political history, which is the dominant pattern of men’s autobiography. Nor do they show signs of the same inflexible ego boundaries that characterize male identity. Women’s autobiography stresses the interpersonal dimension of identity, which is the way in which others shape the self, and also experiments with self-representation in ways that differ both formally and historically from men’s experience (cf. Smith 7f.). Scholars of autobiography, until influenced by structuralist and post-structuralist modifications of subjectivity, have sought patterns of continuity and unity in self- representations in ways that uphold claims of the universality of the self 3. However, the history of autobiography reveals that the self is not a transcendent construct which is recorded by generation after generation of autobiographers. In fact, one might look at autobiography to start questioning the value-loaded theory of the unchangeability and deep-down sameness of selves, because one finds in autobiography a skillful display of the complexities and difference within gender, place, time, religious practices, the aesthetic, the family, work, as well as the experience of class, race, and ethnicity which self-reflexive narratives must manage. The foundation of the self as reducible to a unified and unifiable category of being and knowing is a representational fiction created by patriarchal ideology which inscribes itself onto the subject. The fictions of identity staged
3 At this point I am characterizing what would be called the first wave of autobiography studies, which more or less ended its authority by the early 1970’s. For an interesting research of the work contributing to this transformation, see Elizabeth W. Bruss’ Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre, William Spengemann’s The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre, and James Olney’s Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical.
20 and witnessed by male autobiographers and critics mirror and sum up desires that become values in an authority devoted to reproducing this dynamic (cf. Smith 9). The models of selfhood I have pointed out above are associated with theories of language. The empirical, unified self is able to express itself in words that reflect the world. Theories of language unavoidably project an implicit model of social relations since they set up conceptions of human subjectivity and the nature of its authority and meaning. As Raymond Williams explains:
[…] a definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world. The received major categories – ‘world’, ‘reality’, ‘nature’, ‘human’ – may be counterposed or related to the category ‘language’ […] (21).
Therefore, the relationship between language and the self can be understood most profitably for autobiography as one of mutual interdependence rather than priority. A theory of language associated with what can be described as a patriarchal self requires a complementary version of literature and its interpretation. In this context autobiography comes to bear the burden of logo-centric authority because the proper name unites author and authority in an exercise in truth-telling. This can be made clearer by looking at the relationship male critics of autobiography share with male autobiographers with reference to epistemology and value, self-knowledge and self-expression. For it is an act of interpretation to read the history of autobiography as identical to the progress of men through public, political, and military history. According to this interpretation, the male autobiographer represents the self who is the subject of a master-narrative. Male critics of autobiography have found, have made and placed ‘him’ everywhere (cf. Siegel 10f.). William Spengemann declares that “St. Augustine set the problem for all subsequent autobiography: How can the self know itself?” (32) He agrees with St. Augustine’s implicit evaluation of self-knowledge as the grounds of autobiography, and as a result establishes self-representation as a more or less fixed exercise. Where the goal is static, the self that undertakes this search must be equally stable, because how else might it transcend the differences which would obscure its unity with the dominant pattern? Spengemann’s theory suppresses the possible ground of difference – representation – by describing it as contingent, secondary, and even more or less fixed:
21 there are “three methods of self-knowledge” (33) accompanied by “three autobiographical forms” (33). Spengemann suppresses the place of self-representation and the cultural contexts which generate and shape it, because his model of the self depends on a language that could answer Augustine’s enduring question. For Spengemann the self is synonymous with mind or consciousness. Self- representation seeks to reveal the mind in the act of knowing itself. It is striking that the self appearing in autobiography studies is presumed to exclude the body. The mind/body split is reproduced through the public/private, outside/inside, male/female categories that order perception and experience, and it is derived from a way of knowing that cannot account for the knowledge of the body (cf. 34). Thus, the self has functioned as metaphor for soul, consciousness, intellect, and imagination, but never for body. Karl Weintraub presents as “a major component of modern man’s self conception: the belief that, whatever else he is, he is a unique individuality, whose life task is to be true to his very own personality” (1). Self-conception is formed without a body: “[…] the search for conditions of self-conscious individuality” (1), as Weintraub conceives it, excludes those conditions needed by having a body. Perhaps the body is not viewed as providing sufficiently superior matter for metaphor; perhaps the linkage between woman and body, woman and nature leads writers to reject the body as anything other than the biological consequence of being alive. Women autobiographers, however, as Smith writes, have found the body to provide rich grounds for thinking through the relationship between identity and representation (cf. Subjectivity, Identity and the Body 127ff.) By examining women’s autobiography, I hope to show that subjectivity is always constructed through the changing and contradictory demands of the specific, and that the autobiographers’ rewriting of and resistance to a model of selfhood is a dialectic that shapes the representation of the self. Thus, the identity an autobiography inscribes is a process that variously synthesizes or is fragmented by these elements, and an autobiography, in turn, produces an identity, finding creative expression in language. In the process of self-invention, to create a self is to adopt a certain attitude toward language. The contradictory and fragmented self structures the narrative and its effects, and is a fictive and textual construct. So the interdependence of this relationship creates the textuality of the self as it is figured in women’s self-reflexive writing, and the identity
22 one can read in autobiography is dependent in many ways on the writer’s sense of this relationship (cf. Watson Brownley 100). The self at the center of autobiography is a fictive structure caught in the act of carving out the space of the subject constructing a textual space in which the making and the unmaking of subjectivity plays itself out. Autobiography describes the textual space in which the culturally constructed and historically changing epistemology of the self finds particular expression. Pressured by textuality, the autobiographical self owes its existence to the system of representation in which it evolves and finds expression. Being in the text, therefore, the autobiographical I becomes a self in a way that thematizes the chronology of birth, life, and death, but which enacts it linguistically. Born again in language or in the act of writing autobiography offers a stage, as Morgan (cf. 4f.) notes, where women writers can experiment with reconstructing the various systems of representation and ideology in which their subjectivity has been formed. Thus, the subject of autobiography is not a single entity, but a network of differences within which the subject is engraved. It is already multiple and heterogeneous. While the historical self may be the autobiographer’s explicit subject - the story of her life with self-development as the structure of the text - this subject is divided between the historical self and the textual self, which are both versions of the self who writes. Writing defines one level of subjectivity and describes the present tense of the autobiographical act itself, which is always absent from the reader. The subject of autobiography is the difference within the versions of the self embedded in the text. The self engraved in autobiography is not an unproblematic simulacrum of the historical self, but a partly and unavoidably fictive other constructed by the writing self. A biographical, historical person is never simply there in a text; the autobiographical I marks the site of writing where the relations between the historical, the textual, and the writing self come out in language. Both the figurality of language and the literality of lived experience make up the grounds of autobiographical identity and reveal the persistent fictitiousness of the story of the self. The making and unmaking of identity through language describe the essence of autobiography, and the representation of the autobiographical self in language remains all of the historical self, whose prior domain certainly was lived experience, as Smith argues (cf. “Performativity” 18ff.). Watson Brownley (cf. xii) adds
23 to this that the self classically stands for a person’s inner being, identity or essence. However, many contemporary critics of women’s autobiography challenge this definition and refer instead to the mythical or fictive self. These critics reason that if identity is a fluid process, one cannot discover an individual’s one true self but rather the individual’s many selves. This idea of multiple selves has been a liberating one particularly for feminist critics because traditional ideas of selfhood go hand in hand with unity, and the notion of a unified, vital self has historically been more suitable for a man’s life than a woman’s. As I have mentioned earlier, feminist critics argue that women see their lives as fragmented or contradictory as they try to carry out the impossible expectations society places on them and as they create self-understandings separate from those oppressive norms. Everyone seems to know what an autobiography is, and yet hardly any critics are in agreement as far as its definition is concerned (cf. Olney 7). I want to try to displace this certainty, as it arises from a commonsense interpretation of the relation between truth-telling and referentiality, in order to suggest that one recognizes as autobiography the scenes in language in which the self in the text calls to the self in history, the self the autobiographer remembers, and draws into language. Clearly, one recognizes the mixture of objective historical events and the subjective account that depends on the trustworthiness of the eyewitness; the pressures of memory and the imagination in recreating events; and the submissive partnership of fiction-making and claims to fact. The unstable points of reference are attributed to this deceitful form due to the same deception critics attribute to the self it suppresses through representation: the writing self. One has an unclear idea of this self’s structure, and therefore one allows the same ambiguity in how one defines it in autobiography. One is able to put up with such astonishing incoherence in the subject in question when one refers all questions of difference to the author’s name as the final unity that represents the levels of selfhood. Nevertheless, the differences between the self as historical and as narrative subject create the intersubjectivity that defines the autobiographical form. In the first moment the coincidence of persons, places, and events in both structures is seen as unproblematic. It is the burden of autobiography to produce this coincidence textually. The past can never be recovered; it can only be represented. Autobiography encodes the former possibility,
24 that is recovery as desire, and the latter, that is representation as its mode of production. The autobiographical I is at home in both history and narrative because it is produced by the action that draws those fields together. To combine these structures of subjectivity and misinterpret their interaction as the mirroring of basically the same subject is to reveal the very scene in language one recognizes as autobiography. The reading effect through which one sees the I as everywhere referring to a stable presence outside the text characterizes a typical response to autobiography. This dynamic of production and reception structures the invisibility of the I whose identity is I am writing (cf. “Performativity” 18f.). Michel Foucault describes writing as a game “that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limit. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is rather a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears” (“What is an Author” 142). This disappearing act performed by the writing subject seems to contribute to the problem of reference in autobiography. “[T]he problem common to all names” (“What is an Author” 144), Foucault continues, is that they establish relationships between things that are not identical. So even if one hopes that a name gives him/her ownership by designating an identity, place, and function, that hope is held back by the structure that created it. While names carry out a number of functions, only one is properly referential, and it is impossible to distinguish that function – in a word – from the others which bear its name. For instance, ‘Augustine’ refers to the author of the text, to the subject of the story, to the church father, meaning one can multiply functions to show how the proper name involves much more than a case of “pure and simple reference” (“What is an Author” 146). But even when the writing subject disappears into the ridges created by names running parallel functions, the autobiography itself keeps representing that subject as if it were plentifully possible for it to spring up everywhere. This shifting absence, played out as presence, also characterizes the use of the personal pronoun in autobiography. In autobiography the levels of subjectivity signified by the author’s name can be substituted at every turn within the production of the text by I. The personal pronoun is odd in language because it does not properly refer. Anyone can speak of and for oneself as I and at the same time be spoken
25 of and for. In other words, this truth is both the most intimate and most easily appropriated marker of identity. This is, however, a troubling feature for a theory of language, because the model of selfhood which one construes from it prohibits the unified self that emerges in Augustine, Rousseau, and their critics. If the development of self-representational strategies in autobiography is a modification to a changing epistemology of the subject, then critics such as Saussure and Levi-Strauss have certainly shifted the hegemony of a subject founded in a belief that language is a transparent mirror (cf. Jay 13). But is the subject of Rousseau’s autobiography a less constructed I than, to use Jay’s example, the lyric I of Wordsworth’s “Prelude”? Is the self in Augustine’s autobiographical quest for self-knowledge less a figure of identity or any more realistically ‘there’ in the text? It seems as if Augustine’s I is no freer in a linguistic view than Wordsworth’s, but critics have interpreted autobiography as supporting a desire for this freedom. The reader in turn substitutes protagonist for author in order to take hold of the ‘real’ self in history. As Foucault (cf. “What is an Author” 147) claims, writing creates and disguises a particular kind of invisibility, and the reader of autobiography has been unaccustomed to seeing this due to the multiple I’s s/he assumes share the same referent. The text internalizes this substitution by a series of smooth adjustments. The historical, textual and writing selves do not make known their role in constructing identity because it is their irreducibility that underpins the privileged presence offered by the autobiographer’s signature. In this way of autobiographical reading, the I is filled up in the text as naturally as it is filled up in everyday life, and as such refers to a person in both instances, not a narrator. The tension between ordinary and literary language is obvious here for the artlessness of autobiography; its way of seeming uncomposed results from the assumption that the I’s coherence operates in autobiography as it does in ordinary discourse, and not as it does in fiction. Mythos is inherited and determined by memory and fortune; personae and masks are not essential to autobiographical discourse. The autobiographer merely simulates the conditions of everyday life and speech, and suppresses the art in his/her project by seeming to fill up the I as simply as it is filled in daily life. The autobiographical I appears to erase the conditions of fictitiousness as it creates a textual identity comparable with a historical identity, although this I is already fiction produced by the tropological nature of language. As a social practice,
26 autobiography claims to expose the self and to tell the truth. In this sense, could this position of the I shift the cultural authority of autobiography? The stable I of male autobiography, the I which builds authority on the male right to speech and the female duty of silence is, in fact, currently seen as a linguistic illusion with possibly devastating consequences (cf. Friedman 72ff.). If one accepts Foucault’s outline and shifts his/her curiosity from author to discourse, from self-sufficient to culturally interactive ways to interpret texts, one would appear to be a short step away from watching contemporary theories of language ban autobiography. In the following chapter I would like to use the insights created by post-structuralist theories of language to discuss two related questions: What could an ending in the belief in the self that has always been the subject of men’s autobiography enable one to see in women’s autobiography? What can women’s autobiography permit one to understand about the categories that have defined one’s knowledge of autobiography: the self and history?
27 4. Language is Privative – Language is Present
One cannot write an autobiography without being alive and without proving the quality of that life in the created metaphor; for to exercise memory, to be conscious and to increase consciousness, to make one’s metaphor, is to live […]. Such a perfect hypothetical experiment and experience is another name for self-completion and self-realization on the part of a perfect human become divine: it is transcendent self-awareness, the created universe existing as a thought in the totally self-aware mind of – call the being what one will – God (Metaphors of Self 331f.).
In Metaphors of Self Olney has definitely written innovatively about autobiography. He shows an explicit interest in differentiating the self in the text from the self in history; he also suggests that the gaps in reference characterizing autobiography are bridged tropologically. The self seems to be constituted linguistically by means of metaphor. For Olney, the self’s relation to language is described in such a way that the autobiographer takes on the role of God and creates, out of the language of autobiography, a metaphor of self that is capable of generating a new order. When he arrives at a discussion of death and language, his model of subjectivity is most obviously exposed. Olney writes his way out of death by granting the successful (male) autobiographer virtually divine status. The persistent problem of subjectivity in autobiography seems to be the one I have described above: It is impossible to tell which subject one is reading about - the one writing or the chief character about which the narrative speaks. De Man (cf. 921) uses the following example to explain this difficult situation: In order to believe newly-found knowledge concerning the subject, the reader has to read narrated events that happened to the author and situations in which the latter is described metaphorically. The subject cannot simply be there in the text. Instead, the reader constructs it as he reads: narrated events shape the author’s representation and seem necessary as they inescapably and once and for all reproduce the author. They totalize the author’s character for the reader. But events have to be presented within a narrative. Therefore, the revelation of character depends on a temporal distribution of narrated acts. As such, narrative creates character through metonymy: identity in the text emerges through contiguity. De Man asks which
28 is the means and which the end: metonymic narrative process or the metaphorical definitions that it produces? Where does one place autobiography: in the field of fiction or biographical fact? This is not one of the “pointless and unanswerable” (De Man 921) questions; “the distinction between fiction and autobiography is not an either/or polarity […] but it is undecidable” (De Man 921). De Man describes the speculation in autobiography as it enacts the relationship between fiction and fact, metaphor and metonymy, through a reading of the dynamics of undecidability. Autobiography comes forward as a special case as far as subjectivity is concerned, because it interiorizes the speculative play between the producer/producing and the produced. De Man (cf. 922) points out that the same difficulty occurs whenever a text is said to be about anything, or even by anyone. Hence, he weakens claims to authority that are based on privileging self-referential power in the form of understanding and knowledge and authority, the source of power. Autobiography unfolds as a special case due to the reading situation it creates. Certain conventions of reading strengthen the conventions of producing subjectivity in autobiography: the reader keeps watch over the writing; makes sure that the rules are followed; judges the authenticity of the name on the title-page; and certifies whether or not the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is told. Yet, for de Man (cf. 922), these expectations are not located in history, but are basically manifestations of a linguistic structure; these expectations that refuse to accept autobiography as a linguistic phenomenon and that try to locate its authority in history will unavoidably be undone by the instability inherent in the failure to take hold of the referent in the text: “The specular moment that is part of all understanding reveals the tropological structure that underlies all cognitions, including knowledge of the self” (De Man 922). Other critics have resisted accepting all historical pressure to a purely linguistic analysis. Lejeune’s dispute in “The Autobiographical Pact”, for example, offers an important counterpoint to de Man. For Lejeune (cf. 14) the signature gives the text legal authority and obligations, still such authority acts only as an extratextual concern. He finds nothing in the form of autobiography that distinguishes it from fiction. The only characteristic that defines autobiography is the identity of the one who signs and the one who narrates the text. Although Lejeune begins by discussing the tropological system of
29 the name, he moves quickly to give the proper name or signature the contractual approval of speech acts. Since Lejeune uses the terms the ‘proper name’ and ‘signature’ interchangeably, De Man criticizes him for this lack of differentiation between the proper name and the legal signature:
For just as it is impossible for him to stay within the tropological system of the name and just as he has to move from the ontological identity to contractual promise, as soon as the performative function is asserted, it is at once reinscribed within cognitive restraints (922f.).
Clearly, Lejeune’s substitutions entail moving around the location of transcendental authority in the text: it remains in play and can be appropriated by any of the subjects of autobiography, that is, the reader can withdraw from the author’s contract if authenticity has been violated. Therefore (cf. Lejeune 14) it is precisely the ability to decide the authenticity of autobiography that defines its contractual nature. Both readers and authors act out this structure, so it is adequate that the substitutions happen. For de Man (cf. 923), the subject produced within the text must prove acceptable by means of matter of fact, while the author must have followed the rules of autobiography closely enough to have put into play the ability to write out fiction and write in fact: due to this the reader might take over the author’s function and reconstruct from the text the circumstances in which the authenticity of the signature will be judged. De Man argues that this influence happens within autobiography: “The transcendental authority had at first to be decided between author and reader, or (what amounts to the same) between the author of the text and the author in the text who bears his name” (923). It seems obvious that the rhetoric of autobiography prevents one from knowing the subject; instead, it offers two ways of coming to terms with how one reads the author. Autobiography is inappropriately understood as a genre because the autobiographic moment is formed by the speculations of authors and readers staged in the text. This phenomenon describes most of all a figure of reading. The changeability that happens between readers and subjects depends on a structure that contains their differences and their similarities enabling their “mutual reflexive substitution” (De Man 921). The self implicit in this theory of language is clearly a linguistic structure which
30 differs from the historical self, and it dwells in the text as a metaphor. The historical self – the real self of the signature – could be seen as a metaphor for truth. The truth of such a doubled self that is reducible to and not compatible with reality is both offered up and moves away into the language that seems to hold it. Metaphors entice the reader into thinking that s/he has non-metaphorical knowledge, particularly in autobiography. The desire to locate the real self in autobiography is therefore a consequence of its rhetoric: The self and language are privative, for they generate and deny the very thing they cannot provide (cf. De Man 921, 930). For de Man (cf. 926) autobiography is prosopopeia, which he defines as an apostrophe. He calls it an absent, dead, or inanimate object. Talking to the dead or the inaccessible creates a strong movement of control because one not only assumes the capability to address rocks, waterfalls, absent loved ones, and oneself, one bestows on the ‘other’ the capability to respond. De Man presents this function visually: faces speak, so prosopopeia is the making visible and invisible of faces, and because a voice speaks from this face, prosopopeia involves giving and taking away voice too. Figuration becomes disfiguration as autobiography defaces the subject:
[…] the restoration of mortality by autobiography (the prosopopeia of the voice and the name) deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores. Autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause (De Man 930).
The specularity and substitution that I have described earlier make this move dangerous, because making the dead speak also risks making the speaking subject speechless. In whose voice then can the subject of autobiography speak? De Man’s argument produces a disturbing point about a self constructed within a language that is privative, within a tropological system: “Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament” (De Man 930). De Man’s exemplary text is Wordsworth’s “Essays on Epitaphs” that makes the tension between what language appears to promise and what it cannot produce a subject. Even though one is born into language, one cannot die out of it. So the dead seem to haunt language - prosopopeia supports this – like figures of subjectivity haunt texts; the
31 autobiographic moment confirms this – as the moment when knowledge of the self or subjectivity seems to have been achieved. De Man chooses a passage in which Wordsworth attacks language as the “clothing for thought” (929) rather than thought itself; that is, language is deceptive in that it leads one away from true thought which it only represents (cf. De Man 929). The language so violently criticized, however, is the language of metaphor, of prosopopeia; that is, the very thing that makes the unknown obvious. The language humans depend on to produce things for them – the subject of autobiography, for example, by way of prosopopeia – is silent. It cannot itself speak, nor is it the thing itself, still it generates for humans the thing in and for itself while drastically excluding them from it. To the extent that the reader depends on such processes of representation or of production, s/he is “eternally deprived of voice and condemned to muteness” (De Man 930). While autobiography might offer a metaphor of death for de Man in the trope of prosopopeia, for Olney writing an autobiography means choosing a metaphor of life. As I have briefly indicated in the second chapter, Olney focuses in Metaphors of Self on questions aimed at accounting for the universality of the appeal of autobiography: “[…] behind the question ‘What is man?’ lies another, more insistent question – the ultimate and most important question, I should think, for every man: ‘How shall I live?’” (Metaphors of Self xi). Autobiography is therefore a tribute to the self it constructs and that constructs it and originates from the natural desire to order. Olney (cf. Metaphors of Self 30ff.) claims that order is the main urge characterizing all human behavior, and autobiography proves this as well as any other work of art. Metaphor stands in the gap described by prosopopeia, but in Olney’s interpretation it stands ready to deliver the goods from outside of history to the inside of the text. The theory of language and the model of the self, which enables this theory, depend on an a priori hypothesis that language can make the self whole; can carry out a healing function as it cures the chaos of life; and can, in expressing the truest parts of one man, represent the truest parts of every human being. De Man’s privative language goes further than a description of the linguistics and themes of autobiography to a theory of language as fundamentally privative. Such a theory cannot offer a self fully present, at least to itself; wholly representative and representable, waiting to jump in or out of the text (cf. De Man 930).
32 Olney’s expressivist theory of language, on the contrary, depends on this assumption and it frames the metaphorical presence he finds in autobiography. In other words, his reliance on metaphor as a trope of substitution lures him into thinking he can move between the text and the world. The fluidity of access to language and history that Olney envisions characterizes the privilege men have experienced in both structures (cf. Metaphors of Self 35ff.). And still, both analyses have different limitations for feminist theory. It is almost a commonplace of feminist criticism to point out that it is a good deal easier to abandon yourself to disappearance if you already dominate all your survey. Therefore, Heilbrun, for example, focuses on women’s lives rather than their texts; for “we are in danger of refining the theory and scholarship at the expense of the lives of women who need to experience the fruits of research” (20). She explores the recent past when women have begun to assert power and control – “only in the last third of the twentieth century have women broken through to a realization of the narratives that have been controlling their lives” (Heilbrun 60) – rather than previous centuries of silencing in a patriarchal literary tradition. Although de Man does not explicitly take up the engendering of the subject, his theory in no way excludes that analysis. But Olney’s hopeful vision of humanity is to be blamed with coding the human self as male. Women autobiographers are absent from his book. This is not by any means surprising since his and his male counterparts’ theory of the self and language holds back its links to the historical suppression of women’s voices (cf. Stanton 131ff.). Where are the women autobiographers? Olney might have asked himself this question and remained puzzled by the exclusion. How might the absence of women from the canon representing that most significant male form be explained? Olney’s argument builds the notion of universality, of enduring values, and of exemplary lives around the absence of women. His idea of autobiography as texts that answer the question “How shall I live?” (Metaphor of Self xi) denies women’s ability both to phrase or answer such a question. In Olney’s investigation, metaphors of self function for the writer in a primarily epistemological way, the system of referentiality is totalized by unreflecting reflexivity and thereby achieves nearly perfect closure. His language of presence assumes that the self can be fully present to itself; that is, present enough to represent itself for the benefit
33 of others. The self controls the effects of language and is the shaping agent of representation because the achievement of self-presence happens prior to writing, prior to language. Autobiography is only and brilliantly the literary reflection of the self that has become conscious (cf. Metaphors of Self 33f.). Olney’s argument, however, seems to prove false, because it is metaphor that permits the knowing of the unknown. Olney suggests metaphor has extralinguistic properties and can therefore show a relationship to pre- or nonlinguistic experience with knowledge:
It is only metaphor that thus mediates between the internal and external, between your experience and my experience, between the artist and us, between conscious mind and total being, between a past and a present self, between one might say ourselves formed and ourselves becoming (Metaphors of Self 35).
It seems as if he requires a lot of work of metaphor, and the ‘betweens’ appear capable of such endless multiplication that one wonders what the limits might be. The significant replacement autobiography finally results in is to exchange the author’s self-knowledge for the reader’s self-knowledge. And for de Man this is a possibility to be set aside early on: “The interest of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge – it does not – but (that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions” (De Man 922). I bring up these thoughts in order to show, first, how questions of life and death follow discussions of language as surely as they follow discussions of historical or textual being and, second, to show how differently feminist criticism and theory and women’s autobiography respond to this heritage. Women autobiographers tend to assign to speech, presence, political enfranchisement, and social authority the same effects contemporary critics associate with the free play of signifiers (cf. Smith and Watson 5). Still, one needs to ask how different are the claims that women autobiographers construct a space from which they can speak and into which they inevitably disappear? Has a patriarchal epistemology that presents male experience as representatively human constructed language as privative for women? Might there be a way of seeing self-reflexive writing as a discourse of remembering and self-restoration written against the language that is
34 privative and the language that is present, which guarantees women’s absence as it makes them suitable, historically and linguistically?
35 5. The Origin of the Word
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made (The Gospel According to John 1:1-3).
If we continue to speak the same language to each other, we will reproduce the same story. Begin the same story all over again […]. Words will pass through our bodies, above our heads, disappear, make us disappear (Irigaray 69).
In this Biblical account of origin, the Word is not identical with a historical being; rather, it precedes and engenders it, and this question of priority still haunts debates about the relationship between the self and language. The Gospel According to John, describing the Word coming into the world, selects language as the a priori system through which matter is born. The Word that creates and the created world begin to interconnect in the person of Christ who comes to be known as “[t]he Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (The Gospel According to John 1:14), but the interconnection of word and body clearly suggests that nothing comes into being except through language in the Christian tradition. I hope to show that this relationship between word and body reveals an understanding of selfhood that informs the Western (male) tradition of autobiography, both literary and critical. However, the notion of selfhood on which autobiography depends is not a fixed category. Instead, it is capable of accommodating epistemological and historical shifts in the ideology of the self which are marked by a focus on the male self as the self in question. Women autobiographers confront a tradition that consigns women to an inferior status due to a complex relationship between word and body that relegates them to a position of belatedness with respect to language and authority. For women to articulate their experience becomes a project so growingly intriguing that the double binds wrapping both word and body become just like a cloak of silence when woven into the autobiographical act because in order to write an autobiography woman must be courageous enough to use the personal pronoun and, doing so, she asserts what has traditionally been a marginalized activity for women. The figure of the woman writing cuts across the scenes of history. Thus, the entry of women
36 into their own texts brings together the fields of history and language in the writing of the word and the body. The textuality of this relationship speaks about a new notion of self, of identity and establishes the autobiographical act, for women, in the gendered nexus of word/body (cf. Smith and Watson 12f., 16f.). In the Genesis account of creation - “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1) - the generative power of language is asserted and offers a male alternative to giving birth through the getting-together of names: names that signify identity. In identifying speaking with creating there is a patriarchal authority located which informs the Bible. It would seem, however, that Genesis is a difficult text into which to interpret a structure such as patriarchy because it contains two creation stories and has been identified by Biblical critics as the edited version of at least three documents (cf. Bible Commentary). Although theologians argue that each word in each source was divinely inspired, as were the arrangers of the whole (cf. ibid.), the evidence suggests that where there is arrangement, there is choice; where there is choice, there is also an agenda. Changes made simply to eliminate repetition, however, differ in quality and effect from the process that leaves one with two creation stories. In the first story human life is created in the same way as the rest of the world is created: “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created them; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). Within the first six days and one chapter a hierarchy is established with humans, God’s surrogates, leading all created things. This is a representation that undoubtedly does not raise the question of gender equality or inequality because the top level of hierarchy is shared by male and female. Nevertheless, due to the story that follows, one can notice how hierarchies are posited in order to discover what values and assumptions are at work in the discourse and representation of woman that will come to constitute female identity, both in language and in narrative. The second story, which features woman being created from man’s rib, rewrites the creation of the woman, removing her from all other first acts of creation; that is, those acts that have occurred within the first six days. On a textual level, this story reads as a revision of the previous story; historically, the second version might predate the first one because Genesis 2:21-24 erases the woman’s existence and creates her again out of a
37 found object, Adam’s rib. This places her origin within a second order of creation along with the “[…] wild animals and all the birds in the sky […]” (Genesis 2:19) God shapes from the ground. Although Adam is created from dust, he is divinely inspired – God breathes life into him – and his place in creation is fundamental and planned. Adam’s need for help causes the necessity for woman. It seems as if her belatedness is a result of how and from whom - Adam himself - she is fashioned. In other words, she supplements what might be understood as an order, which is Creation after the seventh day, perfectly complete in itself. So this second story seems to supply an epistemological model with which I hope to show the arbitrary and symbolic correspondence between belated bodies and belated words emerging in the very language of the second story. Because of the belated creation of the female body, female speech concurrently limps behind the man’s experiments with language. The first human work imitates God’s work, as God turns over the authority of naming to Adam. Language in paradise is fully arbitrary. If a name is lacking, so is the thing. Thus, Adam can name creation according to a natural correspondence between signifier and signified. Ontology at this point does not need any epistemological supplement (cf. Derrida 262). But when the name/thing woman is lacking, God performs the first surgery and extracts a rib from Adam in order to use it as the basis for quite a strange birth that automatically links women with wounds. He opens man’s body and from man’s flesh he turns the natural role of woman, being the one who gives life, upside down to make the man the ‘mother’ of the woman 4. Woman is now formed from material that has already been used first and foremost for another purpose. Above all, however, her name as the last word missing in the language of creation is also fashioned by the man, from linguistic elements that have already existed: “[… s]he shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man” (Genesis 2:23). Anxiety also roots in this action, because the original unity of human life has been altered through the removal of the rib. Adam is now what has been left over from the creation act performed for and through, but not by him. The rib is ‘taken from’ him, meaning ‘taken away from’ him. The Word, however, is given to the man, who remains
4 I will argue later that in Native American women’s autobiography the wounded body can be seen as a symbol linked to indigenous women’s birthing experiences in their identification with native men’s suffering during sacred ceremonies. The wounded body, however, seems to also be a symbol linked to native men’s religious practices in their identification with the pains a sick person has to endure.
38 the signifying subject. He recognizes the relationship the woman has to him and names her: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man” (Genesis 2:23). After humankind is gendered into male and female, sexuality seems to be a return to unity: “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). As early as 1980 Robert Alter already summed up the common interpretation of Genesis 2:4-3:7 as “an etiological tale intended to account for the existence of woman, for her subordinate status, and for the attraction she perennially exerts over man” (Alter 143ff.). This etiological tale also justifies the institutional misogyny of the Church and is seen to foreshadow and support Paul’s ban against women’s speech:
A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet. For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve. And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression (First Book Timothy 2:11-14).
Subordinating woman to man, as is codified in the second story, works through the separation of male and female words and bodies; that is, through the construction of gender as the site of difference. The gendering of the female involves a contradictory reading of her identity. While their body and soul are unified in their corrupt and corrupting sameness, she is split off from the man, and through this necessary otherness is brought about the identification of her words and body and the semiotization of women as sexuality, sin, and suffering (cf. Neuman 3f.). By reconstructing male and female access to language and its authority, the second story puts male physical primacy on a pedestal as it demotes the female. Representing the female body as a different kind of creation, and using it to justify the relationship between the female body and sin, provides one an insight into the mythification of femininity as flawed and transgressive (cf. Smith 9f.). Referring to Paul’s ban against women’s speech quoted above, it becomes obvious that he distances the woman from man as a body and assigns to her soul the consequences of her words.
39 Woman’s words or language that lead to the fall (speaking with the serpent, eating the fruit, tempting the man to eat) emphasize for Paul the danger of female speech. The luring serpent serves as a means of showing how female word and body are seen in correspondence with deception and transgression, and it is in this arrangement of word/body that woman emerges as the narrative sign ‘truth’ that Paul feels confident to read. Thus, trying to figure out which of the two Genesis stories is first can merely repeat Paul’s contribution in the production of ‘myth’, since both texts do not contain any clues to their chronological origin. That is, the two stories, following in the order they do, have been read, certainly by Paul, as the deliberate unfolding of Eve’s character in a narrative that starts to interpret signs into the feminine: Her secondary, therefore less worthy body, is a morally weaker one and is therefore subject to the forces of corruption, or embodies the corruption that will eventually expose itself in Eve’s transgressive act that ends in her banishment from Paradise. It seems clear that one can witness in this ‘myth’ of creation not so much the creation of the world but the creation of the place of woman in narrative, because it is in the ways in which this narrative creates identity through difference (through separation, unity, and the gendered assignation of labor and desire) that one can see the fiction of oppression that combines the origins of sexuality and textuality. In this discussion of identity and naming it seems significant that the proper names Adam and Eve emerge in connection with a specific act that marks their symbolic and accurate place in creation. Adam is connected with naming (cf. Genesis 2:19) and the woman, who remains nameless for the duration of her stay in Paradise, finally becomes Eve: “Adam made love to his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, ‘With the help of the LORD I have brought forth a man’ ” (Genesis 4:1). The first three chapters establish naming as the significant action and make clear Eve’s place in this order. She names nothing, creates nothing, and her transgression, which could be interpreted as her desire for knowledge, resulting in the banishment from Paradise, seems to be only a further form of the banishment she already lives in. Excluding her from language bears incredible consequences, and this first story of the dispossessed 5 (she does not own her name, thus, she does not own her self) brings God’s accomplishments
5 I use ‘dispossessed’ here in reference to some writers of Native American autobiography who regard Native women as dispossessed in a double way: first, as dispossessed from Native men; second, as dispossessed from white (male) society (cf. Bird 73).
40 in Paradise to a close. The next chapter begins with another creation story that is centered in the female body which has become the site of labor and pain. God’s punishment of woman centers on her body as His curse reveals the implied consequences of the ‘gendering’ of human life: “To the woman he said, ‘I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you’ ” (Genesis 3:16). Finally, the man’s caretaker role is altered into something that would seem to be tyranny. Due to the lack of human procreation in Paradise, God also predicts the future of heterosexuality, which includes the components desire and childbearing as parts of the female role. It is obvious that such reasoning links the female body, whose desire is not for itself or its own (other women), to its subsequent subordination. Genesis is undoubtedly a story held together not by the unity of truth it offers, but by the liveliness of narrative and interpretation in that it constructs gender and collocates women’s words and bodies. It also seems to be the story of how the proper name comes to be seen as identical with the person/character to which it refers. Therefore, the name defines woman’s identity as symbolic and as human: She is profoundly ‘other’ (cf. Smith 14); she becomes the object of desire by replacing the tree of knowledge as the most persuasive object of creation for the male attention. Eve acts on her desire for knowledge, which is narrated as a scene of seduction, and her forbidden activity encourages God to punish her and Adam through banishment from Paradise. Thus, their expulsion results from her transgression, and the suffering that they inevitably have to bear from this loss is transferred onto Eve. According to MacKinnon (cf. 514), this banishment can also be seen as a useful illustration of the role of woman in narrative: Her desire is for another; that is, she can neither possess nor redirect desire; it is neither owned by her, nor for her own. Desire without authority circulates within a patriarchal, heterosexual economy of debt and loss. Woman pays for her transgression through the loss of owning her desire. From this loss Eve’s legacy for the real women who follow her is born: “[…] that which is one’s own, yet most taken away” (MacKinnon 515). This analysis of the Biblical sources of textuality and sexuality and the gendered relationship between word and body has significance for contemporary Native American autobiographers, who understand and must revise the male logic that makes writing and
41 speaking transgressive for women. For example, in Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter, Janet Campbell Hale creates a myth of identity that shares with Genesis and John the notion that language is the controlling metaphor for the emergence of the self and that identity consists in that self’s relation to the word. The connection between word/body forms not only the grounds of the autobiographical act for women; it is also occasionally the theme. My analysis of this relationship enacts the kind of resistance to reproducing the dominant discourse that Theresa de Lauretis describes as follows:
Strategies of writing and reading are forms of cultural resistance. Not only can they work to turn dominant discourse inside out (and show that it can be done), to undercut their enunciation and address, to unearth the archaeological stratifications on which they are built; but in affirming their historical existence of irreducible contradictions for women in discourse, they also challenge theory in its own terms of a semiotic space constructed in language; its power based on social validation and well- established modes of enunciation and address. So well- established that paradoxically, the only way to position oneself outside the discourse is to displace oneself within it – to refuse the question as formulated, or to answer deviously (though in its words), even to quote (but against the grain) (7).
Hale’s autobiography is the story about separation from a family, a culture and, especially, a mother. The structures of oppression through which ideology acts in the author’s life and text are precisely the grounds of reality and identity: her family, the Native American background, and her relationship to her mother. Hale’s sense of her self, her self-portrait, is created and recreated through “acts of cultural resistance” (De Lauretis 18), of which the most evident and impressive is the writing of an autobiography. Hale’s logic depends on taking the relationship to her mother as a shaping force in her life. Writing about it has the power to do more than merely illustrate; it constructs the beats of life along the narrative lines it brings into play. Hale artistically weaves the stories of the relationship to her mother into the reader’s imagination. The mother evolves as a powerful figure. At times Hale’s self-portrait is rich with suggestions of both reward and regret. On the one hand, the author finds herself strongly established in the daughter/wife/servant role of submission, silence, and self-abnegation. On the other hand, her mother has contradicted and complicated this notion by teaching the daughter
42 stories which are about woman’s power in a white man’s world. In this autobiography, as I hope to show later on, Hale’s act of resistance profoundly challenges her sense of self by recreating herself as a self-determined Native American woman regarding her family, her culture, and her relationship to her mother.
43 6. New Voices: Native American Women Telling their Lives
Reading Indian Voices Speaking […] Writing life. Indian Women’s voices speaking, creating, taking shape, shaping the world, coming into being. Hearing voices now wherever we go. Indian voices. Tribal voices. Weaving stories. Voices. Writing voices speaking. Voices (Blaeser 564).
Native American women writing in the United States must deal with an articulated web of binary oppositions. They are many times marked as the ‘other’ by the dominant culture: as religious minority, ethnic anomaly, national outsider and, finally, as woman in a deeply entrenched patriarchy (cf. Smith Subjectivity, Identity and the Body 10f.). These oppositions set up a variety of internal splits between past and present, origin and destination, family and society, which can be traced in contemporary Native American autobiographical writing by women. The four autobiographies by Native American women that I will investigate in this study – Hale’s Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter, Mankiller’s A Chief and her People, Mary Brave Bird’s Lakota Woman and Ohitika Woman – are in a way speech acts that remarkably perform their message: the ongoing survival of Native American culture, on its own terms, in the face of centuries of oppression.
6.1 The Subject of Native American Women’s Autobiography
Hale, Mankiller, and Brave Bird accept, it seems in the interest of survival, the hybridization of parts of their ancient cultures with the Euro-American dominant culture. They use the dominant language, American English, but in a double-voiced way, resulting in the kind of “dialogized interillumination of language systems” (Bakhtin 115) that Michail Bakhtin says leaves neither language unchanged. The autobiographies that result from this encounter of indigenous and Euro-American worldviews hybridize the traditional model of autobiography with traditional Native American understandings of self and history (cf. De Hernandez 40). In fact, the four autobiographies of my primary literature challenge the hegemony of the Euro-American self-made individual by emphasizing that the Native American self exists only in a complex web of relationships
44 to other people and other life forms, all of which have part in the construction of the autobiographical identity. According to de Hernandez (cf. 40f.), contemporary Native American autobiography replaces self-centered monologue with a polyphonic autobiographical narrative, bringing together voices from the past, present, and future that offer quite a different understanding of history than the conventional Euro-American autobiography. Where the traditional Euro-American model of autobiography moves in an organized progression from the beginning of the life history to the end - that is, from childhood to old age - many contemporary Native American autobiographies seem to be non-linear and episodic, with voices from different times sharing in the narration of a collective life history that moves synchronically through different related narrators, and diachronically through different historical periods. In The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions Paula Gunn Allen explains this technique as follows:
The American Indian tends to view space as spherical and time as sequential, whereas the non-Indian tends to view space as linear and time as sequential. The circular concept requires all ‘points’ that make up the sphere of being to have a significant identity and function, while the linear model assumes that some ‘points’ are more significant than others (Allen 59).
This completely different way of understanding time leads to a model of autobiographical self-construction in which the typical individual ‘protagonist’ of the standard Euro- American autobiography is not present. Anna Lee Walters, a Pawnee/Otoe Indian, explains that “[… r]esponsibility for recording and maintaining history in the tribe was and still is shared […] each gender, clan, band, or family holds a vital part of tribal history that is recognized and acknowledged in formal gatherings and events” (76). Translated into written autobiography, this practice of collective history turns autobiography into a tribal or communal event with many different voices fundamental to the text (cf. De Hernandez 41). The four autobiographies I will analyze in depth seem to be polyphonic to varying degrees. While Hale’s autobiography remains quite monologic, writing about traditional Native understanding of history without trying to perform these understandings in
45 writing, both Mankiller and Brave Bird are strongly knowledgeable of the traditional Native multigenerational narration of history. In fact, Mankiller incorporates the narrative voices of different generations to tell the story of her people, and it is obvious that through this act of collective storytelling her own, personal story materializes. So, a relevant question at this point is whether a text that consists of a collection of voices that range from centuries ago and that continue into the future can be an autobiography? This question can be answered with yes if the reader is willing to comprehend autobiography in a wider sense than is usually permitted by the conventional Euro-American definition, which claims that a text is an autobiography if “the artist and the model coincide, the historian tackles himself as object […] he considers himself a great person” (Gusdorf 29). De Hernandez (cf. 42) claims that it is absolutely necessary that the reader of a Native American autobiography keeps in mind that the traditional Native American self is fairly different from the Euro-American understanding of self. In fact, almost every critic of Native American autobiography points out that “autobiography as commonly understood in western European and Euro-American culture did not exist as a traditional type of literary expression among aboriginal peoples of North America” (Krupat 55). At the same time, the autonomous individual upon which the genre of autobiography is based does not exist in traditional indigenous ideas of self, as Hertha D. Wong demonstrates in her study of pre-literate Native American autobiographical practices. She writes that
[…] pre-contact indigenous autobiographical forms emphasize a communal rather than an individual self; they often narrate a series of anecdotal moments rather than a unified, chronological life story; and they may be spoken, performed, painted [see Figure 1], or otherwise crafted, rather than written (Wong 12).
Wong actually proposes the term “communo-bio-oratory” (Wong 18) for pre-contact indigenous autobiographical expressions, putting an emphasis on the “intracultural collaboration and tribal participation” (Wong 18) that go into the telling of an individual’s life story. In other words, a Native American concept of self can be described as more inclusive. In general, Native people see themselves first as family, clan, and tribal members, and second as separate individuals. There is less of a sense of
46 individuality that distinguishes him or her from the cultural community. Instead of the emphasis on an individual self that is separated from the community, the focus is on a communal self who participates within the tribe (cf. Wong 13f.). While Euro-American society is concerned with the isolated, autonomous individual, Native American societies put an emphasis on the environment, which is seen as the “determining force in an individual’s life” (O’Brien 5). Native American tribes are, therefore, primarily more concerned with the group than the individual. The result is a relational identity, or what Krupat refers to as a “dialogic self” (The Voice in the Margin 133).
Figure 1.
Navajo sandpainting, photogravure by Edward S. Curtis, 1907, Library of Congress.
Besides the preference for locating identity in family, clan, and tribal affiliation, there is a tendency to see identity in a spiritual context, to place one’s self in relation to the cosmos. A number of critics of Native American autobiography have noted that the Native self tends to be relational, based on the religious beliefs that argue that “every creature is part of a living whole and that all parts of that whole are related to one another by virtue of their participation in the whole being” (Allen 60). This awareness of
47 interdependence results in a deep respect for everything in the natural world and a sincere personal responsibility for helping to maintain balance. Rather than standing above natural forces, rather than conquering the elements, American Indians interact harmoniously with them. So, individual identity is secondary to tribal identity, which is understood in a sense of cosmic interconnection (cf. Wong 14). The notion of a relational self is often closely connected to a specific landscape. Paula Gunn Allen claims that “the fundamental idea embedded in Native American life and culture [… is that] we are the land. […] The Earth is the mind of the people as we are the mind of the earth” (Iyani 193). Allen insists that this does not mean “being close to nature [but that] the earth is, in a very real sense, the same as ourselves” (Iyani 193). Many Native Americans, for instance, see their deceased relatives who have returned to the earth as nourishing their physical and spiritual existence. Therefore, traditional Native American self-concepts are defined by community and landscape (cf. Wong 15), but also by time and place. The autobiographers of my primary literature articulate a distinctive view of time and place that totally deviates from Euro-American traditional autobiographical form. Euro-American conventional autobiographies proceed chronologically through historical time; place is often incidental to the life events narrated by the autobiographer (cf. Wentz 13). In contrast to this pattern, both Mankiller’s and Brave Bird’s as well as Hale’s autobiographies shift back and forth between historical and mythical time, both being intrinsically interconnected to place, while at the same time establishing a typically Native American concept of self by not focusing upon individual autonomy but on the way in which individuality fits into and is shaped by the community and its traditions. Native American identity is also dynamic, meaning that it is in process, not fixed. The emphasis on these dynamic processes includes a sense of self that embodies the concept of motion. It is a self that is continually shifting, changing, going (cf. Wong 16). In Mary Crow Dog’s autobiographies evidence of a sense of this ‘self-in-process’ is seen in the different names she takes during her lifetime. As she matures, Mary takes new names to reflect her important accomplishments and changing identities. The three contemporary Native American autobiographers I investigate in this dissertation all come from hybridized, mixed-breed cultural backgrounds and have
48 created complex autobiographical narratives that draw both from the mainstream Euro- American culture and the Native American tribal cultures, strategically making use of the strengths of both to further their own political goal: the survival of the tribal culture inside, outside, and along mainstream culture.
6.2 Native American Women’s Autobiography
American Indian women have been a part of the storytelling tradition – from its inception, passing on stories to their children and their children’s children and using the word to advance those concepts crucial to cultural survival (Fisher 7).
Native American women’s autobiography is certainly a dynamic combination of both conservative traditions from Euro-American sources and ground-breaking versions of new interpretations and cultural configurations of autobiographical writings. It is neither an indigenous genre of literary expression nor is it a direct successor to the Euro- American personal memoir. American Indian women’s autobiography disregards definition, while at the same time demanding it; that is, the complexity and variety challenge the boundaries of literary categories but still draw attention to it as a separate entity in the history of literary expression. As a matter of facts, it is an intricate form that is best approached and analyzed in regard to its process of creation rather than as an established genre (cf. Bataille and Sands 3). Native American women’s autobiography has two models: the oral tradition of American Indian literature and the written tradition of Euro-American autobiography. The oral tradition of the Native peoples of the Americas is an ancient, diverse, complex, and enduring one. It is based on storytelling, on origin and migration myths, songs and chants, curing rites, prayers, oratory, tales, lullabies, jokes, personal narratives and, last but not least, on stories of courage and vision. American Indian women’s autobiography has not developed directly from the recognized genres of oral indigenous literatures for the simple fact that it is not an indigenous oral form. Nevertheless, it shares some fundamental characteristics with oral forms, which are stress on events, awareness of the sacredness of language, concern with landscape, affirmation of cultural values, and tribal solidarity. These assets of the oral tradition derive from a concern for communal welfare
49 and the subordination of the individual to the collective needs of the tribe. Such concepts are not at all part of the understanding of Euro-American autobiography, where individuality and originality are celebrated. It is the element of individualism in American Indian women’s autobiography, however, that is innovative; that is, the conservative roots of the Euro-American literary tradition provide the Native autobiographer with a new element which is absolutely necessary for the process of self- narration – egocentric individualism. When the Euro-American tradition is combined with indigenous elements, a distinctive form of expression results that has been given the name American Indian autobiography. How Native American women autobiographers modify and make use of Euro-American individualism is important for understanding the nature of their autobiographical expression (cf. Bataille and Sands 3f.). Helen Carr (cf. 131) distinguishes three main forms of Native American autobiography: first, the early self-written accounts by Christianized Indians 6; second, a number of life histories and personal recollections recorded by anthropologists 7; and third, contemporary autobiographies written and published in the Euro-American autobiographical tradition, while at the same time incorporating elements of the tribal oral tradition. I will investigate the third group in this dissertation. One kind of contemporary Native American women’s autobiography is composed in the same way as the as-told-to autobiography 8: it is drafted in written form by a Native American and co-authored by a non-Indian for publication 9. This process assumes the
6 This first group, while significant in the genre of Native American autobiography, contains very few accounts written by women (cf. Carr 132). 7 The autobiographies recorded by anthropologists in the 1920s and 1930s were solicited, translated, and edited by white anthropologists and their assistants. They were valued within the profession because they gave the impression of ‘authenticity’ to a ‘total’ cultural picture that was solely based on the anthropologist’s observations. Published with introductions and notes of different lengths, these ‘autobiographies’ were able to support and authenticate the anthropologists’ interpretation of Native American life. Reading these texts today, it is important to keep in mind that they have been structured to serve particular ‘white’ purposes and to support particular ‘white’ views (cf. Carr 132). 8 The as-told-to autobiography is an outgrowth of the ethnographic form. Many of the as-told-to texts in print today were collected and edited by anthropologists. They, however, differ in several ways from ethnographic documents in that they are longer, more comprehensive life stories of the subjects; they often employ literary techniques such as dialogue, exploration of inner emotion and responses to events, a first-person omniscient viewpoint, and an awareness of the reader. These autobiographies use informal, conversational language for stylistic effect (cf. Bloom and Holder 207). 9 Three autobiographies of my primary literature belong to this kind: Mankiller published her autobiography in collaboration with Michael Wallis; Brave Bird published both her self-reflexive narratives in collaboration with Richard Erdoes.
50 active involvement of the co-author, who is often responsible for extensive restructuring of the material and filling in gaps where they occur (cf. Bataille and Sands 13). These collaborative autobiographies, as Kathleen Mullen Sands (cf. “Collaboration or Colonialism” 40) calls them, are, however, not only intimate portraits of their narrator, but also, in sometimes subtle and sometimes blatant ways, portraits of their collectors/co- authors. The final category of contemporary autobiography by Native American women is the written autobiography controlled by the writer and literary in intent, just as Hale’s autobiography. Aside from the tribal identification of the writer, this type of autobiography is identical in process to the mainstream American autobiography. The writer assumes final control over the published material. The great output of this kind of autobiographies by Native American women in recent years suggests that it will be the predominant form of the future (cf. Bataille and Sands 13). Contemporary Native American women’s autobiography - as I have mentioned previously - combines elements of tribal oral tradition and Euro-American written tradition, which are both complex literary traditions when studied separately; they are even more complex when combined and adapted to narration of personal experience by Native American women. As Bataille and Sands (cf. 8) argue, it is not a simple task trying to define what constitutes an autobiography by an American Indian woman because of the several kinds of autobiographies by Indian women. Female autobiographers in general tend to focus on private relationships and examination of personal growth. Their self-reflexive narratives concentrate on domestic details, family difficulties, close friends, and particularly people who influence them. Women usually do not portray their lives as heroic, rather they sort out their lives for explanation and understanding in order to clarify, affirm, and authenticate themselves (cf. Jelinek xiii). Even where the subject is a woman of power within the tribe, like Wilma Mankiller, the former principal chief of the Cherokee, the autobiography does not entirely focus on the public role of the narrator, but quite a lot on the reminiscences of girlhood, family life, pre-reservation lifeways, and personal growth. Thus, according to Bataille and Sands (cf. 8), female Indian autobiographies tend to integrate a number of elements of historic, ceremonial and social importance into the narrative; at the same time they also
51 concentrate on everyday events and activities and family crisis events such as birthing, naming, puberty, marriage, and motherhood. Rather than public lives, they are private lives allowing the reader to grasp an insight into women’s experiences. Thus, there is a sense in most Indian women’s autobiographies of the connectedness of all things, of personal life flow, and events are often linked thematically to establish a pattern of character developing through the response to private experience. To investigate the femaleness of Indian women’s autobiography is important in order to make a distinction that supports defining a separate tradition within the larger body of Indian autobiography. This process of investigation also links American Indian women’s autobiographical tradition with the female autobiography tradition that has just recently begun to receive literary attention (cf. Bataille and Sands 9). The processes and forms of both male and female Indian narratives are the same, but the focus and the kind of symbolic representation that determine the literary value of women’s narratives are quite different from their male counterparts’. The autobiographies of male Indian narrators usually focus on historic events and crisis moments in individual lives and tribal history. Family and personal relationships are often omitted. The autobiographies of American Indian women, however, are basically concerned with the more private and intimate aspects of their lives and cultures and with the communal aspect women share in the structuring and preserving of traditions within their tribes. Therefore, the dynamics of autobiography are similar, but the qualities of Indian womanhood lead to a separate literary tradition which is molded from the uniqueness of insight and the all-encompassing character of womanhood (cf. Bataille and Sands 9). Native American women’s autobiographies are culturally, historically, and politically situated and have to be read both in an intertextual and contextual way. Sands (cf. “Collaboration or Colonialism” 47) claims that they are also fictions that are made from real and imagined memories and are given a dual narrative form, first within the Native rhetorical system, which is undoubtedly affected by cross-cultural experiences, and second within the Euro-American literary models and metaphorical language. In fact, Native women’s autobiography has come a long way since the first examples were collected and published. Hale, quite an acknowledged Native writer in several literary genres, is claiming autobiography for Native Americans. She is pushing the boundaries of
52 the genre by overtly drawing attention to the creative nature of the process of life inscriptions (cf. “Collaboration or Colonialism” 49). Native American women’s autobiographies offer different answers to the question of what it means to be an American Indian woman. All of those works of art have to be seen as demanding literary and personal efforts at exploring problems of cultural tradition, of self-identity, of historical change, and of individual achievement. Autobiography has certainly been a demanding form of expression for Native American women. Mankiller, who as a reservation Indian had not been a success in the world of the white man, reveals an urge to revive the meaning and significance of her Cherokee heritage and to carefully document the internal pressure of living with handed-down white male values. Brave Bird shows a sense of pride in preserving and transmitting Sioux culture. Hale, the most literary of these three Indian autobiographers, demonstrates the possibility, but also the need, to reflect imaginatively upon the traditions of Native America.
53 7. The Lived World of Native American Women
Asgaya-dihi. Mankiller. My Cherokee name in English is Mankiller. Mankiller has survived in my own family as a surname for four generations before my own. It is an old Cherokee name, although it was originally not a name at all, but a rank or title used only after one earned the right to it. To call someone Mankiller would have been like calling another person Major or Captain (Mankiller 3).
I am Mary Brave Bird. After I had my baby during the siege of Wounded Knee they gave me a special name – Ohitika Win, Brave Woman, and fastened an Eagle plume in my hair, singing brave-heart songs for me. I am a woman of the Red Nation, a Sioux woman […]. I am an iyeska, a breed, that’s what the white kids used to call me. […] I have white blood in me. […] My face is very Indian, and so are my eyes and my hair, but my skin is very light. Always I waited for the summer, for the prairie sun, the Badlands sun, to tan me and make me into a real skin (Crow Dog 3, 9).
I am an iyeska, a half-breed, and there are some on the res who won’t let me forget it. The full-bloods, the ikche wichasha, the ‘wild, natural beings’, often look down upon the half-breeds as no longer living in the traditional Indian way, as being ‘apples’, red on the outside and white inside. The half-breeds, in turn, look upon the full-bloods as backward. All this doesn’t mean much. Ikche wichasha or iyeska, we are all no longer living like the old Indians – we […] have had to compromise, with one foot in the white and the other in the Indian world (Brave Bird 10).
I always knew that Campbell is not a real whiteman name as it appears to be, not (like many ‘white’ names Indian families have) just a name passed out by some government clerk who needed to write down a name and record an enrollment number after the treaties were signed and all the Indians had to be counted. Campbell is derived from my grandfather’s father’s Indian name. And we Campbells are the last family left of the once powerful Turtle clan that was one of the Water people (Hale xviii).
These are the expressions three Native American women use to describe themselves. The descriptions are a portion of their stories, the ‘truths’ of their lived experience from their perspectives. It seems clear that the truthfulness of their experiences has been protected in the expression of their stories. The purpose of my study is to explore what it is like to be a Native American woman living in a dual world, that is, to heighten awareness of the life experiences of Native American women who grow up in both white and traditional environments, have professional careers in the contemporary world, and still maintain multiple identities. More specifically, my study seeks insight into how cultural,
54 educational, professional, and relational experiences have influenced the lives of three present-day Native American women. ‘I’ is indeed not for Indian, but for a whole range of interpretations which portray indigenous women from an angle that is a particular appropriate approach in the search for a better understanding of Native American women’s self-portraits in contemporary Native American autobiographical writing.
7.1 Inventing Identity in Contemporary Native American Autobiography
I have chosen Mary Crow Dog, named later on in her life Mary Brave Bird, Wilma Mankiller, and Janet Hale for their identity as Native Americans, their professional status, and their recognition as role models in their Native American communities, and their tribal changeability. In their autobiographies these women engage in personal reflection and share their stories, their thoughts, and their experiences about life as a Native American woman. Moreover, they elaborate on cultural identity, educational and employment experiences, family/community influences, and a personal quest for understanding the complex nature of the lives of Native American women. These three Native American women’s lives are characterized by themes that are unique to each woman, themes that are shared among the three indigenous women, and themes that connect these women to other women. Identification of uniqueness offers insights and expands the understanding of the shared experiences among the three women, as Cole states that “to address our commonalities without dealing with our differences is to misunderstand and distort that which separates as well as that which binds us as women” (Cole 1). An alteration of the Translation Model (see Figures 2a and 2b) is used as a visualization of how the women’s life themes are individual yet unified, interflowing, and connected.
55
Figure 2a.
The Translation Model
56 Figure 2b.
The alteration of the Translation Model
57 The model is divided into five subsections: the Native American researcher or translator, the three Native American women, the women’s unique and shared themes, and the themes which connect them to other women. The broken lines indicate how the themes empty endlessly into each other, always in motion, always in process of becoming (cf. Lincoln 26).
7.2 The Women’s Unique Themes
The need to view “oneself as unique is a potent and continuous force in our society”, explain Snyder and Fromkin (3). In their autobiographies each of these three women describes a unique story, characterized by a unique theme: Mankiller, a prized woman, Crow Dog (Brave Bird), a struggling and harmonious woman, and Hale, a vigilant woman.
7.2.1 Wilma Mankiller: A Prized Woman
Wilma Mankiller is a member of the Cherokee tribe whose
[…] people came from near Tellico, from the land now known as eastern Tennessee […] before the federal government, anxious to seize native people’s land, evicted Cherokees from their homes in Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama, 10 forcibly removing them on what was known as ‘the trail where they cried’ (Mankiller 4) 11.
The Cherokee tribe is of matrilineal 12 ancestral descent. Historically, women of this tribe held a great influence with their people and were keepers of wisdom. Prior to contact
10Before the white men had arrived, the Cherokee were actually dominant in the present-day states of Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia (cf. Green 44). 11 Hereafter cited as MK. 12 According to Green (cf. 24), in many of the southeastern tribes, women enjoyed a great deal of power and authority within their family. These tribes were usually matrilocal, meaning that when a man and woman married, they took up residence near the female partner’s family. The groups also tended to be matrilineal, that is, children were born into, and received their identity from, their mother’s family, and they traced their lineage through their mother. Moreover, the inheritance of personal property and the right to hold office were also traced through the female line (cf. Green 24).
58 with whites, Cherokee women had the right to speak in village councils, 13 and some accompanied men when the tribe went to war, as Mankiller elaborates
[…] it is certain that Cherokee women played an important and influential role in town government. Women shared in the responsibilities and rights of the tribal organization. Our Cherokee families were traditional matrilineal clans. […] there was also a very powerful woman who is alternately described as the Ghigau or Beloved Woman. […] In our tribal stories, we have heard of a Women’s council, which was headed by a very powerful woman, perhaps the Ghigau. […] Women even occasionally accompanied men to the battlefield as warriors (MK 19-20).
With the knowledge of her ancestral past, Wilma Mankiller is a prized person, nurtured in a family where women of each generation are made to feel they possess the power and capability of controlling their own destiny. The significance of Wilma’s unique theme is captured in these statements:
My earliest memory is of sitting on a trunk in our family house at Mankiller Flats in the Rocky Mountain community. We had just moved into the house, and I was as happy as could be. […] Sometimes we attended ceremonial dances. I remember all the food and people. There were always lots of children to run and play with, and laughter and no set bedtime for anyone. It gave me such a good feeling to go to the ceremonial dances. We had such a great time. […] (MK 32- 34).
Wilma obviously grows up with a sense of being a prized person. Her Cherokee relatives keep on telling her stories about the Cherokee’s past when being a woman was a very prized thing. Wilma recalls: “If we were lucky, Aunt Maggie had a story to tell us. I didn’t know at the time, but Aunt Maggie told stories in the old Cherokee tradition. [… and] all of her stories taught us a lesson of some kind” (MK 40). Throughout the chapters of Part I named “Roots”, the author authenticates a history of being a prized person. Much like McBeth and Horne, who believe women like Mankiller “[bear] the legacy of an important ‘feminist’ heritage” (75), Wilma’s own “sense of personal and cultural worth [is] entwined with her ancestry” (75), which instills in her a “sense of pride” (75) in who she is. Thus, throughout her formative years Wilma’s Cherokee relatives groom
13The Cherokee had a system of government in which leadership roles were awarded to both men and women (cf. Green 44). This knowledge of her ancestral traditions enables Wilma later on in her life to become the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.
59 her to become a self-confident, high-achieving woman. Due to the United States policy of Indian relocation 14 and due to the BIA people’s persuasive propaganda, Wilma’s father decides to leave reservation life in Oklahoma to move to San Francisco with his wife and nine children, “Finally, the day arrived in October of 1956 for us [Wilma and her family] to depart for California. […] There were nine of us kids then […]” (MK 70). But life in San Francisco turns out to be very baffling for the family:
The noises of the city, especially at night, were bewildering. We had left behind the sounds of roosters, dogs, coyotes, […]. We knew the sounds of nature. Now we heard traffic and other noises that were foreign. The police and the ambulance sirens were the worst. […] We had never heard sirens before (MK 71).
Wilma is not able to adjust to the urban lifestyle, constantly “longing to go home” (MK 73). The overwhelming sense of alienation she experiences in the urban setting makes her hate city life: “I was nagged by anxiety, doubt, and fear that silently crept from the city’s shadows with the thick bay fog to sit on window sills and hover at the doors. […] I was sad and lonesome most of the time” (MK 76). However, her family helps her survive, confirming her beliefs of what a prized person Wilma is. So she soon discovers a way to deal with her sadness and loneliness:
I allowed my mind to slip away to the past. Going back in time and space can sometimes help remedy a person’s troubles. This is a technique that I developed more fully when I was older and had learned more about my tribe’s history. […] That is why I [as an adult] continue to think about the past and to circle back to my tribal history for doses of comfort (MK 77).
Nevertheless, Wilma does not fully manage to adjust to city life: “I was continually struggling with the adjustment to a big city that seemed so foreign to me” (MK 103). Being confronted with alienation, Wilma decides to “escape from all of it. I would run away from home. […] I ran off to Grandma Sitton, who lived in Riverbank […] Over a year or so, I guess I ran away from home at least five times, maybe more” (MK 104).
14 Mankiller (cf. MK 68-69) stresses that the United States Policy of Indian relocation became effective by 1955, when thousands of Native Americans started moving from reservations and ancestral lands to urban areas in the hope of escaping poverty, receiving job training, education, and a new place to live. Popular destinations were Los Angeles, Detroit, Seattle, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, just to name a few.
60 After having realized that she “did not want to live in the city” (MK 105), Wilma’s parents let her stay with her grandmother on the latter’s ranch. This arrangement turns into a fairly positive experience for the 12-year-old Wilma because
I began to gain some confidence. As I felt better about myself, I felt better about others. My grandmother deserves much of the credit. Even though she was strict, she was never judgmental. At a very critical point in my life, she helped me to learn to accept myself and confront my problems (MK 105).
Away from her family, it is, of course, her grandmother who gives the little girl a sense of being a prized person. She eagerly makes Wilma aware that being a Native American woman is a very prized thing. Wilma recalls that “[d]uring our year together, my grandmother helped shape much of my adolescent thinking. I spent much time with her, and never considered a single moment wasted” (MK 106).
Figure 3.
Stories of Little People have always been among the favourites of Cherokee children. The Little People look like Cherokees but are smaller than humans. They speak the Cherokee language and are thought to be mischievous (cf. MK 41).
61 Having grown up to speak the Cherokee language and having been told traditional Cherokee stories, such as stories of Little People (see Figure 3), Wilma has been taught her ancestors’ kind of cultural patterning and the kind of traditions that the Cherokee have that are also part and parcel of her own life. They are tied up with who she is, what she believes in, and how she expresses herself: “Grandmother Sitton and my father – two of the people I most admired as a young woman – valued hard work. I believe it was their examples more than anything else that contributed to my own work ethic” (MK 106). In fact, Wilma’s father is such a determined person that he never gives up on anyone. Once he sets his mind to do something, he succeeds. Wilma thinks that “my father’s tenacity is a characteristic that I inherited” (MK 112). She has definitely been raised in a household where nobody has ever told Wilma that “[y]ou can’t do this because you are a woman, Indian or poor. No one told me there were limitations” (MK 112). So once again, Wilma finds the assurance of being a prized person. Therefore, Wilma’s Cherokee upbringing and her belief in female power become a source of strength when she ventures into the Non-Native American world of academic education. In June 1963 Wilma’s high school days are over and that means: “[...] no more associating with people I did not like, people who did not like me” (MK 144). Even though there have never been any plans for the young Cherokee woman to go to college, because “people in my family did not go to college. They went to work” (MK 145), Wilma starts college in the late 1960’s. After having been married for several years and given birth to two daughters (cf. MK 150), Wilma becomes bored with being a housewife, “As much as I loved my family and home, I was starting to feel restricted by the routine required of the traditional wife. I had not yet celebrated my twenty-first birthday. Sometimes, I wanted to get out of the house and flex my wings a little bit” (MK 151). Her academic career begins with taking some courses at Skyline Junior College, which is located south of San Francisco in San Bruno. “Then it was time for me to move along” (MK 158). A Native American woman named Gustine Moppin encourages Wilma to enroll at the San Francisco State College, even though at first “it was a little overwhelming […] because it was so much bigger than Skyline Junior College” (MK 158). Shirley Witt’s investigation of Indian women in higher education found that Native American women are generally older than the other students, as is Mankiller when she enters college. Strong interest, motivation, and
62 commitment to the pursuit of advanced degrees characterize these women, and the motivation stems first and foremost from their desire for a professional career and the need for future employment. As motivating factors are also listed community encouragement, boredom with present life situation, self-fulfillment, and ambition. Of least importance is the encouragement by teachers and counselors (cf. “Native Women in the World of Work” 12). This latter aspect also applies to Wilma, who tells the reader that she “hated school. I hated the teachers” (MK 103) and “school had never been a pleasant experience for me. I had hated it so much, but I knew that if I wanted to really find a niche in life, my continuing education was important” (MK 158). Before long Wilma is caught in a “two-track cultural background” (“Native Women in the World of Work” 8) and finds herself participating both in the Indian world as defined by her family’s Cherokee heritage and the white man’s world. Witt (cf. “Native Women in the World of Work” 8) explains that the term ‘the white man’s world’ is surely not an archaic phrase, since the world of the white woman is invisible to Indians. Even if it were not invisible, it is irrelevant, because it is the white man’s world that is the one making an impact on the Indians’ lives and Indian individuals. It is the U.S. government that determines the low quality of life for native people, as the House Concurrent Resolution 108 15 has proven:
The passage and implementation of termination bills during the 1950s shocked many Indian leaders who immediately understood that the United States government again intended to destroy tribal governments. […] Termination also meant the imposition of state civil and criminal authority and the loss of state tax exemptions and special tribal programs. Tribes would find it increasingly difficult to remain sovereign (MK 68).
In spite of all the legislative efforts to terminate tribes and their cultural background, Mankiller clearly affirms their ineffectiveness. She writes:
For my family and other native people whom we befriended in San Francisco, the federal termination and relocation programs dating from the 1950s had failed.
15 This legislation withdrew the federal commitment for Indian people and stated that it was important to make Indians within the U.S. as quickly as possible subject to the same laws and eligible to the same privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other citizens, to end Indians’ status as wards of the Unites States, and to grant them all the rights being relevant to American citizenship (cf. MK 67).
63 Termination certainly never even came close to liberating 16 anyone. If anything, those policies had only increased the misfortune and despair among native people. […] Although thousands of American Indians had been relocated, the relocation act’s goal of abolishing ties to the tribal lands was never realized […] A large percentage of native people who had been removed to urban areas ultimately moved back to their original homes [as Mankiller did, too] (MK 161).
In the academic community, the young Native American soon becomes keenly aware of women in a male-dominated environment: “In those early months of 1968 […] I eventually discovered that many of those [liberationist] women were wives, mothers, students, bright dropouts, and others who met to discuss their sexuality, employment opportunities, and male tyranny” (MK 159). During that time the emergent women’s movement and her experience as an American Indian woman help to strengthen her view, her comfort, and her self-esteem as a woman: “Certainly one of the high-water marks of the year was the growth of the women’s movement, which ushered in a new era of feminism, transforming our culture and greatly influencing my life […]” (MK 159). While experiencing being a prized woman, her marriage to Hugo, a native of Ecuador, is deteriorating. Wilma admits that
[… o]nce I began to become more independent, more active with school and in the community, it became increasingly difficult to keep my marriage together. Before that, Hugo, had viewed me as someone he had rescued from a very bad life. When I showed my independence, he felt as if he could no longer maintain his role as my savior. [… T]hings soured between my husband and me as I exerted my autonomy. Time for the two of us had changed radically. I had become a much stronger person and was more than ready to assert my independence (MK 158, 202).
Exerting her autonomy by having discovered the woman’s movement, Wilma eventually starts paying attention to mainstream politics. 1968, as “the worst year of the century” (MK 159) with the ongoing Vietnam War and University campuses being in turmoil, she gets “caught up in the idealism and promise of this man [Senator Robert Kennedy …]. I truly became interested in mainstream politics” (MK 160). Apart from her interest in mainstream politics, Wilma actively gets involved in Native American political activism,
16 It was actually Utah Senator Arthur V. Watkins, the head of the Senate subcommittee on Indian Affairs at that time, who strongly supported the termination movement. He labeled termination as the Indian freedom program (cf. MK 67f.).
64 which in the 1960s takes place during a time when many groups are actively organizing, for example, groups which are dedicated to civil rights pursuits and those that are more radical Power groups. Among civil rights groups of the time are, for instance, African American organizations or the National Organization for Women. While civil rights groups focus on education and creating legal change, Power groups respond to the limits of civil rights groups with more radical rhetoric and actions. Red Power is advocated by a group named American Indian Movement (AIM) 17 (cf. Langston 114f.). The first Red Power action that gathers national and international attention is the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island (cf. Nagel 158). The occupation of this island off the San Francisco bay stirs up Indian pride and consciousness, and announces a new era in American Indian activism. This landmark occupation begins in November 1969 and ends nineteen months later, in June 1971. There has, in fact, been an earlier four-hour symbolic takeover of Alcatraz in March 1964, which has got media attention (cf. Daly 231 and Johnson 17). Mankiller writes:
A takeover of the island had been under consideration for some time. In 1964, just one year after the Alcatraz prison operations had been halted, five Sioux people living in the Bay area had made a run at it. Dressed in their full tribal regalia, they landed on Alcatraz and claimed title to the island for their people. Federal marshals quickly moved in, and the ‘squatters’ were forced to leave (MK 189).
This small group of Native Americans, from the Bay Area Council of American Indians, drives claim stakes into the ground symbolizing the discovery sticks Lewis and Clark have used. The group offers the government forty-seven cents an acre for a total of $9.40 for the island. The occupying party includes twenty-six-year-old Russell Means, an Oglala Lakota, and his father (cf. Eagle 15 and Means 106). Belva Cottier also presses a claim to the island through the courts under the Fort Laramie Treaty that has given Indians the right to claim abandoned federal property, but has been unsuccessful in court (cf. Johnson 240). According to Mankiller (cf. 188), bills improving the social situation
17A group of young community members in urban Minneapolis formed AIM in 1968. They initially responded to the issues of urban police harassment and found themselves targeted by the FBI. By the late 1960s, Indians in Minneapolis formed a third of the state’s Indian population, more than any single reservation in the state (cf. Olson 167). AIM initially drew a relocated urban underclass to their movement (Crow Dog 76).
65 of Native Americans, such as the Economic Opportunity Act of 1965, have not been legislated for more than a decade. This delay has increased the Native Americans’ anger and frustration; that is why “Native American activism became more militant for many of those reasons. That is why the native protests and marches of the 1960s were so important. That is why native people seized Alcatraz [once again in 1969]” (MK 189). The 1969 occupation of Alcatraz, which gains national and international media coverage, is led by students from California campuses and supported by community members of the San Francisco Indian center. Just weeks before students move to occupy Alcatraz, the San Francisco Indian Center has burned down and members have discussed the possibility of building a new center on Alcatraz (cf. Eagle 39 and Johnson 26). Mankiller remembers that
[o]n the evening of October 28, 1969, a four-alarm fire of mysterious origin gutted our beloved Indian Center building in the Mission District. […] The fire had a galvanizing effect on everyone in the local Native American community. Time was of the essence. A statement had to be delivered. It would require action and not mere words. […] The occupation of Alcatraz had to occur as soon as possible. And it did (MK 190).
An initial landing on Alcatraz occurs on November 9th, 1969 and is followed by a larger landing on November 20th by ninety students who begin the hard work of building an infrastructure to support a long-term occupation (cf. Eagle 71). Mankiller (190) writes that “they [the occupiers] landed at about six o’clock in the evening and claimed the island ‘in the name of Indians of All Tribes’. To them, ‘the Rock’ symbolized our lost lands.” An average of approximately 100 occupiers remain on the island on a continuous basis, thousands of Indians from across the country visit Alcatraz, definitely a symbol of renewed cultural pride and more militant stances regarding self-determination:
This time their stay would last not nineteen hours, but nineteen months. The island population sometimes swelled to as many as one thousand. All sorts of people came. They came from tiny Alaskan native villages, from the great Iroquois Nation, the Northwest coast, from Oklahoma, South Dakota, Montana, the surrounding California native communities, and every region of the United Stated (MK 191).
66 Students are the original occupants of the island, but “Vine Deloria, Jr., the Sioux who wrote the book which became our Indian manifesto, Custer died for Your Sins, was a visitor. So were Anthony Quinn, Jane Fonda, Jonathan Winters, Ed Adams, and Merv Griffin” (MK 191). Numerous community members, such as twenty-three-year-old Wilma, volunteer to support the occupiers from the mainland and visit the island: “I will always be very proud of my brothers and sisters for going to Alcatraz. I did not stay there, but always returned to the mainland, where I felt I could be of more service by remaining active in the various support efforts” (MK 193). Wilma credits Alcatraz with being the catalyst for her initial political awareness, stating “[t]he Alcatraz experience nurtured a sense […] that anything was possible […]. I consciously took a path I still find myself on today as I continue to work for the revitalization of tribal communities” (MK 192). Wilma’s reflections of the Alcatraz occupation reveal once again that she is a prized Cherokee woman who has not ceded her culture to the forces exerted from the non-native world. Instead, she seems to have become capable enough to blend both worlds while reawakening and retaining her own culture: “The occupation of Alcatraz excited me like nothing ever had before. It helped to center me and caused me to focus on my rich and valuable Cherokee heritage” (MK 193). Being a prized woman, Wilma realizes that “[t]throughout the Alcatraz experience and afterward, I met so many people from other tribes who had a major and enduring effect on me. They changed how I perceived myself as a woman and as a Cherokee” (MK 196). During the end of Part III, named “Balance”, the circle closes with Wilma’s decision to leave San Francisco and return home:
More and more, I found my eyes turning away from the sea and the setting sun. I looked to the east, where the sun begins its daily journey. That was where I had to go […]. I had to go back to stay. Back to the land of my birth, back to the soil and trees my grandfather had touched, back to the animals and birds whose calls I had memorized as a girl when we packed our things and left on a westbound train so very long ago. The circle had to be completed. It was so simple, so easy. I was going home (MK 205).
67 7.2.2 Mary Crow Dog: A Struggling Woman
Mary is a Sioux 18 woman from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. In the beginning pages of her autobiography, she tells the reader:
I belong to the ‘Burned Thigh’, the Brule Tribe, Sicangu in our language. Long ago, […], a small band of Sioux was surrounded by enemies who set fire to their tipis and the grass around them. They fought their way out of the trap but got their legs burned and in this way acquired their name. The Brules are part of the Seven Sacred Campfires known collectively as Lakota (Crow Dog 5) 19.
The major theme in Crow Dog’s lived experience is one of struggle and conflict, not so much because of her home but because of the defenses she is required to erect to endure a hostile world. She remembers her childhood, entirely impoverished, as a struggling and hard time: “We had no electricity then, just the old-style kerosene lamps with the big reflectors. No bathroom, no tap water, no car. […] There was one phone in He-Dog, at the trading post” (CD 8). As the white kids make fun of her calling her a breed, 20 Mary’s struggle continues while she learns how to defend herself:
When I grew bigger they [the white kids] stopped calling me that [breed], because it would get them a bloody nose. I am a small woman, not much over five feet tall, but I can hold my own in a fight, and in a free-for-all with honkies I can become rather ornery and do real damage (CD 9).
Mary’s struggle continues in childhood when her father, an alcoholic, leaves the family. She remembers that “[m]y father, Bill Moore, was part Indian, but mostly white, […]. He stayed around just long enough until my mom got pregnant with me. […] Then he just left. […] So all I know is that he wanted no part of me and liked to drink” (CD 14). As her story relates, Crow Dog is born in 1953 to mixed-blood Sioux parentage, but is told
18The Sioux were a horse people, courageous riders and warriors. Between 1870 and 1880 all Sioux were driven into reservations and forced to give up their ancestral lifestyle including their horses, their hunting, and their arms (cf. Crow Dog 6). The earliest known location of the Sioux nation was along and close to the Mississippi River in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and parts of Iowa. During the 18th century, they began a slow westward migration and discovered the high plains. Nomadic hunters and gatherers, they did not plant or farm to any significant extent. They lived off fruits and especially appreciated the buffalo. Though nomadic, they usually hunted and camped in the same areas (cf. Melody 3). 19 Hereafter cited as CD. 20 Breed is another term for mixed-blood or iyeska (cf. CD 9).
68 little about her ancestral background. Her mother, remarried to another alcoholic, refuses to speak the native tongue with her daughter, because she feels that learning anything about Sioux culture will merely hinder the young girl’s assimilation into mainstream American society. Mary’s struggle entails a stepfather that “was even worse than my real father, who was at least not around. [The stepfather] started us kids drinking when I was barely ten years old” (CD 15). Therefore, Mary keeps away from her mother’s place: “I was rather on my own, took care of myself, hating myself for having allowed him to teach me to drink” (CD 15). Her mother is never there for the stressed girl, mainly because she is the sole financial supporter and has to earn a living as a nurse. As they have no car, Mary’s mother cannot be home much to take care of her children, so “she was not there when we [her children] needed her because she had to care for white patients” (CD 16). Throughout this hardship, however, Mary is somewhat lucky, since she ends up being raised by her grandparents for a period of time, too short though, “[like] most reservation kids we wound up with our grandparents. We were lucky. Many Indian children are placed in foster homes” (CD 16). Struggling times, though happy, require being able to deal with “no electricity, no heating system, no plumbing. We got our water from the river. […] We knew little about the outside world, having no radio and no TV. […] That was our home - one room” (CD 18-19). Even though Mary’s grandmother is a full-blood Sioux woman, she is a Catholic who “tried to raise us as whites, because she thought that was the only way for us to get ahead and lead a satisfying life” (CD 19), although in her heart the grandmother has stayed a true Sioux woman, speaking “the Sioux language, the real-old-style Lakota, not the modern slang we have today. And she knew her herbs, showing us [her grandchildren] how to recognize the different kinds of Indian plants, telling us what each of them was good for” (CD 19). During the time at her grandmother’s place, Mary is confronted with racism 21 when she is taken to Pine Ridge to do shopping there. On one of these occasions, the little girl wants to buy an orange but does not have enough money with her. Nevertheless, she
21Racism is one of the many words that have been so broadened in modern, popular usage as to have lost their usefulness. Democracy and socialism are two other such terms. Whereas the latter have become all- purpose terms of approval (for example as in people’s democracy or in National Socialism), the former has become an all-purpose put-down (cf. Fishman 17).
69 puts her little hand on the orange, when a white teacher utters: “Why can’t those dirty Indians keep their hands off this food? I was going to buy some oranges, but now I must try to find some oranges elsewhere. How disgusting!” (CD 21). It seems clear that this is a racist remark. Even if the young Indian girl cannot “understand the full meaning of this incident” (CD 21), it “made a big impression on me” (CD 21). Mary as an adult, writing her life’s story, reflects that in “South Dakota white kids learn to be racist almost before they learn to walk” (CD 22). She recalls another incident when she was about eight- years-old, when she fought with her principal’s daughter while being on the playground. The white girl hanging on the monkey bar was saying to Mary: “Come on, monkey, this thing is for you” (CD 22) adding that Mary “smelled and looked like an Indian” (CD 22). The Indian girl, however, fought back grabbing the white girl “by the hair and [she] yanked her down from the monkey bar” (CD 22). These vivid accounts of her first encounters with racism portray young Mary as a struggling individual who is confronted and has to overcome the difficulties she and her people face as a member of America’s most forgotten and alienated minority. Yet, as her childhood memories reveal, her spirit has not been crushed, and she talks about life as a child without bitterness or self-pity, because she “had food, love, a place to sleep, and a warm, potbellied, wood-fed stove to sit near in the winter. I needed nothing more” (CD 27). Living with her grandparents, she and her siblings “were not angry because we did not know that somewhere there was a better, more comfortable life” (CD 26). Due to her full-blood Sioux relatives, particularly Elsie Flood, one of her grandmother’s nieces, Mary learns about strength of mind, which throughout her life has enabled her to continue fighting the hostile non-Indian world. Elsie is
[…] a turtle woman, a strong, self-reliant person, because a turtle stands for strength, resolution, and long life. A turtle heart beats and beats for days, long after the turtle itself is dead. It keeps on beating all by itself. […] A turtle is a strength of mind, a communication with the thunder (CD 24).
These blissful times of learning about her Sioux ancestry do not last long, because Mary and her siblings are “taken away to a boarding school” 22 (CD 17). Even though the
22Charles Hall, a minister at the ABCFM’s Fort Berthold mission in North Dakota, reported that “getting a child to [boarding] school meant, to the Indian, the giving up of all his distinctive tribal life, his ancestral
70 young Sioux girl grows up struggling a hostile world in which she successfully erects defenses, neither she nor her grandparents can fight enough to prevent her being taken away from her grandparents’ home: “They [her grandparents] protected us [her and her siblings] as long as they were able to, but they could not protect us from being taken away to boarding school” (CD 27). Mary’s struggle against a hostile world continues as she strives to describe her experiences at a Catholic boarding school where she suffers, among other things, physical abuse at the hands of the teachers:
When I was a small girl at the St. Francis Boarding School, the Catholic sisters would take a buggy whip to us for what they called ‘disobedience’. […] At age twelve the nuns beat me for ‘being too free with my body’. All I had been doing was holding hands with a boy (CD 4).
Beating was the common punishment for not doing one’s homework, or for being late to school. It had such a bad effect upon me that I hated and mistrusted every white person on sight, because I met only one kind. It was not until much later that I met sincere white people I could relate to and be friends with. Racism breeds racism in reverse (CD 34).
In this intimidating white community Mary learns that life is not about strength of mind. Instead, it is a legacy of termination, relocation, impoverishment, and racism that has created the hostile environment that causes Mary’s introduction to the non-Native American world to be traumatic:
It is almost impossible to explain to a sympathetic white person what a typical old Indian boarding school was like: how it affected the Indian child suddenly dumped into it like a small creature from another world, helpless, defenseless, bewildered, trying desperately and instinctively to survive and sometimes not surviving at all (CD 28).
Mary’s statement makes clear what a deep impact boarding school education, with its sudden separation from family, has on Native American children. Devens (cf. 158) states that the history of boarding schools is an ambiguous one in which stories of benevolent self-sacrificing missionaries compete with the accounts of rigid disciplines and dreadfully unhappy children. Mary boldly compares those unhappy children to “victims of Nazi
customs, his religious beliefs, and sinking himself into the vast unknown, the way of the white man” (Hall quoted in Devens 159).
71 concentration camps [… where] some just seem to shrivel up, don’t speak for days on end, and have an empty look in their eyes. […] The only word I can think of what is done to these children is kidnapping” (CD 28-29). The term kidnapping seems entirely justified in this context. Devens (cf. 161) claims that despite Native American women’s tribalism and their suspicion of missionaries, many daughters end up attending boarding school for a period of time, most likely having been enticed by the material goods promised them, or by the food that the children receive at boarding schools. Once there, the teachers immediately begin the physical transformation that missionaries hope would be a means for the children’s intellectual and spiritual transformation into Christian citizens. Mary recalls that she has “seen little girls arrive at the school, first-graders, just fresh from home and totally unprepared for what awaited them, little girls with pretty braids, and the first thing the nuns did was chop their hair off and tie up what was left behind their ears” (CD 34). For Mary school is also tough and confusing. At one point in her autobiography she even calls the “Mission school at St. Francis […] a curse” (CD 31). Even though St. Francis’ main goal is to get Mary to reject tradition and seek conversion, she keeps on fighting this hostile environment: “I myself was growing from a kitten into an undersized cat. My claws were getting bigger and were itching for action” (CD 35). So when one day an eighteen-year-old white girl appears at St. Francis and wants to know how the Indian girls are treated at the mission school, Mary becomes active. Having been encouraged by the white girl, Mary starts “a Sioux uprising” (CD 36):
We [Mary and her classmates] put together a newspaper which we called the Red Panther. In it we wrote how bad the school was, what kind of slop we had to eat – slimy, rotten, blackened potatoes for two weeks – the way we were beaten. I think I was the one who wrote the worst article about our principal of the moment, Father Keeler. I put all my anger and venom in it. […] I wrote that we knew which priests slept with which nuns and that all they ever think about was filling their bellies and buying a new car. It was the kind of writing that foamed at the mouth, but which also lifted a great deal of weight from one’s soul (CD 36).
When Mary is taken before a board meeting, her mother has to appear as well. Despite a severe punishment - “[…] scrubbing six flights of stairs on my hands and knees, every
72 day. And no boy-side privileges” (CD 37) - the young Sioux woman is not demoralized. Rather she keeps on working on the school newspaper. During that time Mary’s struggle becomes emotional warfare rather than physical battle, since all the teachers consider her to be different from the other Indian girls because she speaks up against the injustice at St. Francis. One day she and her classmates get a new teacher, a priest, in English. During one of his first classes he asks an Indian boy some questions. The boy, however, is quite shy, hardly speaks any English, but he has the right answer without pronouncing the English words correctly. The priest tells the boy to correct himself and say it over again. The boy gets all nervous, starts stammering and cannot get out a single word anymore. The priest, entirely insensitive to the situation, keeps on pushing the boy to say the words properly. Courageously Mary stands up and says: “Father, don’t be doing that. If you go into an Indian’s home and try to talk Indian, they might laugh at you and say, ‘Do it over correctly. Get it right this time!’ ” (CD 40). This bold statement gets the priest so aggravated that he orders her to stay after class, grabbing the young Sioux girl by the arm, pushing her against the blackboard, and yelling at her: “Why are you always mocking us? You have no reason to do this.” (CD 40). Mary audaciously answers: “Sure I do. You were making fun of him [the shy Indian boy]. You embarrassed him. He needs strengthening, not weakening. You hurt him. I did not hurt you” (CD 40). As a responsive punishment, the priest bends Mary’s arm and shoves her really hard. She in turn hits him in the face, giving him a bloody nose. After this episode with the priest, Mary decides to quit school, even though she would have the determination to succeed and finish it: “I’m not taking any more of this, none of this shit anymore. None of this treatment. Better give me my diploma. I can’t waste any more time on you people” (CD 40). At this point in her life a source of strength for Mary is her ability to transcend the struggle with a belief in herself. Due to this newly awakened self-confidence, the young Sioux woman develops self-composure and patience and learns which battles to fight. The fact that she quits school and does not continue to fight for better conditions at St. Francis might prove the saying that it takes more courage not to fight than it does to fight. Particularly during her participation in the newspaper project, Mary has been upset and angry, but it seems that by quitting this
73 project and school before actually having graduated, she proves strength to control these feelings of anger and frustration. As a teenager Mary leads a temporary life, living in a number of places both on and off the reservation, struggling with alcohol abuse:
St. Francis, Parmelee, Mission, were the towns I hung out after I quit school, reservation towns without hope. Towns that show how a people can be ground under the boot, ground into nothing. [… These towns] were drunk towns full of hang-around-the-fort Indians. […] Some people would just do about anything for a jug of wine, of mni-sha, and would not give a damn about the welfare of their families. They would fight constantly over whatever little money they had left, whether to buy food or alcohol. The alcohol usually won out (CD 43).
Being caught in a hopeless situation surrounded by desperate people, Mary gets in the habit of drinking: “At age twelve I could drink a quart of the hard stuff and not show it. I used to be a heavy drinker and came close to being an out-and-out alcoholic – very close” (CD 44). For Mary it is not hopelessness that has got her drinking, but
[…] because it was the natural way of life. My father drank, my stepfather drank, my mother drank – not too much, but she used to get tipsy once in a while. My older sisters drank, Barbara starting four years before me, because she is much older. I think I grew up with the idea that everybody was doing it (CD 45).
At one point in her autobiography, Mary writes:
People talk about the ‘Indian drinking problem’, but we say that it is a white problem. White men invented whiskey and brought it to America. They manufacture, advertise, and sell it to us. They make the profit on it and cause the conditions that make Indians drink in the first place (CD 54).
As a teenager, however, Mary is not aware of the fact that alcoholism among American Indians is actually a result of the white man’s greed. It is rather the notion that “everybody was doing it” (CD 45) that turns Mary into an alcoholic. Luckily, her substance abuse abruptly ends when she “[…] got tired of drinking. […] every morning I woke up sick, feeling terrible, with a first-class hangover. I did not like the feeling at all but still kept hitting the bottle. Then I stopped” (CD 45). In the hostile reservation towns, in which the rule of the few whites governs, Mary is finally able to quit drinking, which
74 can definitely be attributed to her continuous struggle against this antagonistic environment of her teenage years, which she poignantly summarizes as follows:
It seemed that my earlier life, before I met Leonard [her future husband] and before I went to Wounded Knee, was just one endless vicious circle of drinking and fighting, drinking and fighting. Barb [one of her sisters] was caught up in the same circle, except that she was running with a different crowd most of the time. She was unusual in that she could drink just one beer or one glass of wine and then stop if she wanted to. Most of us at that stage could not do that (CD 54).
Despite being trapped in this vicious circle of alcoholism and fighting, Mary is able to quit drinking. At the same time, however, she becomes so restless in the reservation setting that one day she “[…] ran away. […] I had no place to go, but a great restlessness came over me, an urge to get away, no matter where. Nowhere was better than the place I was in” (CD 56). The teenager teems up with other Indians: “We formed groups. I traveled with ten of those new or sometimes old acquaintances in one car all summer long. […] We just drifted from place to place, meeting new people, having a good time” (CD 58). Traveling the United States in such a manner requires money, which Mary and her friends do not have, so she confesses: “It is hard being forever on the move and not having any money. We supported ourselves by shoplifting, ‘liberating’ a lot of stuff. […] We did not think that what we were doing was wrong” (CD 60). Mary even explains to the reader why the roaming teenagers do not intend to stop stealing:
We had always been stolen from by white shopkeepers and government agents. In the 1880s and ‘90s a white agent on the reservation had a salary fifteen hundred dollars a year. From this salary he managed to save within five or six years some fifty thousand dollars to retire. He stole the government goods and rations he was supposed to distribute among Indians. On some reservations people were starving to death waiting for rations which never arrived because they had been stolen. […] For this reason we looked upon shoplifting as just getting a little of our own back, like counting coup in the old days by raiding the enemy’s camp for horses (CD 60-61).
After some time of engaging in shoplifting, Mary realizes that there are other ways to fight the hostile and unjust world of the whites. Getting caught stealing twice, the Sioux teenager comprehends that “[…] ripping off was not worth the risks I took. It also occurred to me there were better, more mature ways to fight for my right” (CD 64).
75 Nonetheless, it takes some more time before Mary discovers these mature ways to fight for her rights. Still a wandering teenager, her struggle against the hostile world of the white man continues. Mary recalls
[…] I was forcefully raped when I was fourteen or fifteen. A good-looking [white] man said, ‘Come over here, kid, let me buy you a soda’ – and I fell for it. He was about twice my weight and a foot taller than I am. He just threw me on the ground and pinned me down. I do not want to remember the details. I kicked and scratched a bit but he came on like a steamroller. Ripped my clothes apart, ripped me apart (CD 67-68).
Due to the white man’s laws, Mary stands no chance against the rapist, who gets away uncharged despite of the severity of the crime he has committed. Mary is filled with hatred “work[ing] off my rage by slashing a man’s tires” (CD 68). Looking back upon her roaming years, struggling Mary discovers a sense of her self in her culture. She has become capable of living part of her life in the white man’s world, often moving back and forth from traditional to modern on solely situational grounds. Still seeing herself as both traditional and modern under certain conditions, Mary is not afraid to switch between from, say, the Lakota language, when talking to her full-blood relatives, to English when circumstances so dictate:
If nothing else, my roaming years gave me a larger outlook and made me more Indian, made me realize what being an Indian within a white world meant. My aimlessness ended when I encountered AIM [which …] hit our reservation like a tornado, like a new wind blowing out of nowhere, a drumbeat from far off getting louder and louder (CD 72-73).
As this citation recounts, the turning point in Mary’s life comes in South Dakota, when she gets to know the American Indian Movement (AIM) and its philosophy of fighting against injustice. Leonard Crow Dog, one of the members of AIM and her future husband, speaks about this discrimination against the indigenous people of the United States by saying “we [Native Americans] have talked to the white man for generations with our lips, but that he had no ears to hear, no eyes to see, no heart to feel. […] now we must speak with our bodies and that he [Crow Dog] was not afraid to die for his people” (CD 75). Due to Crow Dog’s emotional speech, Mary decides to join AIM. At that time
76 the young woman gets married to a member of AIM. According to her account, the marriage “[…] lasted just long enough for me to get pregnant” (CD 78). During the months of her pregnancy, Mary keeps on moving around with AIM,
[…] going from confrontation to confrontation. […] Wherever there was an Indian political trial, we showed up before the courthouse with our drums. Wherever we saw a bar with a sign NO INDIANS ALLOWED, we sensitized the owners, sometimes quite forcefully (CD 79).
Being part of AIM makes Mary’s struggle more meaningful. In fact, the movement
[…] gave us a lift badly needed at the time. It defined our goals and expressed our innermost yearnings. It set a style for Indians to imitate. Even those Native Americans who maintained that they wanted to have nothing to do with AIM, that it ran counter to their tribal ways of life, began to dress and talk in the AIM manner (CD 82).
More and more Indians begin identifying with AIM’s ideas and goals. One of these goals is a cross-country protest march in Washington, DC, in 1972, in which Mary and a group of Native American activists, all from her generation, take part. They occupy the federal building, housing the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices:
It seemed the natural thing to do, to go to the Bureau of Indian Affairs building on Constitution Avenue. […] It was ‘our’ building after all. Besides, that was what we had come for, to complain about the treatment the bureau was dishing out to us. […] Next thing I knew we were in. […] Security guards were appointed. […] They watched the doors. Tribal groups took over this or that room, […]. Someone put up a sign over the front gate reading INDIAN COUNTRY. The building finally belonged to us and we lost no time turning it into a tribal village (CD 85-86).
A whole week long AIM refuses to leave the BIA building, despite police threats to forcefully drive the Indians out. In the end, a compromise is reached:
The government said that they could not go on negotiating during Election Week, but they would appoint two high administration officials to seriously consider our twenty demands. Our expenses to get home would be paid. Nobody would be prosecuted. Of course, our twenty points were never gone into afterwards (CD 91).
77 Even if nothing much has been achieved from a practical point of view, Mary sums up this one-week siege as an experience that “[…] morally […] had been a great victory. We had faced White America collectively, not as individual tribes. We had stood up to the government and gone through our baptism of fire. We had not run” (CD 91). As Russell Means 23 has put it, it “had been a helluva smoke signal” (Means quoted in CD 91).
Figure 4.
AIM leaders Russell Means (left) and Dennis Banks at Wounded Knee, 1973.
Mary’s personal struggle to endure a hostile world is, indeed, supported by her involvement with AIM. Another turning point in the young Sioux woman’s life, however, occurs in South Dakota, on returning home from the protest in Washington, DC. Mary first becomes involved in another spur-of-the-moment AIM demonstration. A Sioux man named Wesley Bad Heart Bull has been killed by a white man in Rapid City, whose inhabitants have a reputation for discriminating against Native Americans. To make sure justice is done, AIM members, including Mary, attend the trial. On the courthouse steps, they learn that the killer is charged with only second-degree manslaughter, not with
23Russell Means is considered as one of the most outstanding Native American activists today. For over twenty-five years, he has worked on behalf of indigenous peoples throughout the world. Means first became a public figure during the early 1970s as one of the militant leaders of AIM. He has dedicated his work to improving the lives of Native Americans. His forceful, angry power of speech and his striking physical presence (see Figure 4) have made him a symbol of AIM and its activists (cf. Straub 136).
78 murder. Their outrage at the charge erupts in a violent confrontation with the state police. The air is full of tear gas, and the courthouse is set on fire before the riot is crushed:
Then all hell broke loose. The police used tear gas, smoke bombs, and fire hoses to drive us away from the courthouse. […] The fighting lasted from morning until midafternoon, luckily without shooting, just rocks, fists, and clubs. Many Indians were arrested and some were later tried. Sarah Bad Heart Bull was indicted on several counts of rioting and arson, and faced a possible maximum sentence of forty years. Her son’s murderer was acquitted without doing any time at all, while Sarah actually spent a few weeks in jail for having made a nuisance of herself over her son’s death (CD 119, 121).
Almost immediately after the Rapid City incident, the members of AIM answer a call for help from Pine Ridge, a Sioux Reservation that borders Rosebud. Many of its residents have been terrorized by the police force of the reservation government, which is supported by the BIA. Following the orders of tribal chairperson Dick Wilson, heavily armed policemen have wandered the reservation in pickup trucks and often shot into the houses of Wilson’s political enemies, most of whom are elders and traditionalists. With other members of AIM, Mary rushes to help her Pine Ridge neighbors. The group initially plans to confront Wilson at his tribal headquarters, but seeing the police’s supply of firearms, they fear the tactic could end in a bloodbath. One old resident tells Mary that he has lived all his life in Pine Ridge “in darkness [… and that] the whites and men like Wilson had thrown a blanket over the whole reservation and that he hoped that we would be the ones to yank this blanket off and let some sunshine in” (CD 123). At that moment it dawns on Mary that “what was about to happen, and what I personally would be involved in, would be unlike anything I had witnessed before. I think everybody who was there felt the same way – an excitement that was choking our throats” (CD 123). Two older women suggest that AIM draws attention to the violent situation at Pine Ridge by taking over the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre as it has had the BIA building in Washington, DC some time earlier. Wounded Knee has great symbolic importance to the Sioux. In December 1890 more than 300 Sioux men, women, and children were massacred there by the U.S. army. Figure 5 shows Lakota chief Big Foot on December 29, 1890, desperately ill with pneumonia, as he was shot to death by a U.S. soldier. This
79 photograph of Big Foot’s contorted, frozen body in the snow might actually be the most widely known image of the Wounded Knee massacre.
Figure 5.
The Miniconjou Sioux chief Big Foot lies frozen in the snow where he fell at the western warriors’ last stand at Wounded Knee. Neither the Indians nor the troops intended to fight; the murderous clash erupted from an escalating case of nerves on both sides. Big Foot, weakened by pneumonia, arose from his wagon to watch the bloody scene but was soon shot down (National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution).
In addition to being one of the greatest tragedies of Sioux history, the Wounded Knee massacre marked the end of the Plains Wars, during which the Sioux and other Plains Indians failed to drive white intruders from their lands (cf. Hirschfelder 137). Mary remembers:
When I heard the words ‘Wounded Knee’ I became very, very serious. Wounded Knee – Cankpe Opi in our language – has a special meaning for our people. There is the long ditch into which the frozen bodies of almost three hundred of our people, mostly women and children, were thrown like so much cordwood. […] And below it flows Cankpe Opi Wakpala, the creek along which the women and children were hunted down like animals by Custer’s old Seventh, out to avenge themselves for their defeat by butchering the helpless ones. That happened long ago, but no Sioux ever forgot it (CD 124).
80
On February 27, 1973, Mary is among some 200 AIM members who take over several buildings at Wounded Knee. Some of AIM’s members try to persuade Mary to stay behind because she is eight months pregnant by now. Nonetheless, the brave Sioux woman decides that she wants to give birth at Wounded Knee, no matter what the dangers are: “I figured that I would have my baby within two weeks, I moved into a trailer house at the edge of Wounded Knee. By then daily exchanges of fire had become commonplace. The bullets were flying as I got bigger and bigger” (CD 132). Having the baby at the protest site undoubtedly is a symbol of renewal, a victory in her people’s and her own struggle for survival in a hostile world, even if “I’m going to die, I’m going to die here. All that means anything to me is right here. I have nothing to live for out there” (CD 132). Soon after the activists have made their stand, Wounded Knee is surrounded by Wilson’s police and the FBI, exactly what AIM has expected:
None of us [AIM activists] had any illusion that we could take over Wounded Knee unopposed. Our message to the government was: ‘Come and discuss our demands or kill us!’ Somebody called someone on the outside from a telephone inside the trading post. I [Mary] could hear him yelling proudly again and again, ‘We hold the Knee!’ (CD 127).
During the seventy-one-day siege, the FBI and the Indians routinely exchange gunfire. Activists who are shot rely on healer Leonard Crow Dog to use herbal anesthetics and a knife to remove bullets. Mary explains: “Leonard doctored them all. It took him less time than it would have a white doctor to take a bullet out and there never were any infections. He was using Indian medicine to treat the wounds” (CD 146). The occupiers also have to cope with primitive living conditions and dwindling supplies, but are heartened by the sympathetic response of the media and the American public to their message. A 1973 Harris Poll reveals that 98% of the public have heard of Wounded Knee, and 51% have sympathized with the Indians (cf. Matthiessen 69 and Price 125). Yet, Mary does not consider her struggle to be her own but one shared by other Native Americans. Amidst the chaos of the siege, Mary has her first child, Pedro. This birth evolves as one of Mary’s first victories in the struggle against a hostile environment.
81 About to give birth, the young Sioux woman feels “both strong and overburdened” (CD 157). In the Sioux language either word refers to a woman being pregnant. Despite of her Native American friends’ urges to give birth in a ‘white man’s institution’, Mary “[…] was determined not to go to the hospital. I did not want a white doctor looking at me down there. I wanted no white doctor to touch me. Always in my mind was how they had sterilized my sister and how they had let her baby die” (CD 157). At an earlier point in her autobiography, Mary explains that “[f]or a number of years BIA doctors performed thousands of forced sterilizations on Indian and Chicano women without their knowledge or consent. […] I was determined not to have my child in a white hospital” (CD 79). Medicine (cf. 125) explains that in the 1960s and 1970s, many Native American women claimed that they had been sterilized without their knowledge or consent. Outright claims of genocide were leveled against the BIA and the IHS (=Indian Health Service), which maintained hospitals on the reservations. For this reason, Mary “was happy at the thought of having a baby, not only for myself but for Barbara 24, too” (CD 79). Mary’s struggle against the hostile world of white hospitals by refusing to give birth in such a place has turned into a struggle shared by many other Native American women present during the siege at Wounded Knee:“Many came to me saying, ‘Mary, you’re our last chance now to have a baby at Wounded Knee’ ” (CD 160). Even though her labor is long and painful, Mary finally holds a baby boy in her hands. Her account of giving birth is one of great pain, but at the same time one of a triumphant struggle against the hostile world of white medicine. It illustrates how, through personal will, she develops great strength, both as a Lakota and as a woman: “As I looked at him [her baby boy] I knew that I was entering a new phase of my life and that things would not, could not ever be the same again” (CD 163). Living in a society which has driven her people and herself to drink, forcibly sterilizing both her sister and her mother, Mary realizes frankly and openly that a new, more promising and hopeful chapter in her life has started with the birth of her son Pedro. After she has had her baby, Mary earns the name “Ohitika Win, Brave Woman, [while they …] fastened an eagle plume in my hair, singing brave-heart songs for me” (CD 3).
24Barbara is Mary’s older sister, who has had sterilization performed on her without her knowledge or consent (cf. CD 78-79).
82 Having given birth can also be interpreted as a seed, growing as she continues to tell the reader what it means to be a Lakota woman in today’s world. While she is clearly proud of her culture and her heritage, she has had to grow that pride from very meager beginnings. After the excitement of Wounded Knee, Brave Bird settles into a life as a single mother. To her surprise, she soon finds herself courted by Leonard Crow Dog. Twelve years her senior, Crow Dog is held in admiration by the young Sioux woman: “[…] I looked upon him with a certain kind of awe. He was a medicine man and the spiritual leader of the American Indian Movement” (CD 170). At his insistence she agrees to marry him by Indian rites. She moves to the lands of the Crow Dog family, where she sets about making a home for Pedro and Crow Dog’s three older children from a previous marriage. She describes her home as follows:
CROW DOG’S PARADISE. This paradise, Crow Dog’s allotment land, is beautiful. The Little White River flows right through it. It is surrounded by pine- covered hills. In the sky overhead one can see eagles circling. Some water birds […] fly over it with their long necks outstretched. There are horses to ride. Everywhere on this land one is close to nature. The paradise is not just a one nuclear family place, but rather a settlement for the whole clan, the whole tiyospaye 25 (CD 172).
Mary has a home and a husband now, and yet, “it was not always paradise” (CD 173), in spite of the fact that Crow Dog’s land is named PARADISE. The young woman is in no way prepared for her role as wife, mother, and housekeeper. She openly confesses: “I did not know how to cook. I did not even know how to make coffee. I did not know the difference between weak coffee and strong coffee, the kind, that the Sioux like which will float a silver dollar” (CD 174). Apart from her lacking housekeeping qualities, Mary struggles against Sioux men who are “the worst gossips in the world” (CD 174), while she serves as maid to them
[…] continuously busy cooking and taking care of the guests. Indian women work usually without indoor plumbing, cook on old, wood-burning kitchen ranges, wash their laundry in tubs, with the help of old-fashioned washboards.
25The innermost circle of an individual’s kin is called tiyospaye. Usually, it includes all relatives who are removed from ego by no more than two collateral lines (cf. Albers and Medicine 224). The kin groups are a constant and elementary feature of traditional Sioux social organization (cf. Albers and Medicine 184).
83 Instead of toilets we have outhouses. Water is fetched in buckets from the river (CD 174).
In traditional Lakota society, there is an overwhelming agreement that the roles of men and women are complementary, exemplified in the Lakota concept of okicicupi ‘sharing’, which is a philosophy that inspires not only relationships between men or women, but between man and women. For Lakota societies, where the sexes complement each other, women are neither inferior nor superior to men, only different. Both sexes are valued for the contributions they make to society. They are cooperative rather than competitive. Throughout the history of Indian-white relations, two claims of white patriarchal views have found their way into traditional Lakota society. One is that reproductive roles cause women to be subordinate; the second is a belief that males are somehow essentially and universally dominant. A number of feminist writers also view women’s productive and reproductive roles as the basis for female subordination. They see sexual asymmetry as a social fact of life in which women are universally subordinate to men. Moreover, they argue that a woman’s biological and reproductive (private, domestic) role is the basis for her inequality because it prevents her active involvement in the powerful, prestigious (public) spheres open to men (cf. Powers 5-6). For the traditional Lakotas, it was just the opposite. Male dominance did not exist. Women were not equals of men, but they were female persons, with their own rights, duties, and responsibilities which were complementary to and in no way secondary to those of men (cf. Powers 7). Aside from their respective efforts in food cultivation, traditional Sioux women continued to engage in a wide range of activities. In the summer months, they dedicated significant labor to digging wild prairie turnips, picking June berries, choke cherries, as well as wild plums, and gathering a wide range of other plants for food and medicine. Men, on the other hand, hunted waterfowl, they stalked deer and other game, they trapped small mammals, such as rabbits and beavers, and finally traditional Sioux men fished in local rivers and fresh water lakes (cf. Albers and Medicine 185-186). So in early Sioux households, the ideal relationship between men and women was based on principles of complementarity. Under these principles, the members of each sex were expected to be proficient in their respective work activities and self-sufficient as well (cf. Albers and Medicine 189). Beginning in the late 19th century, the federal government provided Sioux households
84 with annuities for work areas other than cash-crop production. The government hired people to work as police, to cut timber for cooking and heating, and to build schools. These jobs and the annuities they provided were exclusively granted to Sioux men. Sioux women, in contrast, were trained to become efficient housekeepers. They were taught a variety of domestic skills including baking, canning, quilting, knitting, crocheting, and housecleaning. Such teaching became the primary responsibility of the curriculum in boarding schools (cf. Albers and Medicine 186-187), such as the one Mary attends as a child. Crow Dog, as well as his male relatives, have grown up learning the white patriarchal views of women as being subordinate to men and therefore having to perform such chores as housekeeping. Struggling Mary endures the same fate, when living with Leonard Crow Dog:
I spent a good many years feeding people and cleaning up after them. It is mostly men who stop by at the house, and only very few women, and you cannot tell men to do anything, especially Sioux men. I sometimes even moved my bed outside the house into the open to get some sleep, because the men stayed up all night, talking politics, drinking coffee, […]. I would wash dishes for the last time at midnight, go to bed, and in the morning all the dishes would be dirty again (CD 174-175).
This statement leaves no doubt that the ‘work’ of men is considered to be more glorious and more honored than the work of women. While living with her husband, Mary encounters yet another problem:
Besides being tumbled headfirst into this kind of situation, still in my teens, with a brand-new baby and totally unprepared for the role I was to play, I still had another problem. I was a half-blood, not traditionally raised, trying to hold my own inside the full-blood Crow Dog clan which does not take kindly to outsiders (CD 176).
Mary’s dilemma is to fit neither into the world of the white people nor into the full-blood Indians’ world. For three generations, the Brave Bird women have been taken from their homes at a very early age to be sent to St. Francis Mission boarding school, there to be harshly disciplined and deprived by force of their own language. This loss proves particularly disruptive when Mary becomes Leonard’s children’s stepmother. Her parents-in-law continually remind her that Francis, their son’s first wife, has been a full-
85 blood, fluent in Lakota. So Mary is clearly ill-equipped to serve a traditionalist’s needs. The difference in their age, she is 17 and he is 31 when they get married in 1973, is obviously less a problem than their cultural differences:
At first I was not well received [by the Crow Dogs]. It was pretty bad. I could not speak Sioux and I could not tell that all the many Crow Dogs and their relations from the famous old Orphan Ban were constantly talking about me, watching me, watching whether I would measure up to their standards which go way back to the old buffalo days. […] The old man told me that, as far as he was concerned, Leonard was still married to his former wife, a woman, as he pointed out again and again, who could talk Indian (CD 176).
Her lack of being able to speak the Lakota language, as well as her ignorance of what the traditional Lakota culture entails set off her full-blood in-laws to treat her “as an intruder. I had to fight day by day to be accepted” (CD 176). Leonard, however, proves to be a very understanding husband, teaching her the ceremonies, the use of healing plants, and reconcile her to the role of a medicine man’s life. Struggling against this hostile world of full-bloods, who are entirely disrespectful towards the mixed-blood Sioux woman, Mary falls seriously ill one day:
The shock of having to deal at the same time with the myth and the reality, […] and having to take care of the needs of so many people as well, was too much for me. I broke down. I got sick. I was down to ninety pounds. My body just collapsed. I could no longer stand up. […] I told Leonard, ‘[…] I am sad, always. I think I am going to die […]’ (CD 183-184).
As a response to his wife’s sickness, Leonard starts to perform several healing rituals, which involve drinking peyote 26 tea. Her autobiographical account movingly describes Leonard’s attempts at mediating between his sick wife and her defensive relatives, who have challenged her since the moment she has set foot on Crow Dog’s Paradise. Along with revealing new aspects of Mary’s relatives (Leonard’s father starts calling her daughter), there is a fascinating experience that leaves Mary with a newborn identity. When walking over to her bed, Mary sees “a strange woman [lying there], her hands crossed over her breast, her face stiff and white, her eyes unseeing. She was dead!” (CD
26In her autobiography Ohitika Woman, Mary explains the origins, the healing powers and the role peyote plays in the Native American Church (cf. Brave Bird 84-95).
86 185). Thinking of Leonard, who has been a constant reminder of Sioux strength, Mary realizes that
[…] the strange woman lying dead in my bed was me. Myself. And a great weight was lifted from me. I could breathe again. My heart was beating. I felt good. What was dying, what had died, was my former self, but I would go on living. […] [t]he dead woman disappeared. The peyote power got hold of me. I started laughing (CD 185).
Mary’s life is not over. What she describes needs to be understood as her own cultural awakening as a result of a life-long struggle for human dignity in a hostile world. Leonard has told her throughout the healing process that Lakota history has happened, of which she has become a part, and as the circle is completed, Mary is clearly proud to have become a part of it. Once again Mary’s struggle is not one of her own but one shared by other Native Americans, particularly women, as is exemplified through Mary’s account of her relationship to Annie Mae Aquash 27, whose own struggle against a hostile world resembles Mary’s. The autobiographer writes:
She [Annie Mae Aquash] too had to do without electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, running water, and paved roads. She too was often hungry, down to one meal a day, eating anything she could find. Her mother had the same name as I – Mary Ellen (CD 187-188).
But it is not only struggling poverty on the reservation while growing up that the two Indian women share. Both of them get involved with the American Indian Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Anna becomes involved with the Boston Indian Center and is sent by the Center to Washington, D.C., at the time when the BIA is taken over. Anna returns from her experience in the capital as a renewed woman, dedicated and determined to share in the struggle of Native Americans, wanting change to come to Indian people right away (cf. Witt 40-41). This is why she fights and struggles so hard, as Mary remembers:
27 Anna Mae Pictou Aquash is born and raised on the Micmac reservation in Nova Scotia. Unlike Mary, Anna is not removed from her family and shipped hundreds of miles away to a boarding school. Being married with two daughters, life on the Micmac reservation soon becomes too oppressive, too devoid of options (cf. Witt 39-40).
87
Annie Mae met her first AIM people on November 26, 1970, when Russell Means and two hundred militants buried Plymouth Rock under a ton of sand, as a ‘symbolic burial of the white man’s conquest’. […] Later Annie Mae was among those who with war whoops boarded Mayflower II, the replica of the vessel that had brought the pilgrims to the New World. […] This first meeting with AIM had on Annie Mae the same effect my first encounter had on me. It decided her fate. It decided when and how she would die (CD 189).
The Battle of Wounded Knee in the 1970s finds Anna Mae among the many young and old women, including Mary, who share a common feature: the loss of patience. Throughout the siege of Wounded Knee Native American women, especially Anna Mae, organize, plane, provide support, and give continuity to the endeavor. She travels back and forth through the battle lines, bringing food to sustain the AIM defenders. In Dakota tradition, she is called Brave-Hearted Woman for these efforts (cf. Witt 42), which put her life at risk, as Mary recollects: “Ever since Wounded Knee she [Anna Mae] had had premonitions of approaching death. ‘I’ve fought too hard,’ she said. ‘They won’t let Indians like me live. That’s all right. I don’t want to grow up to be an old woman” (CD 191). Anna, however, survives the siege, but is arrested at Rosebud Indian Reservation in 1975. FBI agents, even though they have no warrant, arrest her, and start intensive interrogation:
When the feds saw Annie Mae, they said, ‘We’ve been looking for you.’ They handcuffed her, throwing her around like a rag doll. […] They questioned her and questioned her although she had not been anywhere near the scene of the shootout 28. The FBI was convinced that she knew where Peltier 29 was hiding. […] If she did not talk and if she did not do everything they wanted, she wasn’t going to live (CD 195-196).
Anna Mae does indeed have contact to Peltier: “[I]n the months before her death she got really close to Leonard Peltier. She admired him, and could not do enough for him. I
28 The shootout Mary writes about at this point refers to the June 26, 1975 Oglala shootout between Native Americans and foreign Americans. Anna Mae cannot tell the FBI anything because she has been in Council Bluffs, Iowa, that day (cf. Witt 43). 29 Leonard Peltier is still seen as the symbol of struggle against white brutality and injustice. Up to his arrest, he had fought for all indigenous people to regain their dignity, their sovereignty, and their future. In June 1975 he shot two FBI agents in self-defense. During the trial of Peltier in 1977, much essential background evidence was excluded. The greatest exclusion was all of the government-instigated violence, which had caused the whole tragedy and had led to the deaths of their own agents. Peltier was finally sentenced to life imprisonment (cf. Harvey xiii, xiv, xvii, xx).
88 [Mary] still think that he would have been the ideal man for her, but things turned out tragically for both of them” (CD 191). While Peltier is sentenced to life imprisonment, Anna Mae is found shot to death along a highway on the Pine Ridge Reservation on February 34, 1976. Mary receives a phone call from a friend in Rapid City, telling her that “Annie Mae Aquash had been found dead in the snow at the foot of a steep bluff near Wanblee on the Pine Ridge Reservation” (CD 197). Even though it has never become official, Mary knows the federal government is responsible for Annie’s brutal death, since even “William Janklow, the attorney general of the State of South Dakota, had said that the only way to deal with renegade AIM Indians was to put a bullet through their heads, and someone had taken the hint” (CD 198). Having shared a struggle against a hostile world, Mary vows that “[s]omeday I am going to find out who killed this good, gently tough, gifted friend of mine who did not deserve to die” (CD 198). So Mary bravely keeps on struggling for her and her people’s life in order to survive as a people knowing that Annie Mae “[…] died so that I, and many others, could survive” (CD 198). After Annie Mae’s death Mary has to face yet another struggle against the hostility of the white man’s world. Leonard is arrested by the FBI “for having defended his home and family against some drunken punks. To them my husband was more dangerous than Peltier because moral power is always more dangerous to an oppressor than political force” (CD 222). Mary is devastated about his arrest feeling “unspeakably lonely” (CD 222), not fathoming how she can possibly go on with her life without him. Calling her husband’s trials “a farce” (CD 222), Mary reveals to the reader that “Leonard was sentenced to a total of twenty-three years” (CD 223). Mary quickly addresses rallies to raise funds; and it takes many contributions from friends, Amnesty International, and the World Council of Churches to get Leonard out of prison (cf. CD 224-225). When Crow Dog eventually returns to Rosebud “[i]n the spring of 1975 […]” (CD 236), Mary and the entire tribe welcome him with honoring songs that he has been able to survive “through his spiritual power” (CD 234). Mary’s struggle against a hostile world has bred numerous new relationships to discover, to maintain connections to tradition and to ensure cultural continuity amid change. Having witnessed the deaths of innocent Indians, such as Annie Mae, and the unjustified imprisonments of Leonard Peltier and her husband Leonard Crow Dog, Mary
89 has realized that the struggle of Indian people is far from over. American Indians know that anyone who identifies with their tradition and their culture and wants to improve indigenous people’s lives, there is always someone trying to stop them in that process. Most essential is that a very firm background and determination goes along with it. Both Annie Mae and her own husband have taught Mary that Native American people should expect conflict as they pursue self-definition and self-determination, and they must be prepared to stand firm and continue with their goals. Mary has become an activist, maybe even an ‘Indian feminist’. At the same time, though, she has been in a double bind of victimization, caught between eroding traditions and a neglectful and misinformed white dominant culture. During her years of struggling against hostile worlds, Mary has been oppressed. Nevertheless, her life’s story is ultimately one of triumph. Not only does she survive, but she also emerges strong and whole because she can balance injustice with humanity and anger with faith in herself and her culture. After having participated in a traditional Sioux ceremony, Mary can truthfully say:
I could hear the spirits speaking to me […]. I felt nothing and, at the same time, everything. It was at that moment that I, a white-educated half-blood, became wholly Indian. I experienced a great rush of happiness. I heard a cry coming from my lips: Ho Uway Tinkte. A Voice I will send. Throughout the Universe, Maka Sitomniye, My Voice you shall hear: I will live! (CD 260).
7.2.3 Mary Brave Bird: A Harmonious Woman
Mary’s subsequent autobiography Ohitika Woman primarily deals with the history and the culture of the Sioux people, which are deep and complex and encompass peace and harmony, which lends credibility to Mary’s next theme. Cultural strengths of Sioux people are their reciprocal relationship with the land and their environment. As the early history of the various Sioux bands suggests, they were spiritual warrior people on the plains. This grand flowering ended in confinement to reservations, and a life of starvation as well as educational, cultural, and spiritual oppression. Because the Sioux people’s relationship with their land and their environment had been broken, Mary’s ancestors embarked on a slow, painful and depressing search for a new identity (cf. Young Bear and Theisz xxxi). Even these days the dismal poverty found in some of these poorest
90 counties in the United States increases many of the social problems of the Sioux, as Mary writes:
On March 28, 1991, there was a power outage on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. […] I had been drinking heavily, like most everybody else on the res. To drown my sorrows. To forget. To wash away despair in a flood of Jack Daniel’s and ‘Buddy Wiser’ [Budweiser]. I had no place to stay. Part of the summer I had lived in a dilapidated one-room cabin with an earth floor, a kerosene lamp, and a toppling outhouse, a veritable Tower of Pisa. […] There are no jobs. The poverty is unbelievable (Brave Bird 30 3-4).
Yet, as the following pages of Ohitika Woman attest, the love of their land, the persistent caring support of extended families, and the continuing presence of their cultural fabric for those who benefit from it are the anchors that have provided a source for whatever future the Sioux create for themselves. Despite poverty, unemployment, drinking, and hopelessness, Mary’s relationship with the land and the environment is depicted as follows:
Things are not all bad. The land is beautiful. […] Today, the fight for Native American rights is, above all, a fight for our land and environment. The land is a living part of ourselves. Once it is gone, we are gone. The fight is not merely preaching against Styrofoam, aerosol, and Pampers, which are all bad, […] or fighting against trash being burned in open dumps. Or trying to stop trucks with uranium waste […] driving through the res (BB 160,161).
These lines tell the reader that it is once again the white man who disrespects the sacredness of the land by polluting it with chemicals and waste matter. When Mary finds out that part of the reservation land is supposed to be turned into “a garbage dump” (BB 161), she realizes that
[…t]he tribal government has sold us out, making deals without a referendum and against the will of the people. The waste disposal firm will send us the crap and filth from Minneapolis, Denver, and other big cities and will bless us with an Everest of garbage on five thousand acres of our most beautiful land situated near some of our most sacred places and not far from Wounded Knee (BB 161).
30 Hereafter cited as BB.
91 The Sioux woman is outraged at this agreement between the federal government and “[t]hose benighted Indians, these people of reason, [who] are so desperate for money that they’ll accept any terms offered” (BB 162), having forgotten their sacred relationship with the land and the environment. According to Sioux tradition, it was their custom to travel at night, wandering at random over wild, unknown lands. At dawn they were able to see the beauty of the land, the countless hills and valleys, fertile plains, the lakes, creeks, rivers, and beautiful timber (cf. Deloria 93). Thus, recognizing the beauty of the land, the Sioux developed strong ties to it. Sioux, however, did not only honor the land itself, but from earliest times, they believed in a Supreme Being who ruled the universe. They prayed to visible objects, especially the sun, moon, and stars. They even respected trees and rocks (cf. Deloria 94). Having learned all about her Sioux past from Leonard Mary understands the significance of her people’s harmonious relationship with the land and the environment in order to survive as a people. Mary reasons that:
Make ke waken - the land is sacred. These words are at the core of our being. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood. Take our land away and we die. That is, the Indian in us dies. We’d become just suntanned white men, the jetsam and flotsam of your great melting pot (BB 220).
The firm connection between the people and their land gives life to the Sioux, while at the same time establishing a harmonious environment and a Native society that is quite peaceful. According to Andrea Smith (cf. 78), this peaceful nature has posed as a threat to the ability of the white man to continue his ownership of native lands. Due to this threat, “there have been 341 treaties between Indian tribes and the American government that guaranteed us eternal ownership of our land ‘as long as the sun will shine and the rivers flow’, and all of them have been broken” (BB 221). Mary continues to tell the reader that the famous Sioux chief, Red Cloud, once said: “The white man has made us many promises, but he has kept only one. He said: ‘We will take your land’, and he took it” (BB 221). In 1930 the holy man Hollow Horn Bear warns the Sioux against the white man’s intentions to destroy the Sioux people’s relationship with their land: “A day will come, and it is not far off, when Unchi, our Grandmother Earth, will weep bitter tears, asking you to save her for our unborn generations. If you fail to summon up your strength and power to defend her, then our people will die like dogs” (BB 221-222). As soon as
92 Mary becomes involved with AIM and participates in the siege of Wounded Knee, she realizes that
[… o]ur land is now threatened as never before. […] they [the whites] at least left us the land they looked upon as worthless: land with little water, unsuited to farming, or deserts where nothing would grow. But then they discovered that this land had coal, copper, oil, natural gas, and uranium (BB 222).
It is at this point that the whites have expanded the colonization of Native American people to the colonization of native land. It seems obvious that there is a connection between whites’ disregard for nature and for indigenous people. Clearly, it is the same colonial mind that seeks to control indigenous peoples that also seeks to control nature, that is, the land. As Shoat and Stain (138) explain: “Colonized people are projected as body rather than mind, much as the colonized world was seen as raw material rather than as mental activity and manufacture.” Certainly, even in the 1990s Mary observes that colonizers, the whites, justify the ‘theft’ of Native lands on the grounds that the Sioux do not properly control or subdue nature. For instance, since the Sioux do not make proper use of the natural resources that their land offers them, the whites ‘invented’ “a patriotic need to develop these energy sources” (BB 222). In the colonizers’ mind this ‘theft’ of native land is absolutely justified because
[… t]hese tribes are […] in an arrested state of social development. They are not less valuable as human beings because of that, but they offer scant wisdom or learning or philosophical vision that can be instructive to a society that can feed the entire population of the earth in a single harvest and send spacecraft to the moon […] Except for our crimes, our wars and our frantic pace of life, what we have is superior to the ways of primitive people […] Which life do you think people would prefer: freedom in an enlightened Christian civilization or the suffering of subsistence living and superstition in a jungle? You choose (Robertson 153).
The overt racial discrimination in this statement causes Wallerstein (34) to conclude that “racism is meant to keep people inside the work system at a state of marginalization, not eject them from it.” In the case of the Sioux, however, who have an unemployment rate on their reservations as high as 90 percent (cf. BB 4, 150, 151, and 153), the intent of racism seems to be to exclude them. Because a lot of natural resources are on Sioux land,
93 the continued existence of this people is a threat to capitalist operations. Thus, the connection between the colonization of the Sioux and their native land is not simply metaphorically, but is rooted in material realities. One way in which capitalism has succeeded in continuing its insistent assault against the environment is that certain indigenous populations, such as the Sioux, become deemed as surplus populations and therefore worthy storage areas of environmental waste. Mary writes:
So now these firms come to us with their garbage. […] And, of course, we will have to live with whatever they dump on us forever. […] What this does to the environment is a horror story. All these various types of land exploitations are exposing us to toxic waste, radiation and the pollution of the water supply” (BB 162, 230).
Amin (142) describes this process as “apartheid [where] sacrifices imposed on some do not carry the same weight as the benefits obtained by others.” It is obvious that the Sioux, who have already been portrayed as dirty, impure, and therefore expendable, are forced to face the most immediate consequences of environmental destruction. According to Andrea Smith (cf. 83), it is not surprising that 100 percent of uranium production takes place on or near Indian land. Nor is it a coincidence that Native reservations are often targeted for toxic waste dumps. Mary recalls that “[w]hen they were prospecting in Pine Ridge, they found that the water on the res was incredibly radioactive. The groundwater had already been contaminated by all the mining activity and shaft sinking in the areas around us” (BB 229). It is clear that Native peoples, such as the Sioux, are situated to suffer the impact of environmental destruction so that colonizers can continue to be in denial about the fact that they will also eventually be affected. As Cesaire notes
[…] the processes of colonization are not containable; ultimately everyone is impacted: Colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by the contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer […] tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization, that I want to point out” (20).
Andrea Smith (cf. 84) argues that this attack upon nature is at the same time an attack on Native women’s bodies because the effects of toxic and radiation poisoning are most
94 visible in their effect on women’s reproductive systems. In the areas where there is uranium mining, such as in the areas around Pine Ridge, Indian people face increasing rates of cancer, miscarriages, and birth defects. In Pine Ridge Indian women experience a miscarriage rate six times higher than the national average. Mary explains that “[…] we had 101 miscarriages per 1000 births, seven times the national average, and our cancer rate was four times higher. The closer you were to the mining and drilling, the more likely cancer occurred. We even had some mutations” (BB 229). It is obvious that through the rape of the land, Native women’s bodies are also raped. Even though Mary together with WARN 31 leads a fight against the colonizers exploiting and polluting the Sioux land in the early 1980s (cf. BB 229), Stoler (cf. 69) reasons that as long as Native people continue to live on the lands rich in natural resources that government and corporate interests want, the colonization of Native people will continue. Native bodies will continue to be described as expendable and inherently violable as long as they continue to stand in the way of the ‘theft’ of Native lands. The United States is indeed engaged in a permanent social war against the Native bodies, particularly Native women’s bodies, which threaten its legitimacy. Colonizers clearly seem to have recognized the wisdom of the old Cheyenne saying: “A nation is not lost as long as the hearts of its women [and their bodies as well] are not on the ground” (CD 137). The cultural strengths of the Sioux as manifested in their reciprocal relationship with the land and their environment create peace and harmony replacing despair. Mary’s autobiographical account apparently documents past and contemporary dispossession. There is a sense of the white man’s impact on the tribes’ land in some of its darkest hours. At the heart of Mary’s discourse of protest, grievance and sorrow is also a tragic theme that is definitely female and maternal: that of lost and stolen land, and, as a result, Mary’s motif of her struggles of protecting and preserving the environment. These fights insist on reinstating an ethic of care for the land and its environment. Mary lays bare with anger the horrors of colonialism on nature, but at the same time she restores the value of the land and an ethic to take care of it in proper ways. Her battle to regain native land resembles that of the suffering, resolute AIM members in their militant activities to seize ancestral lands in the face of a malignant and despotic patriarchal government. Both the
31 WARN stands for Women of All the Red Nations (cf. BB 229).
95 active militants and Mary are re-inventing and re-originating themselves, their harmonious selves, and restoring harmony with the land and the environment. In effect, Native self-determination seems to be the governing principle of Mary’s harmonious relationship to the land even while, as a Sioux she mourns the loss of most of the tribe’s ancestral land, reasserts an ethic of female caring, and celebrates regained ties to the land:
For me and for all the Lakota people, the Black Hills are not only sacred but also the most beautiful in the whole USA. Here are majestic mountains, towers of granite soaring to the sky, sparkling lakes, pine-covered rolling hills, patches of grassland, and caves whose walls are covered with crystals. [… T]he land is still there, beautiful, waiting to be redeemed, and so long as there is still a shred of life left in us we will keep on fighting for it. HECHEL LENA OYATE KIN NIPI KTE, so that my people may live (BB 232).
Having reclaimed the land lost within herself, the Sioux woman is then able to change her lifestyle and face the challenges of living in harmony with nature.
Figure 6.
The tipi was a conical dwelling fitting perfectly into Plains life. The poles and bison skins with which it was constructed could be quickly taken apart and transported by horse-drawn carriages (cf. Zimmerman and Molyneaux 47).
96 The traditional Sioux have close family ties, extended family members living together, and individuals who engage in teaching and counseling one another. Deloria (cf. 93) writes that the Sioux are a very old people. They lived in tents, which is, in portable skin tipis (see Figure 6), moved from one place to another, as did the Nomadic tribes of the Orient, and camped wherever they found water and good pasture for their horses. These horse nomads subsisted primarily on bison, had a technology which produced light and durable articles of skin, emphasized war and military societies, and were usually bilateral in social organization and in kinship (cf. Spencer and Jennings 328). The fact that Sioux hunters had multiple wives, and jealousy was never reported as being much a problem among the women, provides evidence to this tribe’s close family ties. Harmonious family ties were an integral part of the traditional Sioux. Though Plains Indians earned respect for their competence in hunting, glory came to them from achievements of courage in warfare. Kinship ties played an important role at that point since everyone in a war party helped each other (cf. Garbarino 262, 263). Marriage ties bound family groups together. Women usually left the parental household to live with their husband’s kin. In the flow of family life, the ideal of mutual respect dominated the relationship between the sexes (cf. Buffalohead 241, 242). Mary gets to know these strong family ties when she moves in with her son Pedro at Leonard’s father’s place:
When I first lived in this earthly Eden, there were still standing a number of different structures. First there was the main house, which Henry [Leonard’s father] had built with his own hands around 1930. […] Across from the old blue dwelling was Leonard’s house, into which little Pedro and I moved. [After a terrible fire] they all [Leonard’s relatives] stayed in the house I was in, Leonard’s house (BB 30, 31, 33).
Mary definitely experiences a certain degree of peace and harmony living with Leonard and his family. On the other hand, though, she “became totally worn out and freaked out by constantly being overwhelmed by crowds of visitors. It got to the point where I yearned to go for a ride just to escape for an hour and get some peace and quiet” (BB 38). Being a half-breed and having been raised the white man’s way, Mary has to get used to strong family ties and extended family members living together. After a while, however, the young woman is able to appreciate this part of traditional Sioux culture: “While I
97 lived at the Paradise, so many people came and went that I remember only a blur of many faces. Some, however, stayed for long periods, became friends, and had an influence on our lives” (BB 44). Throughout Ohitika Woman Mary reveals a spirit of harmony exhibited in the ease with which she interacts with both Indians and whites. She seems to think of herself as a unique person because wherever Mary goes, she can relate to people and get along with them. And it does not seem to matter which age, whether older people, or people her own age, or whether it is children. She is clearly comfortable with everybody. Even though “[c]ertain relatives of Leonard’s were really mean to me” (BB 34), Mary’s spirit of harmony goes past familial arguments and causes everybody “to love each other” (BB 35). Another example of Mary’s gift to spread a spirit of harmony is her relationship to a very close friend named Norma Brave:
Like me, she had to spend so much time with her children that she didn’t have time for anything else, such as going back to school. She had a hard life. […] Norma and I were buddies […] We’d talk about our troubles and try to get strength from each other (BB 134).
By assisting each other in the struggles of everyday life, Mary’s spirit of harmony gets recharged, while on the other hand she helps to make her friend’s life more harmonious. Mary’s spirit of harmony is once again revealed through her ease of interacting with other people, even when she is going out to bars to have fun. Living with Leonard in Phoenix, Mr. Lucky’s is one of Mary’s favorite bars. One night she frequents the bar hoping that she would find someone to dance with, when this guy
[…] came up to me and said: ‘Guess what tribe I’m from.’ I said: ‘Apache.’ ‘Right,’ he said. I said: ‘Guess what tribe I’m from.’ He said: ‘Sioux,’ and I said: ‘Right on!’ He said: ‘Let’s show ’em how!’ So we went and danced the last dance (BB 144).
Despite the fact that both of them have already had way too much to drink, Mary is able to take the tension off the drunk Indian man, making him feel comfortable and at ease so that they enjoy a dance together.
98 Mary not only keeps harmonious relationships with her full-blood in-laws, her full-blood relatives, and Native Americans from tribes other than her own, but she also engages in well-balanced relationships with whites. Richard Erdoes, her co-author, is one of those people she greatly cherishes. He admires her ability to live in harmony with both her Native American background and the challenges she faces in the white man’s world, encouraging her to personally promote her first autobiography Lakota Woman by going from city to city “on a public tour” (BB 166). In one interview Mary describes her relationship to Erdoes as one in which
I record and say a lot, and we [Mary and Erdoes] work through the tapes. We work together pretty good, but sometimes he’ll put in stuff I didn’t want anyone to know. […] There was some stuff that happened, there was some fighting over stuff, but it turned out okay afterwards (Wise and Wise 2).
In spite of some editorial disagreement, it is once again Mary’s spirit of harmony that enables her to interact with her co-author at ease. It is that very same spirit that has also helped to build a trusting relationship between the young Sioux author and her co-author that entails that Mary whenever she is “[…] absolutely desperate, I turned to Richard Erdoes […] As always, he helped me out so that I could last until things were sorted out” (BB 136). In yet another conversation with Mary, the Sioux woman stresses the importance of her harmonious personality, which at the same time has made her respect people, no matter what race or religion they belong to or whether they are male or female:
[…] I told them [women] we are all sisters. It doesn’t matter what color we are, what nationality, as long as we respect each other. I try to emphasize that we must respect men, to respect the balance, even though you can be strong and everything. But there has to be a balance [harmony]. I have met a lot of feminists that are really hard, hard core, and I try to talk to them. To get them more on a spiritual level, to put that energy into something positive. Remember to balance it (“A Conversation With Mary Brave Bird” 485).
Mary’s attitude once again reveals a spirit of harmony exhibited in the ease with which she interacts and thinks of other people.
99 After her divorce from Crow Dog, it is again Mary’s spirit of harmony that attracts Rudi Olguin, a Chicano/Zapotec, to her: “He was obviously head over heels in love with me that it bowled me over. He said: ‘I’m glad I waited for you. I want you to be my wife. I think it was fated by the Great Spirit’ ” (BB 247). Mary, now a thirty-six-year- old grandmother gets married to Rudi, who “[…] is good to me” (BB 248). It seems apparent that all of the factors – positive or negative – that have affected Mary’s life have not impacted her spirit of harmony. This fundamental principle is reflected in her choice to get divorced from Crow Dog and to remarry to strengthen this spirit of harmony in order to endure and succeed in both the Native American and the white man’s world. Mary has spoken out and has written her own story, both a tribal and a personal one. What good might have been her pen, her paper, if she had not been able to fashion them into tools or weapons to change her life? These brief accounts that reveal a spirit of harmony exhibited in the ease with which she interacts with other people cannot possibly provide all the details of Mary’s life; however, the ‘words of harmony’ are indeed ‘weapons’ to change the white man’s impression that Indian women have no practical history and no recognizable present. Throughout Ohitika Woman, Mary’s portrayal of her sense of harmony is an effective means of gaining a true picture of the variety of experiences and of the powers and endurance of the young Sioux woman. Mary’s harmonious aspects of life are evidenced in her role as a leader. She certainly is not a leader as Wilma Mankiller, who was the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation for many years. And yet, Mary’s autobiographical account gives the reader the impression that she is a leader. So how can a leader be described? According to Hart (cf. 4), the most common answer to this question is that leaders are authoritarian, dictatorial, controlling, too uninvolved, or ineffective. How accurately does this statement describe my observations about Mary as a leader? Hart (cf. 4) claims that it is because of these negative connotations of leaders that many women today are not sure whether they want to be leaders. They obviously do not want to model themselves after those they have seen or known about. Leadership, however, does not have to be this way. Hart (cf. 4-5) presents a model that defines effective leaders as those who are true to themselves, androgynous, and authentic. Leaders must be true to themselves. To be true to the self means getting in touch with personal values, beliefs, goals, and strengths. Once
100 identified, personal characteristics and beliefs become the foundation of a person’s plans and behaviors. Throughout actually both her autobiographies, Mary’s spirit is maintained because she is true to herself. As a teenager, Mary’s involvement with AIM and its occupation of Wounded Knee make her a leader in the sense that she is true to herself, sticks to her beliefs, fights for Native American rights and makes a stand by staying on the battle-site, even though she is about to give birth to her first son: “I considered myself part of AIM […] and so after the movement took over Wounded Knee in February, I joined my friends who had occupied the historic site, determined to have my baby there. Call it a statement, or a gesture of defiance” (BB 24). Clearly, Mary’s decision to stay holds leadership qualities. Hart (cf. 5) explains that two problems emerge for women as they try to remain true to themselves. First, many of the characteristics that are more highly developed in women as a group, such as vulnerability, weakness, helpfulness, emotiveness, cooperation, participation in others’ development, and creativity, are usually discounted or discarded as non-valuable by the male-dominated world. Miller (cf. 274), however, provides a strong argument that these characteristics are, in fact, strengths that are essential to and form the basis for a more advanced form of living. Assigning a positive value to these characteristics defeats all the messages woman have previously received about themselves and encourages women to reorient their thinking. To stay at Wounded Knee during the whole time of the siege and to give birth there enable Mary to prove to the male-dominated world of the Sioux that characteristics such as vulnerability and helpfulness are indeed strengths that are essential to and form the basis for a symbolical rebirth of the Sioux nation. With the birth of her son, Mary leads the fighting Native Americans into newly found hope and pride: “It lifted up everybody’s morale to have a new life born after Clearwater, an Indian from North Carolina, [who] had been killed by the marshals” (BB 24). According to Hart (cf. 5), a leader must also be androgynous. Nobody would argue that the highly technological society in which people live has created numerous economic and social problems, including the stress on people’s personal lives that comes from the increased pace. Solutions to these problems are not simple. Fortunately, society has unused resources in both its men and women. To completely utilize these human resources, it is necessary to create a state or climate in which both men and women feel
101 free to choose from the full range of human behaviors. To understand this concept of androgyny, Hart (cf. 5) suggests to have a look at the restricting, inflexible ways white man’s culture has used to described men and women. Historically, the stereotypic characteristics of the male role, such as aggression, independence, objectivity, rationality, and self-control, have been more valued than those of the female role, such as emotiveness, subjectivity, passivity, talkativeness, and gentleness. This different evaluation has led to the definition of healthy adult as healthy male, therefore implying the unhealthiness or sickness of the female adult. The traditional focus on differences between males and females has covered up the overwhelming similarities and resulted in a false and unequal polarization. However, masculine and feminine characteristics are not opposing. As Hart (cf. 6) claims, the concept of androgyny represents a synthesis of the two, while at the same time offering the possibility of a wider range of behaviors. Instead of taking an ‘either-or’ or ‘good-bad’ position, advocates of androgyny envision “individuals who are capable of behaving in integrative feminine and masculine ways, assertive and yielding, independent and dependent, expressive and instrumental” (Kaplan and Bean 2). Mary is indeed able to prove Kaplan and Bean’s theory during the siege of Wounded Knee when she fully utilizes her total range of characteristics. Giving birth at the battle-site, supporting the male warriors emotionally and supplying food to them illustrate her feminine, nurturing ways. At the same time being assertive about her decision to stay at Wounded Knee during the entire time of the siege, despite of many hardships, shows Mary’s capability of behaving in masculine, independent ways. Finally, Hart (cf. 6) claims that leaders must also be authentic. The search for authenticity, which seems to begin around the age of 35, is a time in adult development when people reevaluate their lives. The search for a personal truth requires careful examination, confrontation, and finally renewal or resolution of the issues raised. In this process, people question what is most important to their lives and compare their evaluation against the norms and expectations of society. Authenticity emerges when there is congruence between a person’s personal truth and his/her behavior. In addition, a leader who is authentic speaks and acts in a way that is believable. The words, s/he says, the plans s/he makes, the decisions s/he enacts, and the directions s/he takes are compatible with his/her values and beliefs. There is no so-called credibility gap. Mary’s
102 search for personal truth also requires careful examination, which starts with her involvement with AIM. Suddenly she feels alive, having a goal in life, reevaluating her past life, realizing that the struggle for land, the land that is rightfully the Sioux’, is what is most important for the young Sioux woman. Contrary to Hart’s statement that this search for authenticity starts at a later age, Mary is only seventeen-years-old when these issues of reevaluation, examination, and renewal are raised. Mary evolves as a truly authentic person when her decision to give birth during the siege is compatible with her belief that staying will lift everybody’s spirit and act as an encouragement to the warriors. With the birth of her baby, there is no credibility gap left anymore, “[t]here was [only] drumming and singing when my baby was shown to the people” (BB 24). Mary appears to be exactly what everybody needs during the occupation; a leader who has remained true to herself by developing both her feminine and masculine characteristics, while at the same time moving in the direction of authenticity. To be a leader Mary needs to get the respect, the recognition, and the support of the people at Wounded Knee. In several accounts, the Sioux woman proves that this is precisely what she gets. The fact that she is awarded the title “Ohitika Win, Brave Woman” (CD 3) after having given birth to her son during the occupation, demonstrates her people’s respect, recognition, and support. At the same time, she realizes the need to relate to the interconnecting threads of the sacred. Leonard Crow Dog being “the spiritual leader” (CD 129), who “had made a tremendous impression upon me” (BB 28), helps her become more positive, both physically and mentally. His spiritual teachings cause Mary’s transformation to a more positive being and reinforce her ability to connect more with the higher being. Mary, as a half-blood, has grown up neither with the traditional Lakota culture nor with the values of the white man’s culture always having had “one foot in the white and the other in the Indian world” (BB 10). While growing up, Mary’s mother, even though she is a full-blood, keeps telling her daughter about some of the old Sioux customs that in her words “weren’t very nice, like having multiple wives and drumming an unwanted wife out of the camp so that she could never come back” (BB 13). Even though Mary’s mother has been raised the Sioux way and is able to speak Lakota, she does not teach the native language to her children:
103 My mother, Emily, was raised the Indian way, way out on the river in a tent, isolated from the world beyond. But after her father, Brave Bird, died, she was taken to the St. Francis Mission School in Rosebud and she chose the white man’s road as her way of life, [because the days at the boarding school …] were the bad old days when they tried to ‘whitemanize’ the kids with a strap” (BB 17, 18).
Having adapted to the white man’s way of life, Mary’s mother keeps telling her children that to get “a quality education” (BB 19) is a means to survive in the white man’s world. Mary adds that “[i]t paid off for her, as she became, first, a registered nurse and later a schoolteacher” (BB 19). In her teenage years, however, the young half-blood woman starts to feel the need to explore the interconnecting threads of the sacred, that is, her Lakota culture: “My sister Barb and I started seeking for our roots, for a faith, for a meaning in life” (BB 23), while Mary’s mother
[…] does not go to ceremonies and is not interested in powwows. She does not know much about Indian religion. She must have known it as a child. Maybe she forgot, or wanted to forget, while I, and my sisters, went to Uncle Leslie Fool Bull [a full-blood Sioux relative] to learn as much about our ancient beliefs as we could (BB 23).
During the time of her involvement with AIM and during the occupation of Wounded Knee, Mary once again understands the need to reconnect to the sacredness of her Lakota culture, which enables her to remain at the battle-sight during the whole time of the occupation being a “rock of fortitude and courage” (BB 28). As her experiences at Wounded Knee are infused with the spiritual, and her life is transformed, Mary becomes clearer about her philosophy of life’s purpose: “I had gone to the Knee for the purpose of giving birth to my first child there. […] Pedro’s birth was looked upon as a symbol of renewal, a tiny symbol, a tiny victory in our people’s struggle for survival” (BB 54). Mary, still a teenager, realizes that everybody on this planet has a purpose in being there. She has also been put there to have some kind of purpose. Giving birth at Wounded Knee and actively participating in her people’s struggle for survival become a part of her purpose. By believing in Lakota spirituality, she is able to follow her purpose closely and eventually gets to understand what she is supposed to be doing as the following chapters of her autobiographies illustrate.
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7.2.4 Janet Hale: A Vigilant Woman
Janet is a member of the Coeur D’Alene tribe of northern Idaho 32. In 1740 a raven spoke to the chief of the tribe telling him that
[… a] great evil is coming. An enemy more powerful than any you have ever known will surround you. Even now your enemy has spied you. There will be much bloodshed. Much sorrow. Gather your strength. Before the enemy three ravens will come to you. Their teachings will help you survive the coming onslaught (Bloodlines 33 xv).
Thus, the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in the 1850s is interpreted as the completion of this prophecy and the members of the tribe convert to Catholicism, realizing who the enemy is. Since then there have been many changes entailing bloodshed and misery. The enemy has been triumphant, wiping out the way of life of a whole people. Today the Coeur d’Alene are confined to one small portion of what has been their huge ancestral land, located in northern Idaho (cf. BL xv-xvi). The fact that they are confined to merely a very tiny portion of what used to be their ancestral land, has obscured the Coeur d’Alene’s place in American history and accounted much for Janet’s vigilant nature. In her autobiography she describes not only contemporary reservation life but also the undesirable effects of poverty and alcoholism on native families, and the struggle of the Coeur d’Alene to maintain a sense of identity in modern American society. She writes that she
[…] was born in Southern California but I don’t remember it. My mother used to tell me how the roar of the ocean disturbed her at night when we lived in Oceanside, made her feel uneasy somehow. […] None of them [Hale’s family] liked the almost constant sunshine and the perpetual summer. They missed the ice and the snow and the sound of the coyotes howling in the night. They missed home (BL xvii).
32 Hale was actually raised on the Colville and Yakima Indian reservations of the Coeur d’Alene in Washington State (cf. Cullum 197). She is a Coeur d’Alene Indian, but with Cree and Kootenai as well as Scottish ancestors, currently living on the Coeur d’Alene Reservation in De Smet, Idaho (cf. McFarland 158). 33 Hereafter cited as BL.
105 It seems obvious that it hurts dreadfully feeling alienated in an unknown environment, far away from home, and having to pay the dues for it. Therefore, when Janet is six months old, the family decides to leave California to return home “where their hearts were” (BL xviii). Hale might have been born in California, but the first place that she remembers is her family’s home in Idaho because there is “[…] no place on earth more beautiful than Coeur d’Alene country” (BL xviii). While being vigilant about the place where she grows up, Hale at the same time develops strong ties to her ancestors, learning that the Campbell’s “are the last family left of the once powerful Turtle clan that was one of the Water people” (BL xviii). Having been taught about her past makes young Janet feel confident. She has realized who she is and where she comes from. Nevertheless, the family leaves their home reservation one more time, sensing that “none of us would ever live there again though my parents maintained strong ties” (BL xviii). It is only years later that Hale, not long before she completes her autobiography, visits the Coeur d’Alene Reservation, her childhood home, where her vigilant nature has shaped her into the person she has become thirty-six years later. She tells a group of schoolchildren that being a tribal person is “something special” (BL xix) and “a source of strength” (BL xix) and that, despite of the many social problems that plague reservations, “things are better now” (BL xix). Even if tribal and family ties do not always provide solace – her own family, in particular, has nearly destroyed her – Hale emphasizes the importance of being connected to one’s roots and of being vigilant at all times, as the American
[…] government’s intention all along was to get us to assimilate onto the mainstream of America and to a large extent we have. We all speak English today and we go to school and we work and pay taxes. We drive cars and watch television and see all the big movies (if we want to). The government would like nothing better, at this point, than to abolish the reservations and get all our tribes to disband, to get rid of us (BL xx).
Being vigilant of the white man’s intentions assures each native tribe to stay alive and regard what is left of their ancestral lands as their “landbase, […] home, [… which they] don’t want to let go of” (BL xx). Therefore, being vigilant definitely ensures a people’s survival, but courage also seems to be part of the Coeur d’Alene’s heritage because “the most admired quality among the old Coeur d’Alene was courage. Courage has been bred
106 into you. It’s in your blood” (BL xxi). As the pages of her autobiographical account reveal, it is essentially both character traits, being vigilant and courageous, that guarantee Hale’s survival in a hostile Native American and white world. Inequalities in a ‘bi-racial’ population of Native Americans and whites also cause Janet to feel as though she has been living on the fringes. Such experiences occur early; as a Native American child, Janet has already found out that the community rejects part of its citizens if they do not behave in the proper fashion. As a result, the young girl’s mother keeps telling her daughter that “white people respect good Indians. […] Good Indians are clean and neat, hardworking and sober. […] White people look down on the other kind, the bad ones, the drunken, lazy louts” (BL 113). Clearly, Hale’s mother has strong opinions, and she insists upon them. And at the heart of these opinions both the value of an Indian and the value of a white man are engraved: INDIAN is valuable in so far as he permits the white man to fulfill his being as white. But a white man is valuable in and of himself. Realizing that INDIAN’s value has no value, Janet “would feel the resentment rise in my blood. […] Why should I have to be the one to live up to someone else’s expectations?” (BL 113). However, Janet soon learns that one must not wage war on the white man: “Anyway trying to be a ‘good Indian’ was a futile endeavor. […] General Sheridan [… also reached the same conclusion when he] made his famous remark regarding the only good Indian being a dead Indian” (BL 113), while Hale’s mother still keeps on trying to fulfill the white man’s demands of INDIAN. She indisputably accepts the monopoly of his glory. Janet, on the other hand, has noticed that the white man happily accepts INDIAN’s eagerness to fulfill his demands partly because he perceives in these futile INDIAN’s attempts the expression of a sad devotion to those values of the white man to which the INDIAN can never accede. It is at that point that Janet starts to question the white man’s right to demand, his source of self-glorification. And she comes to the conclusion that she “[…] didn’t care to be a good Indian” (BL 113). Living in Spokane, Janet encounters yet more inequalities in a ‘bi-racial’ population of Native Americans and whites. The town is described as follows:
Spokane […] is a sort of wild-West kind of town. Country western music is, and has always been, very big in this region and lots of men wear cowboy boots and
107 drive pickup trucks with gun racks. And it’s conservative. Very conservative. It’s surrounded by five Indian reservations. […] If you are an Indian in Spokane, you are always aware of it. There is not a great multitude of people from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds (BL 118).
This description of Spokane clearly draws a picture of a white, racist population and emphasizes the history of the white man’s power and supremacy over INDIAN. Janet is aware of the fact that the white community rejects Indians and inflicts great pain upon them. She recalls,
[…] there’s a word that was used to describe an Indian, a ‘dirty,’ denigrating word, sort of like nigger. The word is Siwash. […] It was sort of like squaw, but worse. Siwash. It had the power to cut like a knife. […] The last time I heard it was on the street in Spokane when I was thirty-one. A group of young white men in cowboy boots who had obviously been drinking passed me. One of them turned his head and looked back […] and muttered, ‘Siwash. Goddamned Siwash.’ I was startled. I’d even forgotten such a word existed. It still had the power, after all those years, to cut like a knife (BL 119).
This paragraph undoubtedly illustrates that to predict what will happen to racial discrimination is impossible. But there should be no misunderstanding: the white man and the Indian are caught up in a web of cultural signs of a complexity that practically cannot be analyzed: one can no more talk about INDIAN than about white man without getting caught up in a racist ideology where the representations, images, reflections, myths constantly transform and alter each person’s imaginary order. But even in Spokane “[…] there are people […] striving for racial harmony” (BL 119). Still, racial discrimination cannot be entirely avoided as the earlier-described incident in a street in Spokane proves. So Janet has always had to “[…] suffer racial slurs […]” (BL 119) and most likely always will. There seems to be no reason, however, to exclude the possibility of radical transformations of the white man’s behavior, mentalities, and roles. Through both her own story and those of her relatives – living and dead – Hale deals with the pain Indian women have suffered at the hands of abusive, prejudiced white men. Nevertheless, due to being vigilant, Hale highlights the strength and courage that have allowed Indian women to survive hardship and even prosper in the bitterest circumstances, as does Hale herself, who has become a renowned “writer, […] a full-time writer. […] Through her work she struggles to define herself and her reality” (BL 7).
108 For Janet the ‘bi-racial’ environment of her youth and partly of her adult years marks the beginning of a lifetime of vigilance for a more egalitarian society. As an adult, Hale starts a mesmerizing journey into exploring her ancestors’ lives because “[…] now, years later, for some reason I was interested. […] And Gram’s life was, somehow, relevant to my own” (BL 126). When Gram, her maternal grandmother, was four years old, the first government-run boarding school opened up intending to “assimilate Indians, en masse, into mainstream society” (BL 131). Most of the Native American children suffered a great deal at that school, dying of “[…] disease and homesickness. A few committed suicide rather than become ‘a white man’s Indian’ ” (BL 131). Becoming more knowledgeable of her ancestors’ hardships, a different relationship to them becomes manifested in Hale’s understanding of the Coeur d’Alene’s past, and it is one in which she participates by diving deeper and deeper into her family’s history. She learns that
[…] people thought the best solution to what was commonly referred to as the Indian Problem, (that is, what to do with the Indians who had survived the Indian wars, the ones living on reservations) was to kill them all off. To just exterminate them as though they were cockroaches. The director of Carlisle [the first government-run boarding school], though, was humane and progressive. His motto was: ‘Kill the Indian and Save the Man.’ Get rid of everything Indian … his language and culture, his identity. Cut his long hair short. Make him wear white people’s clothes. Then he would be all right (BL 131).
With this newly-discovered information in mind, Hale puts yet another emphasis on the importance of being vigilant and implies that the more she knows about her ancestry, the better she can understand the status of the oppressed Indian in history. Her ancestors’ struggle resembles her own. Throughout her autobiographical essays it becomes obvious that Janet uses attentiveness a great deal in the context of discrimination trying to make sure that is not happening to her. Most important, however, is her plea to everyone to be vigilant as to what is happening to Native American people and what is being said that is being done for them, and to determine whether it is being done for them or to them. Moreover, it seems that Janet’s journeys to her roots are written to make the reader understand the implications and responsibilities such an exploration into the past entails. Her ancestors’ stories are the words by which Hale begins to identify a perspective for her own life. Her newly-gained notion of discrimination against native people starts from
109 the recognition of and from a struggle against the oppression of Native Americans by the patriarchal system of white society. In order to describe and expose this discrimination, Hale recreates her ancestors’ lives in haunting essays, realizing that her own oppression is not to be found in the fact that she is not INDIAN enough, but on the contrary in the fact that she is too INDIAN. Under the alleged reason that she is INDIAN, thus ‘different’, she has been prevented from fully leading the life of free individuals. It is white men which hypothesize that native people are ‘different’ in order to justify their oppression, as it was practiced in government-run boarding schools all over the United States for many decades. One of those haunting essays is about Hale’s great-great-grandfather, a white man who is known as the ‘Father of Oregon’, and what happened to this man’s Indian family. There are several stories that the autobiographer returns to over and over, and with each telling they get stronger. These stories have to do with discrimination against Indians and with identity, and they reveal Hale’s preoccupation with the question of self and identity. The shifting generations of Hale’s maternal family – the shifts between who looked Indian, who felt Indian, and who had what tribal identity – give a unique approach to this question. Being the vigilant person that she is, Hale takes as her task in this autobiography to “[…] try to articulate my experiences growing up in a dysfunctional family” (BL xxii) and, to take that one step further, “[…] to understand the pathology of the dysfunction, what made my family the way it was. […] to imagine the people I came from in the context of their own lives and times” (BL xxii). She sets out to remember, reimagine, and reconstruct the past. Investigating her ancestors’ past, Hale examines and exposes underlying causes of racism which have wounded lives across generations. It seems as if in today’s multicultural society, where a wide number of works on race and ethnicity has been written, Hale, as a Native American author, demonstrates how her particular ethnic/tribal identity has informed and influenced her life, what it means to be a Coeur d’Alene woman or a ‘native daughter’. At times Janet questions her watchful nature. As a child she often has to just stand back and watch how to feel in certain situations, especially in social situations that she has been in, as the following extracts demonstrate:
110 We’re so poor, Mom and me, so damned, damned poor. […] We follow a rambling course all over the Northwest. Usually we go from one grubby little town to another, but sometimes not. Sometimes we stay in a city. […] She and I share a double bed, and my place is against a wall … a thin wall … which separates us from the wretched couple, who drink and fight and throw furniture around all night long. […] I hate the couple. […] I never get to sleep until very late. Then I get up and go to that stupid Christ the King, where I am manhandled by sadistic nuns (BL 32).
Lincoln (185) observes: “Being Indian can mean living uneasily among white people.” For the young Indian girl it becomes an emotional drama that unfolds as she attempts to meet the demands and expectations of conformity in the dominant society. Standing back and watching how she feels in certain situations makes Janet aware of the fact that she is not able to fulfill white society’s prospects. As autobiographies by female Native Americans - surely one of the most marginalized and stereotyped groups in the U.S.- cover a remarkable sub-genre which was in fact long overlooked and has never been given its scholarly due (cf. Hale 69), Janet Hale’s essays describe native lives caught between two cultures and the relative strength of Euroamerican influences on them. The author focuses on her private life while only occasionally glancing at historical events as “associative mileposts for her memory without attempting to discern the impact the latter made on her” (Hale 69). Frederick Hale (cf. 69) adds that, like many Native American autobiographers on whom Euroamerican influences have been determinative, Janet Hale puts an emphasis on the centrality of personal relationships and the impact of turning points in her life on her psychological development. That is done in quite a random way, rather than episodically relating individual achievements. The random descriptions of these turning points in her life make the reader aware that Janet’s childhood background has remained with her over the years. In spite of all the moving from town to town, Janet seems to have not moved, she moved physically, she moved intellectually, but she has never moved away from the background of her childhood until she starts exploring her ancestors’ past. For many years the memories of her childhood have been a part of her and she has taken them with her, and that seems to have been one aspect of what has made her vigilant, looking around that something not quite the same is happening once again.
111 Some of those childhood memories entail moving frequently, as her mother tries to escape from her abusive, alcohol-addicted husband who “[…] had been horrible and evil, […] a low-down, no-good drunkard who had beaten her time and time again […]” (BL xxiv). These early experiences not only increase the necessity to be vigilant, but they also stimulate the author’s desire to become literate as she seeks refuge in reading and writing. She admits that
[…] I can remember writing in those tablets, too, though I can’t remember what I wrote. I remember opening myself up and focusing all my energy, channeling it into the ‘writing’. I didn’t understand then what writing was, that letters represented different sounds and, put together, they made words that were symbols that stood for thoughts and feelings and objects in the physical world (BL 3).
Even though the little girl does not quite know what writing means, she is aware that
[…] if the writer had managed to leave her emotions and thoughts in the marks on the paper, a reader could come along and pick up the paper and look at these marks and the reader could feel and think as the writer had when the writer wrote on the pages. The thoughts and the feelings would remain as long as the marks remained on the paper, or as long as the paper would last (BL 4).
It is once again vigilance that allows the young Native American girl to detect the deeper meaning of the writing process. The writer articulates her thoughts and feelings through words which eventually are read and interpreted by a reader. It seems clear that Hale wants both the writer and the reader to take an active part in the creation process, not leaving the latter a defenseless victim of the text. Moreover, her notion of writing offers the reader not only a strong theory of human society but also a positive concept of freedom. Hale grants the reader this freedom of ‘transcendence’, this stepping over or crossing something. It seems as though this expression contains some reference to mountain walks and to the pleasure of finally getting to the point with the most beautiful view. So the writer and the reader are completely free to put any or none of these or other images into the reading/analyzing process. As Hale grows older, her notion of writing does not alter much. She acknowledges that
112
[…] I think that [… my initial idea of writing] was not very different from the way I would write later on, after I had learned to read and write in the conventional sense, as a teenager expressing myself in poetry no one would ever read and much later as an adult writer of novels. If it is to be real and true, if you are to write the deep-down truth and have it understood the way you intend, then you must concentrate all your energy, must throw off pretensions and bare your soul, write with the utmost sincerity and intensity whatever it is you want to say, right down to the very core (BL 4).
Again, Hale emphasizes the closeness between writer and reader. This relationship requires that the author’s writing is sincere and truthful. In addition, her revelations are intimate conversations with the reader which are casual, spontaneous, and interactive. They appear to resemble conversations among people without the intervention of the presumably ‘objective’ observer. As a four-year-old, Janet writes about “[…] something more than reportage, […] that I was in some way interpreting life, giving some order to the chaos my life had become, and in this writing [I] was keeping my own counsel” (BL 4). Once more, the reason for writing her autobiographical account is a similar one. In seven chapters Hale speaks of being poor as a child, and she highlights the lack of control over some aspects of her life as a young girl, the virtue of hard work, the important role of courage in the survival of the tribe, the impact of the Christian religion, and the survival of Coeur d’Alene traditions. While her autobiographical stories are interspersed with hopefulness and a positive outlook on life, they also reveal a great deal of suffering and sadness over the negative effects of alcoholism, domestic violence, and abandonment of children. Janet’s vigilant nature is obvious in her dreams too. Her dream in 1987 about a turtle (her family is the last one left of the Turtle clan) is a dream about her family:
I was walking along the shore of a lake or bay towards a house in the distance. I step on a small turtle I did not see lying among the rocks and think I’ve killed it. I am filled with grief. I leave it there and hurry away towards the house. I come back to that place on the shore later and see that the turtle is not only alive but is no longer the size of a small rock. It has grown to a hundred times its previous size. It’s like a giant sea turtle and is very strong. I am filled with joy now. I watch as the great turtle walks into the water and swims away (BL xxxi).
113 Hale’s interpretation of the dream reveals that her family “[…] only appeared to be dead, stepped on, broken into million little pieces. The family – or the power of the family – lives on in some form and is strong” (BL xxxi). Her odyssey involves accepting that her family will never give her what she needs. As a child Hale is constantly moving as her mother flees from her alcohol-addicted husband. She plainly writes about her mother’s death and the lack of any reconciliation. Her mother has been very cruel to Janet throughout the latter’s childhood, having repeatedly said that she does not want her daughter to attend her funeral. So Hale does not (cf. BL 42, 52, 64-65). And yet, at the end of her autobiographical essays, the author has learned to speak of her childhood without bitterness:
I stitched together a happy childhood for myself, an expurgated version I could recall to my little girl. It had order. It had continuity. And it was not a lie. I think I must have made it up for myself first, long before I told it to her – smoothed off the rough edges. And tried to believe in it. I had had a home. I had a place where I belonged, really belonged. I came from a family that valued me (BL 169).
Rearing two children, a son and a daughter, Janet has experienced strong family ties and community support, especially when she revisits her father’s grave with her own daughter in 1992. She seems to feel connected to the reservation where she has lived as a child, but senses that she is still searching for a home, since as a child she has never received the love and support that she desperately longed for. However, her story talks about how she triumphs over poverty, receives a college degree and attends law school. Although the tribe is never able to send her money for college, the belief that it “[…] would be coming soon” (BL 105), keeps her from surrendering to despair. It seems as though what is optimistic in her comes from her own children and the promised help of her tribe. Over the years, being vigilant has not prevented Janet from becoming involved with people outside her community. In the fall of 1983, Janet is “[…] almost flat broke. […]” (BL 54), so she has to accept a job as instructor of English at the Northwest Indian College on the Lummi Indian Reservation south of the Canadian border in Bellingham, Washington State. In 1985 she takes on “[…] a one-year appointment at the University of Washington in Seattle as Distinguished Visiting Writer, […]” (BL 55). Years earlier, right before her twenty-first birthday, Janet starts classes at City College in San
114 Francisco, even though she has never graduated from high school: “Then I found out, from a neighbor, that I could go to open-admissions, tuition-free City College of San Francisco without having finished high school if I were twenty-one, which I would soon be” (BL 100). Hale takes the entrance exam and “[…] passed with scores so high I wouldn’t have to take any remedial courses at all but could begin a program of university-parallel courses that were transferable to any four-year college or university in California” (BL 100) While attending college, Hale is actually getting involved in the white man’s community. She makes a lot of new friends, realizing that she can do that outside her Indian community. Experiencing some sort of emotional support, the young Coeur d’Alene Indian is able to “[…] make it through my first year [at college]. And I passed all of my courses” (BL 106). Once she has gotten into the white man’s community, Hale encounters people who want to help her, regardless of what race she belongs to. This is certainly a side of white society that she has not known existed. Still being vigilant, Janet takes the “[…] SAT and applied for admissions to the University of California at Berkeley. I was accepted. And I was granted tuition waivers and scholarships and educational loans. I would be a welfare mother no more. I was twenty- two years old” (BL 106). In 1974 she receives her BA from UCLA at Berkeley, then studied law at UCLA at Berkeley and Gonzaga Law School in Spokane, Washington State. Since that time Hale has earned her MA in English from UCLA at Davis and has taught literature courses at UCLA at Berkeley and Davis, Western Washington State University in Bellingham, the University of Oregon, and Lummi Community College in Bellingham (cf. Bataille and Laurie 122). By being vigilant, the author gives voice to the urban Indian; one who rarely returns to his/her reservation and cannot claim it as home. It is essentially with the birth of her son that Janet finds a home for herself: “When I had a baby things changed. For his sake, I told myself, I can imagine a future. I can be more than I was. I can be strong. I can be a rock” (BL 94). Unable to secure permanent employment while caring for her infant son, this high-school drop-out works at a number of temporary jobs while living in San Francisco in the 1960s before going to college and university. Succeeding in the academic field, Janet gains a sense of direction and greater self-respect. The detailed description of her entry into higher education might be seen as part of her vigilant nature because it has served as an escape from poverty and has opened
115 her new ways to pursue her career as a writer. Frederick Hale (75) questions these motives by stating the following:
But, beyond mentioning that she studied at the City College of San Francisco (where she took a course in social psychology) before transferring to the University of California (where she studied law and eventually English), she relates virtually nothing about her university years. Other sources indicate that she studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts to pursue rhetoric as an undergraduate in Berkeley. Why did she select these various subjects and change from one to another? Again, what if anything, did she gain from them that affected her writing?
It seems obvious that Bloodlines focuses on private rather than public events and vividly reflects the bicultural/biracial atmosphere in which it was written. Therefore, the reader can gather a lot about certain phases of and difficulties in the first two decades of Hale’s life, while other periods are excluded. Most of all, Hale’s vigilant nature has led her to academic success, while at the same time securing her private life by establishing various kinds of relations to the white man’s community. In these respects, Hale’s autobiography is quite revealing. Violence against women and child abuse have become significant themes of Native American women writers of both fiction and autobiography. These writers depict violence from within the Native American community, that is, with Indian women who are beaten-up by Indian men and Indian children who are abused by their parents. From the research that has been done by Native American women to explore their past, it seems clear that in traditional Native American societies women were protected from violence, and child abuse was improbable. Native American cultures are different from one another, but appear to share common beliefs about the treatment of women and children (cf. Hendrickson 13). The lack of this traditional concern, in modern times, also becomes an issue in Hale’s autobiographical account. The author traces the origins of her family’s dysfunction to her father’s alcoholism, his abuse of her mother, and the latter’s escapes from one town to another, and the frequent returns to Janet’s violent father. Janet’s father abuses his wife as he drinks more and more heavily: “My father turned out to be (at times) a vicious, brutal drunkard, and he began to beat her [mother] when he got drunk … for no reason or very little reason. Because he was mean and
116 angry. And Mom was there and couldn’t get away from him” (BL 44). As Hale’s father withdraws into alcoholism, the family is left without the father’s support. For this reason, Hale’s mother takes Janet, her youngest daughter, and flees from the alcoholic madman. The author states that “maybe her running away had something to do with that, too, running … on the move, on the road, not tied down. Maybe it gave her a feeling of freedom to be that way” (BL 45). Hendrickson (cf. 23) claims that it is tempting to believe that Native Americans might begin to deal with violence against women and children within their communities by remembering that, in the past, women were protected from violence in relationships with men, and children were raised with love and respect, not violence. The fact that Hale’s mother is beaten-up by her husband, however, means that the cultural values of the past have not survived in Hale’s family. It seems clear that is part of what has been lost in the intentional destruction of Native American cultures and the enforced acculturation of Indians by whites in the past. Hale writes about violence against her mother because it is part of her experience while growing up. The distress that Janet experiences as a child caused by her violent, abusive father leads its way to effect change: it helps Janet to deal with this ordeal so that in the long run she can forget about it. Also, by confronting the reader with the experience of a victim, the author might help empower women and children, so they can put an end to violence and abuse.
7.3 The Women’s Shared Themes
While the lived experience of each of these autobiographers is unique, during the process of analyzing their autobiographical accounts themes have emerged which they share: spirituality, cultural expression or ‘Indianness’, mother-daughter bonding relationships, experiences of oppressive racial discrimination, and a deep sense of reciprocity or inclusiveness. At times it was difficult to separate the women’s shared themes because they are intimately interwoven and built upon each other in multiple ways. Allen (“Something sacred going on out there” 559), in her discussion of myth and vision among Native Americans, states: “For in relating our separate experiences to one another, in weaving them into coherence and therefore significance, a sense of wholeness arises.”
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7.3.1 Theme One: Spirituality
Spirituality is a powerful force and a unique aspect of Native American people. It is interrelated with their culture, their philosophy, their psychology, and their religion. In 1911, Eastman (see Figure 7) wrote: “The religion of the Indian is the last thing […] another race will ever understand” (ix-x).
Figure 7.
Dr. Charles A. Eastman, Santee Sioux, 1897. Eastman was a founder of the Society of American Indians. He wrote several books and lectured on Native American life (Courtesy national anthropological archives, Smithsonian Institution).
In view of what Eastman recognized it is no surprise that spirituality is the principal shared theme to emerge from the three autobiographers’ lived experiences. Each of the women elaborates on its meaning for them. Each woman reiterates its importance. For Mankiller spirituality means something deep. It is deeper than organized religion. To prove her point, the autobiographer reveals one version of the Cherokee genesis story:
In the beginning, before Mother Earth was made, there was only a vast body of water that was both salty and fresh. There were no human beings, only animals. […] As the animals, birds, and insects multiplied, the sky became more crowded
118 and there was a fear that some creature would be pushed off the sky rock. All the creatures called a council to decide what to do. […] At last the earth dried and the creatures came down, but it was still dark, so they convinced the sun to move overhead every day from east to west. […] When all the animals and plants were created, they were told to stay awake and keep vigil for seven nights. […] Human beings were created after the animals and plants. There were several versions of the story how the first humans were made. It was said by some of the old Cherokee that in the beginning there were only a brother and sister, and that the man touched woman with a fish and told her to multiply. In seven days she bore a child. She continued to do this every seven days until the earth became crowded. Then it was deemed that a woman should have only one child each year. It is said that the first red man was called Kanati, or the Lucky hunter. The first woman is named Selu, or Corn, and she was also red. So these red mortals – the first human beings – came to be called Yunwiya, the real people (MK 15-16).
Spirituality is, in fact, tied up with Mankiller’s Cherokee view of people and the relationship that Cherokee have with being a part of the greater overall system, the relationship that Cherokee have with all other living things in the world. Wilma sums up her feelings of being a part of the overall system in a very moving paragraph: “[…] I have always loved being outside with trees, rocks, plants, and animals. […] I have always loved the small purple and yellow flowers that grow unattended in the woods near my house. I would sometimes examine every detail of the tiny petals” (MK 42). To reinforce this idea of interconnectedness of all living beings, the Cherokee autobiographer quotes Jenny Leading Cloud, a White River Sioux, who explains:
We Indians think of the earth and the whole universe as a never-ending circle, and in this circle man is just another animal. The buffalo and the coyote are our brothers; the birds, our cousins. Even the tiniest and, even a louse, even the smallest flower you can find – they are all relatives (Leading Cloud quoted in MK 42-43).
The Cherokee, as well as any other Indian tribe, are people who surely worship a God, a greater overall being, without a Bible. Wilma explains that the spirit and spirituality are enmeshed in the whole process of life, therefore she “[…] much preferred playing in the woods to doing my chores” (MK 43). Throughout her childhood years, Wilma learns to understand the connectedness of humans not just to animals, but also to nature. On April 26, 1841, Henry David Thoreau described the Native American as follows: “The Indian […] stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully […]” (Thoreau quoted in MK 43). This notion of rather
119 being outdoors close to nature than being indoors proves that the Cherokee are deeply spiritual people experiencing the longing to be close to God. At the same time, they are communitarian by nature, and all expressions of individualism occur within this firm communitarian commitment. Thus, the forced removal of the Cherokee in the winter of 1838 is not regarded as ‘torture’ of the individual Indian, but rather as ‘torture’ of the whole community, where the Cherokee “[…] cried. In English, the removal became known as the Trail of Tears [see Figure 8] 34” (MK 46).
Figure 8.
The Trail of Tears, by Robert Lindneux. (Courtesy of Woolaroc Museum, Bartlesville, Oklahoma)
With losing their ancestral lands, many Cherokee have also lost their tribal knowledge, which includes traditions and the specific way this people defines the sacred or spirituality: “It was not a friendly removal. It was ugly and unwarranted. For too many
34 During the Trail of Tears thousands of Cherokee died. They were forced to leave their homes in the southeastern United States to move to present northeastern Oklahoma (cf. MK 46).
120 Cherokees, it was deadly. The worst part of our holocaust 35 was that it also meant the continued loss of tribal knowledge and traditions” (MK 47). Referring to this forced removal several times at different points in her autobiography figures thematically in my study of Mankiller’s own sense of the sacred, or spirituality. Re-experiencing her own Trail of Tears – her family’s relocation from Oklahoma to San Francisco – by telling the reader about it, is an attempt to represent personal memory as an integral part of collective memory in words and signs – to construct an image of memory and experience. Wilma’s voyage to the sacred, to spirituality, once known to her while growing up on the reservation, begins in a series of accounts of the historic Trail of Tears, which are interrupted with recollections of her and her family’s trail where they cried. Through these stories of oppression and removal, Mankiller seems to absorb both the tribal and the familial memory of Cherokee spirituality. And through the process of writing about these events she seemingly inscribes herself into tribal history, but also into her personal history. This theme of the importance of tribal and familial memory in Mankiller’s autobiography eventually allows her to re-discovery spirituality. While it can be argued that familial memory is crucial to any search for spirituality, it has to be taken into account that Wilma, as a Cherokee, relies to a great degree upon tribal history, too. Furthermore, this tendency of the removed Native American to depend upon tribal stories seems to be even more pronounced in Mankiller, whose family has suffered displacement, poverty, and a loss of Cherokee traditions. Though subject to the inconstancies of recollection, invention, and repetition, tribal traditions, as they are told to the autobiographer, are her only access to spirituality during her stay in California. With Wilma’s father’s death, the family returns to their homelands for a few days:
Even in my grief, the countryside looked so familiar to me. I was back home again. Rocky Mountain is sparsely populated, but as our procession of vehicles wound slowly down the road to the cemetery, people came outside and stood in their yards to watch us pass. You could almost hear them saying, ‘There goes Charley Mankiller. They are bringing Charley Mankiller home’ (MK 200).
35 Mankiller’s use of the term holocaust when referring to the Trail of Tears seems to be justified when one keeps in mind the following: “What began as agreements between equal nations deteriorated over time to land seizures, land allotments, assimilation, tribal reorganization, tribal termination, and some would say, deliberate attempts to do to Native Americans what Hitler once tried to do to the Jews” (Robert Henry quoted in MK 49).
121 In Mankiller’s autobiography, this process of re-discovering Cherokee spirituality begins with returning the father to Oklahoma. Charley Mankiller was, as a removed Cherokee, a hard working, honest man, who kept the family together by trusting in Cherokee spirituality even during the toughest times. It is easy to see how Wilma, the hopeful young Cherokee woman, starts to identify so strongly with him and his notion of spirituality, especially when returning to her homeland for his funeral. But the very reasons for this identification with her father’s sense of spirituality may breed anxiety. Part of her distance from Cherokee tradition, surely influenced by Indian-white relations, comes from Wilma’s rejection of female Cherokee roles, stemming back to the times when “Cherokee women were expected to become subservient and domesticated like white women, who were home oriented” (MK 86). Therefore, it seems clear that Mankiller inserts her father’s voice into her text more frequently than she does her mother’s, deliberately rejecting certain feminine traditions by “[…] starting to feel restricted by the routine required of the traditional wife” (MK 151). So she looks to her father for confirmation of ancient Cherokee tradition. Wilma refers to him as the actual authority on matters of the sacred and spirituality. He is the keeper of early Cherokee wisdom, especially the spiritual one, and as Mankiller comments: “When he believed in something, he worked around the clock to get the job done. He was always dragging home somebody he had met, someone who was down on his luck and needed a meal and a place to stay. […] My dad never gave up on people” (MK 112). Being interconnected to all living things and regarding all living beings as sacred, Charley Mankiller practices Cherokee spirituality, even though he is far away from his homeland. Admiring his spirit, Wilma “[…] always listened to him, even if I did not agree with what he had to say” (MK 112). At the same time as Wilma, a young wife, seeks to surpass the constraints of traditional, white feminine roles, her father’s traditional Cherokee views on spirituality hold the promise of physical escape from the stifling boundaries of life in San Francisco in the 1960s. So her re-discovering inquiries into Cherokee spirituality offer sacred escape from the constraints of traditional white feminine roles. Her awakened interest in Cherokee spirituality can certainly be traced back to her traditional Cherokee upbringing back on the reservation in Oklahoma, where she has been shaped by her father, who
122 […] came from a strong family, and because of his traditional upbringing, [… nothing] was successful in alienating him from his culture. He was a confident man and, to my knowledge, he never felt intimidated in the non-Indian world – a world he came to know even better after he met my mother 36 (MK 9).
This spiritual upbringing greatly simplifies her growing relationship to Cherokee spirituality and allows Wilma to make a link to her ancestral past through her full-blood father. Ignoring the white man’s influence on Cherokee tradition, she follows her father’s lead in pursuit of spirituality. Wilma takes his knowledge of Cherokee spirituality to reveal her own quest, and she uses his wisdom of the sacred to construct her own sense of spirituality. This transfer of knowledge becomes clear in the moment when she returns to Oklahoma to bury her father there. The final pages of this chapter highlight Wilma’s re- discovered sense of spirituality. These lines read like a passing of the spiritual ‘torch’ to the younger generation. Finally, at her father’s funeral the young Cherokee woman seems to understand that spirituality means there is a power that is greater than any of the mortals. It is something deep, tied up with her view of Cherokee people, and represents the relationship that she has with being a part of the greater overall system, the relationship that she has with all other living things in the world:
Our immortality comes from our relationship with Mother Earth. We are a part of the land in every real sense. Our ancestors were buried in the land and became part of the earth. We grew up among the dust of our ancestors. Our struggle to preserve the Indian ways is tied up with our struggle to preserve the ecological balance. The two things are almost the same (Carter Camp quoted in MK 200- 201).
Wilma’s closest precursor in her quest for spirituality has definitely been her father. Despite white societal influences, she seeks to follow and learn about Cherokee holiness from the full-blood paternal figure. It seems clear that Wilma does not rely on female relatives to show her the way. In revealing her father’s understanding of spirituality and celebrating him as a unique human being in the pages of her autobiography, Wilma both pays respect to a spiritual role-model and sets right her knowledge of ancient Cherokee spirituality.
36 Wilma’s mother is white and her ethnic background is mostly Dutch and Irish (cf. MK 9).
123 Even though the family moves back to San Francisco after the father’s death, Wilma soon becomes aware of the fact that the spirit and spirituality are enmeshed in the whole process of life. Having learnt that the spirit is the major part of who she is and what direction she goes, it does not take her long to come to the conclusion that she will have to go back to her homeland. Her knowledge of ancient Cherokee spirituality has become her soul, and she could not have returned home without her soul. It is indeed the soul that gives Wilma direction: “I had to go back to stay. Back to the land of my birth, […] I was going home” (MK 205). With her return to Oklahoma in the 1970s, the autobiographical account registers the collective past of the Cherokee, in search of tracing the unique role of women in ancient Cherokee society. The writer starts out each chapter with stories demonstrating different aspects of ancient Cherokee culture. In chapter 12, named “Homeward Bound”, Wilma includes a story about the ancestral role and status of women in Cherokee life:
In the times before the Cherokee learned the ways of others, they paid extraordinary respect to women. So when a man married, he took up residence with the clan of his wife. The women of each of the seven clans elected their own leaders. These leaders convened as the Woman’s Council, and sometimes raised their voices in judgment to override the authority of the chiefs when the women believed the welfare of the tribe demanded such action. It was common custom among the ancient Cherokee that any important questions relating to war and peace were left to a vote of the women. There were brave Cherokee women who followed their husbands and brothers into battle. These female warriors were called War Women or Pretty Women, and they were considered dignitaries of the tribe, many of them being as powerful in council as in battle. The Cherokee also had a custom of assigning to certain women the task of declaring whether pardon or punishment should be inflicted on great offenders. This woman […] was known as Most Honored Woman or Beloved Woman (MK 207).
Mankiller includes detailed information about the status of women in ancient Cherokee society and proper names of those women who have populated her father’s memories, in a privileging of historical detail. The story continues as follows:
It was the belief of the Cherokee that the Great Spirit sent messages through their Beloved Women. So great was her power that she could commute the sentence of a person condemned to death by the council. The Ghigau, known by her later name of Nancy Ward, is often called the last Beloved Woman. She earned her title, the highest honor that a Cherokee woman could achieve, by rallying the Cherokees in a pitched battle against the Creeks in 1755. As a War Woman of the
124 Wolf Clan, she accompanied her first husband, Kingfisher, into battle. […] When Kingfisher was killed in the heat of the fray, she raised his weapons and fought so valiantly that the Cherokees rose behind her leadership and defeated the Creeks (MK 207-208).
The story is clearly an attempt to accurately document ancient Cherokee history. The grave importance of the status of women in ancient Cherokee society, which Wilma wishes to explore, emphasizes the value of ancient knowledge in an attempt to approximate the truth, which has been forgotten with Indian-white relations. Far from diminishing Wilma’s voice, this plurality of ancient voices serves to echo her tribe’s plural experiences, in a newly-discovered remembrance of early voices and a culture that composes Wilma’s life and identity. At the same time, this story is also proof of Cherokee spirituality, which is represented through the concrete manifestations of the great respect that was paid to women in ancient Cherokee society. Here the status of women in the past is described as the collection of marks left upon the world. There is a creative tension between the spatial (society/home) and the temporal (the Cherokee past/Wilma’s memories/the present of writing) that informs the external processes of writing (worldly investigation) and the internal ones (organization, imagination, memory). This skilled navigation of the outward and inward, past and present, integrates the lives of ancestors into the autobiography of the author. It is an exploration into history, and into the many ways the telling shapes the experience. In the union of the many voices at her command, Wilma manages to fit in many different realities. Like the story, Wilma’s notion of spirituality can be read as a combination of voices from the past and present. However, Wilma’s reliance upon the power of the word to represent ancient Cherokee spirituality does not allow her to find her way back to her roots right away: “Little did I realize, in the middle of the 1970s, that in less than a decade I would not only be back in Oklahoma working for my tribe, but I would be principal chief of the Cherokee Nation” (MK 208). Fleeing from the wretchedness of urban life in San Francisco, Wilma embarks on the journey to a new life in Oklahoma, even though she “[…] would not return permanently to Oklahoma until 1977, about the time of that vision” (MK 209). Although returning to her homeland can be seen as a journey in search of spirituality, seeking to end alienation from her Cherokee past and telling the tribe’s story from a distinctly feminine perspective, Wilma learns that her future has already
125 been foreseen by a Cherokee spiritual leader in whose vision she has been honored to become the first Cherokee woman chief years before she decides to stay in Oklahoma permanently:
I am a spiritual person, born with a gift inherited from my forefathers….One of our prophets is a woman, the First Woman…a woman came out from the place where the holy spirit had gone into. She was an ideal woman, an ideal Cherokee woman, and she was nice and she smiled. And I thought, I’m not dealing with gods now. This is a human, I can talk to her. At that moment, as she smiled at me, I knew that she was the Red Lady of the Eternal Flame. That she was in the third form of our deities, our ancient deities…. […] And at that point, I woke up from that vision, or dream….I knew right then and there, five years ahead of time, that she, Wilma Mankiller, was going to be chief. With experience of this nature, we could only say that she is a special gift. She is someone special (A Cherokee spiritual leader quoted in MK 208-209).
This vision of her forthcoming greatness originates once again in the sacred, in ancient Cherokee spirituality, which is entangled in the whole process of life. As a reservation Indian and a woman living in San Francisco, the writer has always been doubly marginalized. She has never found a place in white-male society, either as a Native American or as a woman. This position of double marginalization clearly looks like a vacuum offering no grip for a prosperous future. By permanently remaining in Oklahoma, Wilma is able to escape this lack of belonging. Thus, back home Wilma is finally free, free from her husband who first “resisted my request for a divorce, but finally he went along with my wishes” (MK 212), and free from alienation. Since she has not lived in Oklahoma for many years, she “had to reconnect with my past” (MK 214). In the following chapters, the reader learns about Wilma’s efforts to reattach with her past, describing the multiple influences that eventually make up her sense of identity. She begins by getting the job of an economic stimulus coordinator whose “[…] assignment […] was to get as many native people as possible trained at the university level in environmental science and health, and then to help to integrate them back into their communities” (MK 217). Even though the job seems to be a good one, Wilma has “[…] very mixed feelings. For so long, I had been involved with the nitty-gritty issues of Indian activism, and I soon found that things were not done in quite the same way in the Cherokee Nation” (MK 217). During her first few months as an economic stimulus
126 coordinator, she describes the simultaneous push and pull between almost mystical identification with, and a very Euro-American alienation from her Cherokee roots, saying:
Out in California, beyond my own family and our extended tribal family, I really did not have any true sense of community or lineage. I missed that very much. But when I heard the old man say, ‘there goes John Mankiller’s granddaughter,’ it was as though I were a ten-year-old girl again on my way to the picture show. […] It all seemed like a huge bureaucracy, and I was hard-pressed to find anyone with any beliefs in grass-root democracy (MK 216, 217).
Her complicated relationship to both the tribal power base of the Cherokee Nation and its patriarchal hierarchies is set up from the start as a problem of gender:
The tribal power base was dominated by men, but it was refreshing to see that at least a rebirth of our government, which the federal government had tried to suppress for seventy years, was in full swing. Our tribe […] was once again electing its own chief, and it had a brand-new constitution (MK 217).
Her earlier involvement with issues of Indian activism have lead her to consider her attraction to tribal politics to which she has had, up to now, no practical connection. Moreover, her fairly non-political upbringing has separated her from living the Cherokee culture of her ancestors, which granted women a significant part in Cherokee politics. Thus, for Wilma, this attraction to Cherokee political affairs is evidence of a weight of an identity that cannot be shed. It is a persistent complication to her sense of what it means to be a Cherokee - that must be dealt with - in order to negotiate her own participation in Cherokee tribalism. During these chapters, Wilma makes clear that her intentions in writing her autobiography are to document and illuminate ancient Cherokee culture, and in this manner both the reader and Wilma herself learn more about this subject. One of these subjects clearly is Wilma’s growing interest in Cherokee tribal politics, which in a way is embedded in ancient Cherokee spirituality, as the sacred and the spirit are intertwined in all of the processes of life. As Wilma’s understanding of spirituality is tied up with her view of people, her view of the Cherokee as a sovereign Nation, and the goodness of mankind, she gradually becomes aware of her special status within the Cherokee tribal power base, because soon “[…] folks at the Cherokee Nation discovered
127 that I possessed some ability [… and] I was kept busy churning out proposals. By 1979, I was made a program development specialist for the Nation, a job I would hold for two years” (MK 219). Her firm belief in spirituality allows her to be part of the greater overall system, in fact, gives her courage, a belief in herself, and the ability to prove to a male- dominated Cherokee power base that she – as a woman – succeeds in developing promising proposals in the interest of and for the well-being of the whole tribe. While working as a program development specialist, Wilma decides to “finish my college work by picking up a few remaining course credits for my bachelor of science degree in social work” (MK 219). That not being admirable enough, her spirit makes her take up “graduate work in community planning […] at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville” (MK 219). Her strong connectedness to spirituality enables her to “arrange for a graduate assistantship to help defer some of the expenses, and I never did have to take a formal leave of absence from my post with the Cherokee Nation” (MK 219). Once again the relationship Wilma has with all other living beings – both white and Cherokee – is rooted in her belief in the spirit, which permits her to successfully combine the duties at work and for school. In the final sentence of the latter citation, Wilma lays bare that being a working woman, a student, and a mother is no dilemma. Furthermore, she gives the reader this mixture of identity, which is strongly inspired by spirituality, in a series of images, then underlines their symbolic power by referring to the awe that they should inspire. Flourishing as a working woman, a student, and a mother definitely creates a sense of admiration. At the same time, these images of herself refer not only to her ability to having been able to rediscover Cherokee spirituality and live it but also to the stark contrast between Cherokee spirituality and the hegemony of the white man’s spiritual world of the ‘only’ presentable God. The whites’ God is the sole true spirit anyone, colonized or not, has to believe in. During her years in San Francisco, Wilma becomes acquainted with this God, even though she manages to stay close to her roots by getting actively involved with the Indian Center, which “[…] became even more important to me than junior high and various high schools I attended” (MK 111), and by being inspired by Indian activist groups, such as AIM and the Black Panther Party: “The first activist group I truly identified with was the Black Panther Party. They talked about problems I was familiar with” (MK 154). The status and power of this ‘white’ God, however, is
128 seemingly indisputable, and any attempts to follow a different spiritual direction are labeled as blasphemous right at the root and, thus, condemned to failure. Wilma’s presentation of these images, which depict her as an indigenous woman who is striving to be successful in both worlds, the white man’s and the Cherokee’s - “One reality is the acceptance of and ability to deal with the non-Indian world around us, and the other reality is our being able to hold onto and retain our ancient Cherokee belief system, values, customs, and rituals” (MK 220) - , are also a sign of her role as an autobiographer and her immediate task: to represent her particular subjectivity through language, making use of the full spectrum of stories, memories, histories, and images available to her. Her autobiography is the attempt to represent personal and collective memory in words and signs – to construct an image of memory and experience. Being successful as a program development specialist, Wilma describes her voyage to Cherokee spirituality, which is at the same time a voyage to self-discovery. It begins with a very serious car accident, in which Wilma is involved, getting badly injured:
I left my home and got on the road. As I always did, I drove my station-wagon up the backcountry roads until I reached Highway 100. Everything seemed perfectly normal. […] On the other side of the hill, a car headed for Stillwell pulled out to pass two other cars that were going slowly. […] I came up to the top of the hill, and there was that car in my lane bearing down on me. In a split second, I realized we were about to collide. I tried to veer to the right, but it did no good. Our automobiles crashed head-on. […] The front of my car was pushed back so far that the edge of the hood cut into my neck. My face was literally crushed, and my left leg and ankles were broken. So were many of my ribs. There was blood all over the place, pouring from cuts and abrasions. Death was very near. I felt it (MK 222, 223).
During the ride to the hospital, the reader cannot help but note Wilma’s fervent desire to die:
As the ambulance sped down the highway, I believe I was really trying to die. It was such a wonderful feeling! That is the best way to describe what I felt. I was dying, yet it was all so beautiful and spiritual. I experienced a tremendous sense of peacefulness and warmth. It was probably the most profound experience I have ever had. […] It was overwhelming and powerful. It was a feeling that was better than anything that had ever happened to me (MK 223).
129 Due to the overwhelming power of these feelings, Wilma actually wants to die. While the doctor frantically tries to save Wilma’s life, she recalls that
[…] there was this tremendous pull toward what seemed to be an overpowering love. […] I did not see any tunnels or white lights. There was none of that. It was more as if I came to fully understand that death is beautiful and spiritual. It is part of life, and when I finally came out of it, I vowed to hang onto that experience. I wished to retain that feeling, and I did so (MK 223, 224).
Wilma’s comparison of her death experience to a spiritual one marks another step closer to becoming a spiritual Cherokee woman. Trying to plant her heels firmly in the realm of the dead, she travels through imaginary time and space “[…] walking into spirit country […]” (MK 224) and after she has been saved, she follows up in her real-life journey of spiritual re-discovery. Wilma’s movement is certainly not in keeping with the cultural opposition of mind/spirit to body, and the privileging of the mind and spirit as masculine and the inferiority of the body as feminine (cf. Broughton 79). If the traditional model of autobiography is the narrative of a great man turning within himself to explain or justify his life, to trace the roots of his success in manifesting his will upon society, perhaps, then, the reverse of this model would be one of turning outward in order to understand one’s place within the world, by examining how past events position identity in the present. Wilma’s narrative movement in her autobiography is indeed an outward one, or a succession of them: she first explores the roots of her identity in a generation once removed (full-blood father), then in her own immediate culture when living in San Francisco, and finally in an almost foreign Oklahoma, her ancestors’ homeland, which she has had to leave behind during her childhood years. The autobiographer ends her narrative movement with the description of the almost fatal car accident. There is an insistence on the physical appearance of the injured driver, almost like bringing the reader back to the imperfection and decay of the material world. Her injuries startle her; she feels death being close. During the ride in the ambulance, she feels her body as something painful, burdensome. It seems as though her physical appearance turns her into a stranger to herself, torn between life and death. This same physical appearance of the image of the injured body and Wilma’s alienation from her spiritual self underlines the separation of mind and body, of the spiritual and material worlds in the face of death.
130 Wilma’s attempts to explore the realm of the dead have brought to light the inevitability of dedicating her life to Cherokee spirituality with the result that she has “[…] lost any fear of death” (MK 224). Throughout Wilma’s recovery process, her new life does not appear foreign to her anymore as Cherokee tribal life and politics did to her when she first returned to Oklahoma for good. Having re-discovered ancient Cherokee spirituality, she is gradually becoming part of a once quite unknown culture to her. The way in which she has chosen to live her life after the almost deadly accident relies wholly on spirituality. The spirit has indeed left her with the manifestation of herself – her physical body:
I had faced death, and I had survived. […] Recovering at home, I had the time to examine my life in a new way – to reevaluate and refocus. […] During the long healing process, I fell back on my Cherokee ways and adopted what our elders call ‘a Cherokee approach’ to life. […] The accident changed my life. I had experienced death, felt its presence, touched it, and then let it go. It was a very spiritual thing, a rare natural gift. From that point on, I have always thought of myself as the woman who lived before and the woman who lives afterwards (MK 225, 226).
Wilma’s reliance on documentation of experience, that is, documenting the accident and her slow recovery, approaches the deeper mysteries of the sacred, of spirituality, of experience in general, especially in a writer for whom names and labels, such as American Indian, Native American, indigenous, Cherokee, woman are each charged with the ambiguity of existing between cultures. Wilma, as a student of ancient Cherokee wisdom, has had a quick look at death to define herself, and that has left her questioning all names that apply to her. Wilma’s accident also tells the story of healing from personal trauma and can be regarded as a tale of spiritual truth which is hard to define in the language of man. Towards the end of chapter 12 the reader becomes more and more aware that the brave Cherokee woman has reconnected with ancient Cherokee spirituality, which becomes obvious in the fact that she emphasizes the power of spiritual words. At the same time as she is recovering from the injuries of her almost fatal car accident, Wilma is “diagnosed with systemic myasthenia gravis [… which is] a form of muscular dystrophy that can lead to paralysis” (MK 228). Instead of giving up hope, Wilma focuses on her newly
131 discovered views on Cherokee religion: “I drew on the strength of my ancestors […] and on my own internal resolve to remove all negative factors from my life so I could focus on healing” (MK 228). Her reiterated insistence on spiritual words would seem to support a powerful and direct connection between Wilma’s new understanding of identity and the words of the spirit, between self and language, signified and signifier. In her discussion of autobiographies and naming, Leigh Gilman proposes that “a discourse of re- membering and self restoration organized differently through metaphor and metonymy around the name is currently being written” (91). This process of re-constructing the fragmented, writing self seeks to restructure the space of the writing subject. Gilmore’s use of the word metonymy itself implies closeness and multiple presence, lending the act of writing a spatial component. It appears obvious that Mankiller’s autobiography reflects a process similar to the one outlined by Gilmore. Naming is categorization, and to an extent destiny. It is a marker of culture and of function. Especially in chapter 12 the author’s subject is language and the power of the word to shape existence, but the very title of this chapter – “BALANCE Homeward Bound” – points to a truth that exists outside the material realm of the world. She has explored the power of language to guide and organize her own experience and has shown the reader that there is far more beyond words, that language is an insufficient tool to fully describe how she finally re-gained balance, re-connected to her ancestors’ past and re-discovered Cherokee spirituality. While this revelation might not be out of place in any attempt at autobiography, it seems to become more explicit in Mankiller’s work, because she is a Native American woman writing through her Cherokee identity. Her personal and family history is marked by fragmentation before the act of writing has started. Before Wilma has her co-author Michael Wallis take up his pen, her goal is to reconstruct a Cherokee woman’s identity. Knowing that language alone cannot conform to her experience, she sets about challenging it. She weakens the traditional power of the word whenever possible; proving she is no slave to the ‘law of the white man’, recognizing the power of language to shape experience, while acknowledging its inability to represent it. She shows the reader that names and words suggest destiny. It is actually somewhere between the words that the truth – ancient Cherokee spirituality – exists. Identity does not lie in the examples set by her Cherokee relatives, but in the way their oral histories touch and deviate. It neither lies
132 in the Cherokees’ present nor in the ancient Cherokees’ past, but in the spiritual journey between present and past. This spiritual journey between the present and the past takes Wilma to unbelievable heights: “At last, the Cherokee Nation had elected its first woman as principal chief – the first woman chief of a major Native American tribe. […] I had been chosen as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation by my own people” (MK 249). Wilma clearly proves that anything is possible, she hints at that unpronounceable truth of subjectivity, “dancing along the edge of the roof” (MK 231), as the title of chapter 13 suggests. So in 1985 at the age of 57 Mankiller becomes the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation. She does that not only by overcoming the normal barriers set against Native Americans but also by jumping over the chauvinistic obstacles imposed by fellow Cherokee males, who have never been led by a woman. With utmost courage to push old restrictions aside, Mankiller has become a true warrior not just for the Cherokee but for humanity itself. She can undoubtedly be regarded as a symbol of both feminism and Native American self-determination (cf. Nelson 1). Mankiller’s use of the word as an instrument for re-creating culture and simultaneously re-discovering spirituality sharply contrasts with Janet Hale’s reluctance to name and categorize. Hale seeks out another way to find spirituality. While Mankiller’s work ‘shines’ outward, documenting fragmentation and the polivocal influences shaping the author’s spiritual identity, Hale’s autobiographical essays turn the reader inward, away from the categories of the outside world, in a possible alternative to the structure adopted by Mankiller. While the latter also sees herself as a combatant to help modern Cherokee women re-gain their ancient status in society, Hale has to invent a new role in which to cast herself. In her autobiographical essays, Hale treats, among others, the subject of tribal and spiritual alienation. She is both a scholar and a creative writer, the author of essays, novels, and poetry (cf. Cullum 198). Bloodlines, subtitled Odyssey of a Native Daughter, is an “autobiography in fiction” (BL 1), recounting the facts of the author’s childhood and adult years up to age 40 as narrated through the voice of a fictionalized subject, a forty-year-old woman whose name is Julia. This woman has “[…] a life, sort of, more or less, like my own. She is, like me, a writer, […]. She has only recently begun to realize the seriousness of her work. […] Through her work she struggles to define herself and
133 her reality” (BL 7). Hale explains that Bloodlines is her first attempt in the genre of autobiography, stating that “my story will be, of course, autobiographical, more or less – in a manner of speaking […]” (BL 5). She refers to her text as being autobiographical “more or less” (BL 5), foregrounding the marriage of memory (autobiography) and invention (fiction) in this work, as the reader comprehends when the author writes: “Julia now has begun a novel, which is progressing well. […] A distancing process has occurred. I have become Julia. I can see her, and she is not me” (BL 10). To elaborate on her work, Hale explains that
[… f]iction speaks in symbolic language, symbols both personal and universal. Fiction and dreams spring from a common well. Fiction illuminates, imposes order where there was none. Where autobiography, so-called, is used as a basis for fiction, a rearrangement, a transformation must occur (BL 12).
This rearrangement has definitely occurred at that point in Hale’s story when Julia becomes Hale herself. Several times throughout her autobiographical essays Hale refers to the limits of autobiography – when does she tell the truth and when does fiction start? She claims: “This was all true. Not one word, not one incident was a lie. It was just not the whole truth” (BL 168). By revealing more and more details about her miserable childhood, the reader learns that Hale’s rearrangement of the truth partly functions as a copying mechanism to deal with the horrid incidents of her childhood. At one point in the story Hale admits that she is, indeed, writing Bloodlines “[…] for therapeutic, not artistic reasons” (BL 5). Tribal and spiritual alienation are two of the dominant themes of Hale’s writing. One could say that her life is doubly marked by tribal and spiritual alienation. First, she experiences tribal alienation as a child of a family of mixed-bloods. The family’s mixed- blood heritage keeps them from participating in tribal life, practicing their native beliefs in the confinement of their home, gradually loosing contact with their traditions, as they attempt to cling to the mutually exclusive categories of whites and mixed-bloods. Then, Hale feels the impact of spiritual alienation as a child being raised in the white man’s world, where she first experiences the feeling of not belonging anywhere. When asked where she is from, where she is born, Janet “[…] always experience[s] a little anxiety. Such a common, simple question: Where did you grow up? Where are you from? Most of
134 the time I just say L.A., […]. Sometimes I say Idaho because that is where my home was … the home of the tribe I belong to” (BL 35). Her very concept of language is marked by separation and exclusion: “Your mother and your sisters have been telling you how ugly you are most of your life, how strange you are, and nobody has ever said that wasn’t true” (BL 39). Being both humiliated by her relatives and excluded from family life, Janet’s existence is marked. And the mark of these labels, assigned to her and incorporated by her, will be the drive for the creation of a personal language, one that will replace the old system of marking. Will it be a language in which distinctions of otherness are not marked? Or is it, rooted as it is in alienation, the very language of difference? In trying to avoid the categorization of what it is to be ‘other’, Hale will try to provide a self-portrait that cuts short the constraints of traditional literary language in order to convey life in the margins. The subjectivity expressed in Bloodlines is one of tribal and spiritual exile, pieced together by the fractured memories of Hale’s childhood. While the introductory chapters are an attempt by the mature writer to explain her writing and professional formation, the following chapters are an effort to reach directly into experience and represent the memory – in all its experienced truth and invented falsehood – of a child coming to terms with her identity. Though the introductory chapters contain explicitly autobiographical themes, the subsequent chapters are written from the point of view of a child whose mind knows no secure surroundings, just alienation. It seems as if these pages exemplify another method of life-writing from the one that is evident in the introductory pages; that is, these pages can be seen as an alternate version of the life story recounted in the essays of the introductory chapters. While the latter chapters are a collection of data which describe the specific facts of her early life and explain her professional methods and history, the subsequent chapters are a highly imagined work exploring that same early life and its most prominent events but which present that same history as freed from the accessories of a more traditional ‘life’: the names, dates, and explanations that make up a confession. Still, one can argue that those following chapters are not false memories. Rather, they are the memories of a mind trying to free itself from the limits and responsibilities of language, while at the same time coping with the consequences of tribal, familial and spiritual alienation.
135 There is a distinctive collection of people, Hale’s relatives, and places that are specifically named in Bloodlines. Janet’s first husband is named. Dr. John McLoughlin, her white great-great-grandfather, who “was chief factor for the Hudson’s Bay Company” (BL 111) is named, though most of the people who come into contact with Hale’s family are not. One friend and one specific place are named. Janet’s world is populated by Derek - “[…] a young man […], a student who lived in my building [on Haight Street near Ashbury in San Francisco]” (BL 91) – and is made up of her first home on a reservation in Idaho. The lack of deliberately given historical detail makes the narrative voice of Bloodlines seem to come to the reader from some other, clear, alternate reality. Yet, the author’s collection of autobiographical essays easily documents the fact that all these people and places reflect what one might call the ‘historical reality’ of Hale’s lived experience. It is only when Janet returns to Idaho with her son and her father that she for
[…] the first time […] thought about connections to people who had come before, connections to the land – about ancestral roots that predated the white society […]. And this was the first time I thought about my own posterity … of the possibility of my own bloodline continuing down through the ages (BL 103).
One might say that these thoughts are embedded in some spiritual awareness. For Janet, spirituality is tied up with a new view of her people, her ancestors, and the relationship that man has with being part of the greater overall system, especially the relationship that one has with the land. At that point in her work, Hale appears to be stressing the importance of discovering/recovering spirituality rooted in ethnic identity and ancestry as being vital to her personal and cultural survival. When reading Bloodlines, however, one finds that its narrative voice embodies the author’s indigenous culture to strongly varying degrees and differs greatly on the emphasis she places on recovering aspects of it which are on the verge of disappearing or have already been lost. In unfolding her childhood and early adult years, the reader learns that Hale longs intensively to receive some ancestral, spiritual knowledge to be able to handle her mother’s and sisters’ verbal and physical abuse. By contrast, the urbanized and almost entirely detribalized Janet living in California apparently knows little of her indigenous culture and is too preoccupied with personal problems to seek attachment to the Coeur d’Alene traditions. Returning to Idaho with her son, Janet seems, for the first time, to be able to expose her soul, starting to
136 investigate the lives of several members of her dysfunctional family of origin, while seeking her place in Coeur d’Alene history. Hale’s childhood and early adult years are definitely shaped by a lack of spiritual anchoring. Very early in life she has lost touch with indigenous spirituality. Nevertheless, the author does not stress a strong affiliation with Christianity either. Hale’s mother, a devoted Christian, is the only character mentioned in Bloodlines who sometimes “[…] sits in the kitchen and smokes and reads. Maybe the bible” (BL 32). The autobiography’s organization seems to appear at first simple, especially in contrast to the complex temporal and spatial structure of Mankiller’s work: Janet’s experience is narrated in what is fundamentally reverse chronological order, in a process of investigating backward into memory, first her sickbed at St. Luke’s Hospital from where she starts writing her “[…] more or less autobiographical story” (BL 5), her home in San Francisco, her experience moving from town to town with her mother, and lastly, her first home in Idaho on the reservation. Once that framework has been laid out for the reader, her childhood ordeals, school experiences and diversions are described in a muddle that imitates memory – themes and events suggest others. It seems to be for the reader to organize the facts chronologically. Hale’s style in Bloodlines is poetic, with short, lyrical, often incomplete sentences that suggest childhood memory and childlike speech, which also sharply contrast with Mankiller’s high-spirited prose. Even though these two Native American contemporary writers differ greatly in style and structure, both texts expose skillful authors who depend for their self-portraits upon the written word and its power to evoke experience. But while Mankiller celebrates and plays with language, Hale appears to be fleeing from it. Having proven herself a powerful writer in other works, Hale here gives in to a voice which seems to fear saying too much. It is as though, in order to get the ‘truth’ which she wishes to represent, she must free herself from the restraints of language and enter the childhood imaginary. It is actually only when Janet returns to Idaho, her first home, that she finds peace and spirituality. Later, researching her ancestors’ lives also awakes a spirit that she has never known could exist. Janet’s childhood is lonely and dominated by tribal and spiritual alienation. She suffers the double alienation by relating to a family, particularly her mother, who hides
137 her Native American origins and has sympathies for the white man’s values and lifestyle. Janet describes her mother as follows:
My mother, who was my father’s second wife, was not a Coeur d’Alene. She was Canadian and not a ‘status Indian’ (that is, an Indian recognized as such by the government) because her father, to whom her mother was legally married, was a white (in this case, Irish) man. […] Her mother was a Kootenay and a small part Chippewa. My mother spoke only English and was light-skinned and lived in white society all of her life until she married my father in about 1930 […] (BL xvi).
And perhaps the defining events of her young life are the moments when she “[…] obsesse[s] about [her own] death. […] To think your consciousness will come to an end … blackened out just like before you were born. Unthinkable. And your parents. They’ll die. What will become of you if they die before you grow up?” (BL 41) But in addition to these moments of tribal and spiritual alienation, part of this isolation has to do with her fear of language. She is afraid of what her family, especially her sisters, could be saying to her next - more cruelly articulated humiliations or heartless insults. Another part of this fear seems to come from the violence that can be inflicted by language and the real, physical danger that can be exerted upon her by members of her own family:
One night (we lived in Idaho, I know I was five almost six), my half brother and his wife were overnight guests. Mom had my bed, and I had a canvas folding cot. When I got into bed, I found my pillow missing … and I had just put it there a little before. ‘Hey, my pillow is gone. Where is my pillow?’ Big mistake. My mother, who had given her pillow to our guests, had taken my pillow for herself. ‘Here’s your goddamned pillow,’ she said, throwing it at me. […] The best thing to do now was just to keep quiet and hope she wouldn’t launch into an attack (BL 40).
The little girl cannot understand why the mother has taken her pillow away. The mother, however, uses this incident as proof of her daughter’s symbolic exclusion from the white man’s community with which Hale’s mother identifies. Again, language, communication, and words are associated with their power to indicate difference and to isolate. The child feels that this symbolic exclusion also leads to harassment and violence, which I will discuss in detail when analyzing mother-daughter bonding relationships.
138 Spirituality is also paramount for the Sioux woman Mary Crow Dog. What determines her view of spirituality? What does spirituality mean to her? As spirituality is a powerful force and a unique aspect of both Mankiller’s and Hale’s lives, it also determines Mary’s lived experience. Mary’s full-blood relatives are the first people who teach her about spirituality: “So I went to them if I wanted to hear old tales of warriors and spirits, the oral history of our people” (CD 23). Even though all of Mary’s relatives have been forced to go to boarding school to adopt the white man’s lifestyle, including his religion, they have never completely given up their own faith. Thus, Mary describes her grandmother as a “Catholic [who] tried to raise us as whites, because she thought that was the only way for us to get ahead and lead a satisfying life, but when it came to basics, she was all Sioux, in spite of the pictures of Holy Mary and the Sacred Heart on the wall” (CD 19). When Mary decides to participate in the siege of Wounded Knee, she becomes acquainted with Leonard Crow Dog, “the spiritual leader” (CD 129) of the occupation. It seems as if Mary records the siege in great detail out of a wish to preserve her people’s vanishing spirit, out of a desire to leave a record for both the younger Sioux generation and white people, and out of a deeply-felt need to come to terms with ancient Sioux spirituality. To achieve these goals, autobiography proves to be the right choice of genre. Its strength lies in its providing “[…] privileged access to an experience […] that no other variety of writing can offer […] autobiography renders in a particularly direct and faithful way the experience and the vision of a people” (Olney, Autobiography 13). Because of the unique and authentic approach and insight that Mary’s autobiographies provide, the author is able to draw a breathtaking picture of the siege. In addition, Mary writes about the occupation to come to a greater understanding of spirituality and to answer the question: What does spirituality mean to her? Writing about the siege then is not just the recording of an event, but a spiritual quest for Mary. The more she gets to know Leonard, the bigger her access to the realm of spiritual power gets. Once she discovers the power of sacred words, she discovers her people’s history. Once she starts to conceptualize the Sioux spiritual world, she can transform it and to transform it is to gain greater access to it. It is Leonard who helps her make this happen.
139 Another reason that the autobiographical mode is one of the most popular starting points for minority writers, such as Mary, may be that “[… a]utobiography is both the simplest of literary enterprises and the commonest. Anybody who can write a sentence or even speak into a tape recorder or to a ghostwriter can do it” (Olney, Autobiography 3). As an aside, one knows that The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written by Gertrude Stein; Malcolm X’s autobiography was written by Alex Haley; both Mankiller’s and Mary Crow Dog’s autobiographical texts were written in collaboration with another writer. In any case, although Olney seems to simplify the difficulties of writing an autobiography, his comment nevertheless seems true and is also supported by the number of minority autobiographical works in various forms. “In addition to being the simplest and commonest of writing propositions, autobiography is also the least ‘literary’ kind of writing, practiced by people who would neither imagine nor admit that they were ‘writers’ ”(Olney, Autobiography 4). It is true that Mary Crow Dog is not a professional writer or academic. Together with her co-author Richard Erdoes she has neither written Lakota Woman nor Ohitika Woman for a living. Olney asserts that autobiography “exercises something like a fatal attraction for nearly all men and women who would call themselves ‘writers’ ” (4). Because one’s life is usually what one knows best, and since each life is a markedly different experience from every other life, the recording of one’s life is, for many aspiring minority writers, the logical starting point. This seems to be also true for Mary who, to remember, does not only record her own life but also the lives of many of the Native Americans present at Wounded Knee. Having reconnected to Sioux spirituality, Mary realizes that it also determines actions toward others. Being pregnant and having her baby within two weeks from the beginning of the siege, Mary is urged to leave the occupation site: “You’re leaving. You’re pregnant, so you’ve got to go” (CD 132). Instead of obeying this well-meant advice, the determined Sioux woman stays, having realized that one of the important things is that one really has to keep one’s word if one gives it to people. Doing so she earns respect, especially from Leonard, who teaches her more and more insights into ancient Lakota spirituality: The creative ability of a woman to produce children was traditionally seen by the Lakota as a powerful, spiritual act. According to the Lakota view, a woman embodied power and sacredness
140 when being in a pregnant state (cf. Medicine and Jacobs 141-142). Leonard keeps emphasizing the fact that women played a significant role in Lakota religion:
Unlike in the Christian Bible where Eve is made from Adam’s rib, in one of our ancient tales woman came first. As Leonard told it in his medicine talk, this First Woman was given power by the Spirit. She was floating down to the world in a womb bag and, as Leonard put it, she was four-dimensional – all the creation rolled into one human being. She came into the world with a knowledge and with a back-carrier and in it she had all our people’s herbs and healing roots. […] First Woman was the center of the earth and her symbol was the morning star (CD 246, 247).
From Mary’s point of view, the attraction to Leonard and his knowledge of ancient spirituality seems to be supplied in part by the ability to enter, at least partially and for some time, Leonard’s life, which is remarkably different from her own. Diving into this sacred world opens a new world to her. After the siege, Mary “became Crow Dog’s wife” (CD 170), starting a sacred journey into the realms of ancient Lakota spirituality. She becomes acquainted with the Ghost Dance 37 (see Figure 9), the Sun Dance 38 (see Figures 10 and 11), vision quests, the yuwipi ritual 39, the Lakota’s sacred food, peyote, and the story of the White Buffalo Calf Woman,
[…] who brought to our people the most sacred of all things, the ptehincala- huhu-chanunpa, the sacred pipe around which our faith revolves. This woman taught our people how to use the pipe and how to live in a sacred manner. After she had fulfilled her mission she bade farewell to the tribe, and as she wandered off the people saw her turning into a white buffalo calf. Then they knew that she had been sent to us by our relatives, the Buffalo Nation (CD 247).
37 The Ghost Dance religion was already at the center of the Battle at Wounded Knee in the 19th century (cf. CD 144). During a Ghost Dance ceremony each participant, being in trance, is praying and the spirit moves everybody (cf. BB 103). Several times Mary has been able to see her ancestors talk to her. She has heard spirits, which are in harmony with the dance, and they have sung and talked with her (cf. BB 104). 38 Mary claims that the concept that lies behind the Sun Dance is similar to the one of the suffering Christ. In a Sun Dance ceremony the participants pierce their flesh with skewers to help someone dear to them. For many decades Indians performing this dance could go to jail (cf. CD 253). The Sun Dance is, in fact, the most sacred of all Lakota rituals. It is a celebration of life, of the sun, the buffalo, and the eagle. It is a self-sacrifice, not an initiation rite or a way to prove one’s courage (cf. BB 110). Being the wife of a spiritual leader, Mary has sun-danced herself, but she has not pierced until the second time she participated in this traditional Lakota ceremony (cf. CD 257). 39 A yuwipi ritual is a “finding-out ritual – finding a missing person, or object, or the cause of a sickness” (BB 104). According to Mary (cf. BB 104), this ceremony is put on at the request of a sponsor who wants the spirits to give him the answer for what he wants to know. At the center of the ceremony is the yuwipi man who translates to the sponsor what the spirits have told him.
141 Leonard’s teachings start a process in her that “[…] was odd. On the one hand I was still the same footloose half-breed girl who once ripped off stores in many big cities; on the other, I was becoming a traditional Sioux woman steeped in the ancient beliefs of her people” (CD 251).
Figure 9.
Revival of the Ghost Dance at Rosebud Reservation in 1974.
142 Figure 10.
Piercing during the Sun Dance ceremony at Leonard Crow Dog’s place.
Figure 11.
In 1971, at Crow Dog’s Paradise, a man undergoes the self-torture of the sun dance.
143
In her second autobiography, Ohitika Woman, Mary dedicates most of the chapters to describing ancient Lakota ceremonies, which are to her “[…] as necessary as breathing” (BB 109) and the significance of peyote 40 for her people. She is a mature woman now, having divorced Leonard, having gotten married a second time, having given birth to five children. Her spirituality can be regarded as her inner self. It has become part of her. It is a blending of all the things she has learned over the years and what she feels, how she sees the world, how she interacts with people, what she tries to accomplish, how she tries to treat people. In addition, Mary has found dealing with life’s challenges easier when she views spirituality as a source of power. Utmost poverty is one of these life’s challenges that the mature Lakota woman has to deal with: “I had no place to stay. Part of the summer I had lived in a dilapidated one-room cabin with an earth floor, a kerosene lamp, and a toppling outhouse, a veritable Tower of Pisa. [… On the reservation there …] are no jobs. The poverty is unbelievable” (BB 3, 4). Therefore Mary, as well as most of the reservation Indians, “had been drinking heavily. To forget. To wash away despair in a flood of Jack Daniel’s and ‘Buddy Wiser’. […] Getting drunken means getting mean, [… or …] driving while intoxicated” (BB 3, 4). As far as alcohol abuse is concerned, Sandmaier (cf. 81) claims that many people at one time or another have reacted to a stressful situation with allowing themselves to experience the dulling effects of alcohol 41, because they temporarily allow the drinkers to believe that they have escaped from their frustration, anxiety, anger, tension, loneliness. Indeed, Mary is extremely frustrated and angry about her deplorable financial situation: “The advance money from the book [her first autobiography] was long gone. Every week I had to borrow money from Richard, my wasichu [white] coauthor” (BB 3). In addition, she “had
40In chapter 6 Mary explains that the “[…] use of peyote in Indian ceremonies goes back to the beginning of history. The medicine’s name comes from the Aztec word peyotl, meaning ‘caterpillar’, because this cactus plant has fuzz at its top like the hairs of a caterpillar” (BB 70). 41Among Native American women, alcoholism appears to be even more serious than among their white counterparts. A report from the National Center for Health Statistics showed that women account for almost half of the total deaths from liver cirrhosis among Native Americans, compared to around one- third of cirrhosis deaths among whites. Because liver cirrhosis tends to be underreported in women, these figures indicate that alcoholism has reached crisis proportions among Native American women (cf. Sandmaier 138).
144 been going through a lot, was depressed 42 and did not want to go on with my life. That is why I got drunk and wrecked in the first place” (BB 6). One night Mary has been getting drunk once again at a friend’s house. Hours later, even though she is stark drunk, the Sioux woman decides to drive home, despite her friend’s warning: “Don’t go. You’re in no condition to drive” (BB 5). Disregarding these words of warning, Mary gets into her car, wanting “[…] to pick up my cousin, Mike, […] and have some more Buddy Wiser with him. I never made it. […] I was on a gravel road, real loose gravel. I took the wrong turn and must have been going real fast, because I lost control of the car” (BB 5), crashing into a utility pole. The scene of the accident looks eerie and Mary’s injuries are very serious:
High-voltage wire was wrapped all around the car, and to get me out they had to call the electric company to turn off the power. I was pinned inside the car, drifting in and out of consciousness. I did not know where I was or what had happened. They thought I was dead […]. When they moved me there was a terrible surge of pain that shot up all the way from my feet into the roots of my hair. Cuts from the glass of the splintered windshield had left tiny drops of blood all over my face. […] One of my ears was nearly severed. Six of my ribs were broken. One had punctured and collapsed my left lung. Another had ripped open my aorta, […]. At the tribal hospital they thought that my neck had been broken (BB 5).
Since it is impossible for the author to include every detail about this serious accident, Mary has to edit and filter the experience, literally giving only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The pain and misery that Mary must have suffered at the accident site and later during her week-long recovery can only be guessed. Most importantly, however, is the fact that Mary starts viewing spirituality as a source of power, which has greatly helped her endure and overcome the pain after the car accident. During open-heart surgery, Mary has a vision:
It was very real, like a down-to-earth experience. I went to see my grandma who had raised me. I was in a room with her in the house where I had spent my early childhood. I said: ‘Grandma, I came to stay with you.’ She said: ‘No, you can’t.’
42 For many women one of the reasons to get addicted to alcohol is depression. Periods of depression prior to the onset of drinking occur more frequently in women than in men. A 1990 study by the American Psychological Association on Women and Depression states that twice as many women as men in the United States suffer from depression (cf. Sandmaier 97).
145 I told her: ‘I don’t want to stay in the world anymore. I miss you.’ But grandma insisted: ‘No, you can’t. You have kids to take care of. Think of them. You have to go back. I’ll be here for you.’ So my grandmother was telling me to go back to the world and my responsibilities (BB 6).
The author clearly shows the complicated workings of the human imagination while calling attention to the importance of a fervent belief in spirituality which actually saved her life. When envisioning her dead grandmother, Mary feels that there is something much bigger than she is that guides and directs her, a Great Spirit. That Great Spirit makes her realize that she must not let down her own children, but act responsibly. It helps her have the strength to recover from her injuries. It has helped her find the way: “Finally this episode in my life came to an end. I never was the same again after it. It changed my life-style for sure” (BB 8). By regarding spirituality as a source of power, the author has undoubtedly sought to discover an underlying sense of stability based on spiritual continuity and interconnection with the natural world. At last, Mary is “[…] at peace with the universe and all living things” (BB 109). A spiritual perspective characterizes the most significant component in shaping the three authors’ philosophy. These Native American women acknowledge a belief in a supreme being. Spirituality is clearly understood as ‘the soul’, ‘the self’, and ‘a power’ greater than anything else in this world.
7.3.2 Theme Two: Indianness
Native Americans today are nations of people within a nation, the United States. They characterize themselves tribally, such as Cherokee, Sioux, or Coeur d’Alene. Wilma is a Cherokee 43 woman who later in her life finds out that “we originally called ourselves […] Yunwiya or Ani-Yunwiya, […] which means ‘Real People’ or ‘Principal People’ ” (MK 16). Mary states that “I am a woman of the Red Nation, a Sioux woman” (CD 3). While Mary and Wilma grew up with an awareness of belonging to a certain nation/tribe, Janet’s identification with the Salish people, the Coeur d’Alene tribe, happens only as an adult, when she can finally say that the Coeur d’Alene reservation is
43 The word Cherokee is actually derived from the word tciloki, which means “people of a different speech” (MK 17).
146 the place where “I came from. […] This is where … the closest thing I ever had to a home” (BL 185). Wilma’s lasting traditions seem to evolve from an innate nature that stirs within her a passion to be connected, humanly and culturally, in ways which validate her Indianness. She reiterates the way in which her people’s spirits are merged culturally, uniquely setting them apart from other populations,
Most of what I know about my family’s heritage I […] learn[ed] [… when] I was a young woman. […] The name Mankiller carries with it a lot of history. It is a strong name. I am proud of my name – very proud. And I am proud of the long line of men and women who have also been called Mankiller. I hope to honor my ancestors by keeping the name alive. […] But I have started my story far too early. Especially in the context of a tribal people, no individual’s life stands apart and alone from the rest. My own story has meaning only as long as it is part of the overall story of my people. For above all else, I am a Cherokee woman (MK 12, 13, 14).
Wilma implies that she has grown up knowing the life-ways of the Cherokee, and she sticks to the ways of her people. Clearly, she seems to be a tribal traditionalist person. In this way, her people have imitated the ancient Cherokee who, just like the Pueblos, “depended upon collective memory through successive generations to maintain and transmit an entire culture” (Silko 501). When Wilma returns to the Cherokee reservation and gets involved in tribal politics, she starts examining questions of Cherokee identity through the maternal line. The conflict between the traditional role of women in ancient Cherokee society and the status of women in modern Cherokee understanding is essential to Wilma’s account. These two value systems are reflected, on the one hand, by the way the author has been brought up; Mankiller has come of age in a loving Cherokee family where women have been highly valued. She remembers that nobody has ever told her: “You can’t do this because you’re a woman, […]” (MK 112). In this sense, Wilma is taught that “[… ancient] Cherokee women played an important and influential role in town government. Women shared in the responsibilities and rights of the tribal organization. Our Cherokee families were traditionally matrilineal clans” (MK 19). On the other hand, Wilma is aware of the declining role of women in contemporary Cherokee society, because “Europeans brought with them the view that men were the absolute heads of the
147 households, and women were to be submissive to them” (MK 20). Towards the end of part three, called “Balance”, the author describes this unique situation arising from the European colonial conquest, unfolding her overwhelming experience in an attempt to make contact with her understanding of Indianness. Mankiller skillfully interweaves these chapters with a narration of writing her own story of political success in a Cherokee world dominated by male Indians. This success seems to be only achieved by controlling her physical surroundings. One way of doing this involves her effort to engage in the creative process of writing: “To help channel the anger and to maintain a good mind, I decided to write a short story that would address this issue of cultural clashes” (MK 232). In this story Wilma treats the inexpressible, whether it be the truth of experience or artistic vision, as trapped within her mind, divorced from language and seemingly incompatible with the realities of modern Cherokee world views:
I called the story ‘Keeping Pace with the Rest of the World’. It did not appear in print until 1985, in Southern Exposure, a publication of the Institute for Southern Studies. […] That story was my first published piece, and it helped me deal with the trauma I had to endure. It was pure fiction, but it was filled with the stark truth (MK 232).
Here one might see an autobiographical option for navigating between the inward territory of personal experience and the outward realities of male-dominated expression. By successfully establishing herself in tribal politics, Mankiller once again maintains her understanding of Indianness through educating her male counterparts of the ancient Cherokee role of women in society. However, life alienated from Cherokee traditional culture has been transformed by other cultures, in this case, the white man’s culture, into a complicated web of affiliations. In the last chapter of “Balance” Mankiller presents the full spectrum of Cherokee identity by being elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. The author is able to address the crisis of cultural identity for her generation of Cherokee women. She can be regarded as defying imposed patriarchal structures by taking up the office of principal chief and by taking up the pen and claiming authority over her memories. She explores the crossroads between language and traditional Cherokee culture. While at the same time writing against the values of white male
148 society, the author reminds her people of a glorious past in which women and their role in the community were honored through the organization of matrilineal clans. As the daughter of a traditional Cherokee family, Wilma is, indeed, fascinated by ethnic identity from early adolescence on. She regards the Indian Center in San Francisco as a place where she “[…] could talk to other native people about shared problems and frustrations” (MK 112), “[t]hat is why the Indian Center was so immensely important” (MK 113), “[t]hat is still my best teenage memory” (MK 115). The Indian Center, however, seems to also be a place for affiliation within her urban Indian and traditional Cherokee identity. These early chapters of Mankiller’s autobiographical account highlight the eruption of ‘unknown’, strange cultural principles, associated with the white man’s values, into the memories of Wilma’s teenage years. Later on in her life, after having returned to her homelands, Mankiller analyzes how language reinforces patterns of identity. She tries to challenge language to begin to express her own, distinctive and overwhelming experiences. And she seems to come to terms with the constructed nature of language’s relation to experience and how that relationship breaks down with the shifts in perspective and consciousness inherent in ‘being’. The author shows how a bi-cultural and in fact, bilingual (English and Cherokee) upbringing shapes identity by complicating the problem of representation, within the family, the ethnic community, and American society at large. Mankiller strongly identifies with her female Cherokee ancestors from whom she inherits their concept of Cherokee female identity in the context of the United States. The main theme of her autobiography is Mankiller’s attempt to come to achieve sexual and financial independence, as against the expectations of marriage and motherhood imposed by white, male tradition, as passed down by her mother whose “[…] name is Clara Irene Sitton. […] My mother’s family[’s …] background was mostly Dutch and Irish. She does not have a drop of Indian blood in her veins” (MK 9). Wilma looks to her father for knowledge of her ethnic identity and finds conflict between the genders and the generations of her family. She observes how her father and his relatives support the Cherokee language, thus being able to analyze how a sense of identity is conveyed by her paternal line, and to explore ancient Cherokee culture from that vantage point.
149 Mankiller definitely takes into account the role of gender in her understanding of Indianness. While feminine presence seems to have always been excluded from white society, identity based upon this concept naturally strengthens the masculine power of supremacy. Therefore, it appears understandable how the modern, sovereign Cherokee Nation participates in the cultural practices of white male society. While one should keep in mind the way in which the concept of identity is based upon a masculine subject at the Cherokee reservation, one must also look at the ways gender intersects with the concept of a traditional Cherokee identity. While participation in traditional Cherokee ethnicity is dependent upon the acknowledgement of the matrilineal line, the reader can see that modern Cherokee identity, an identity that in Indian-white relations has marked everlasting outsider status, is also built around the concept of a male subjectivity. Thus, the author relates and reacts to her hybrid identity as a woman exploring the feminine limitations and possibilities of each: through the strictly-enforced, culturally assigned feminine roles of wife and mother, and through her strong affiliations with her father’s Cherokee family through the matrilineal line. In Mankiller’s autobiography, the particular social and political position of women in Cherokee society is not only addressed by Wilma’s narrative voice but, in several instances, is clearly articulated by a variety of textual sources used by the author to represent various ideas on the issue of Cherokee identity. In the school that Wilma has to attend, all the tensions of Cherokee identity in an urbanized environment are present, without the least attempts to unite the community while acknowledging differences. She explains:
I was uncomfortable. I felt stigmatized. I continually found myself alienated from the other students, who mostly treated me as though I had come from outer space. […] Not only did I speak differently than they did, but I had an unfamiliar name that the others ridiculed (MK 103).
This situation recognizes and criticizes the prejudice that exists among whites, and Wilma looks forward to the day she does not have to attend school anymore because she “[…] loathed being in California, and I particularly despised school. […] I hated what was happening. […] I hated school. […] I hated the other students [but …] I did not hate my parents or the rest of the family. I always loved them very much” (MK 103). Not only
150 is a sort of urban Indian identity advocated, but the revival and return to a traditional Cherokee one is also suggested. This basic conflict between an urban Indian and a traditional Cherokee identity could be improved by acknowledging the urban Indian self while achieving a balance and unifying the white community with dislocated traditional Native Americans. That is, this could happen if each community, which has clung to its tradition, could be convinced to set aside the differences that mark them. Mankiller, however, clearly proves that neither for the white students nor for her, such a ‘melting pot’ identity is probable. This very same passage about Wilma’s school memories emphasizes the relation between language and ethnic affiliation that the reader can see sprinkled throughout Mankiller’s autobiography. Her full-blood father, who grows up speaking only his native tongue, is sent to a boarding school where he “[…was] punished for only the slightest infractions [such as speaking Cherokee …]” (MK 8). The only goal of the so-called boarding schools is clearly “[…] for the children to leave everything behind that related to their native culture, heritage, history, and language” (MK 8). Wilma continues: “Fortunately, he [Wilma’s father] came from a strong family, and because of his traditional upbringing, the school was not successful in alienating him from his culture, [and language]” (MK 9). Growing up on the reservation, Wilma remembers that
[m]ost people we knew spoke Cherokee in their homes and as their first language. In our home, both languages were used, often interchangeably. Cherokee was spoken almost exclusively whenever we visited other native people or when they came to see us” (MK 34).
These lines talk about the importance of being able to speak the Cherokee language, and they advocate a sort of leveling of identity. Wilma admits that at the boarding school her father “[…] also acquired his love of books, a gift he passed on to his children” (MK 8). On the one hand, the author despises the way Indian children are alienated in boarding schools, while on the other hand, she does admit that she is very happy for the things that her father has learnt there. Moreover, it seems obvious that Mankiller wants the reader to understand the dilemma of separation from the familiar, but to remember that both, the Cherokee and the white man’s culture, are seen as open-armed ‘mothers’, who teach their children appropriate behavior through the proper use of an ethnic language. The author’s
151 seemingly understanding tone implicit in these lines underlines the central conflict of Cherokee identity experienced by her father: peaceful unity that denies heritage versus proud individuality weighed down by conflict and exclusion. The basic problem of all Native Americans is present, but not resolved: forget where you come from to become white, but remember who you are and stay Cherokee. In a Catholic boarding school where, as a child, one seems to be constantly told by the white teachers that one is personally responsible for the death of Christ, this double pressure toward remembering and forgetting, between identity and assimilation is particularly painful. This truth is also brought home for Mary when she is confronted by one of the sisters at the mission school at St. Francis, when she neglects to recognize the importance of the school’s rules, disobeying them when she should have been following them:
All I got out of school was being taught how to pray. I learned quickly that I would be beaten if I failed in my devotions, or God forbid, prayed the wrong way, especially prayed in Indian to Wakan Tanka, the Indian Creator. […] I did not take kindly to the discipline and to marching by the clock, left-right, left- right. I was never one to like being forced to do something. [Attending boarding school meant to Mary feeling like …] the victim of Nazi concentration camps […] (CD 28, 32-33).
Mary’s suffering, physically and emotionally scarred by concentration camp experience, is a reminder of the painful price of identity and a personification of the reasons why the move toward assimilation can be a treacherous and thankless one, as Mary declares:
Oddly enough, we owed our unspeakable boarding schools to the do-gooders, the white Indian-lovers. […] ‘You don’t have to kill those poor benighted heathen,’ the do-gooders said, ‘in order to solve the Indian Problem. Just give us a chance to turn them into useful farmhands, laborers, and chambermaids who will break their backs for you at low wages.’ In that way the boarding schools were born (CD 30).
As long as she can remember, the Sioux woman has found herself in a particularly complicated position. Both her scholarly education and her growing attraction to Lakota traditional culture are reflected in her autobiographies by a mixture of knowledge of the white world and the Lakota way of life. In Ohitika Woman these interventions of Lakota wisdom appear naturally, without appearing strange or new to her, while in Lakota
152 Woman Mary admits at several occasions that she “[…] was a half-blood, not traditionally raised, [… she] could not speak Sioux [… and was constantly worried whether she] would measure up to their [the traditional Lakota] standards which go back to the old buffalo days” (CD 176). The combination of her increasing interest in ancient Lakota culture, interspersed with either Christian elements or more modern ideas, is typical of the young Sioux woman’s behavioral pattern and can be regarded as a metaphor for the blending of identities that is evident in Mary’s everyday experience, the way it is recalled, and the way it is retold. Not belonging to either culture, the white man’s or the traditional Sioux’, reflects the result of centuries of hybrid experience. In Lakota Woman its further integration into Mary’s own life is indicative of the progression of the mixed-blood experience: it is a signifier of difference that slowly takes on the aspects of its surroundings. As Mary points out, particularly after her marriage to a full-blood Lakota, the Christian upbringing that has marked Mary’s beliefs is already diluted by several occasions of exposure to traditional Lakota culture. The reader can see this when Mary comes into contact with the ‘pure’ language. All of her full-blood in-laws “[…] could talk Indian” (CD 176). The ability to speak the ‘pure’ language clearly presents the full-blood Sioux as almost anti-half-bloods. Here Mary is torn between association with her Christian upbringing and with the full-bloods’ culture:
Once, when I went over to the old folks’ [her husband’s parents] house to borrow some eggs, Henry [her father in-law] intercepted me and told me to leave, saying that I was not the right kind of wife for his son. […] I was […] treated as an intruder. I had to fight day by day to be accepted (CD 176).
Being able to speak Lakota and having knowledge of the traditional Sioux culture, the full-bloods gain authenticity through association with their ancestry, while at the same time Mary is reminded of being rejected by that progeny. On the one hand, she feels a pull to defend her Christian upbringing as the way of power and prestige of the white man’s culture. On the other hand, it is a reminder of her subordinated status, as well as of the suffering of expulsion and alienation from traditional Sioux culture. The innuendoes invoked by her father in-law, though viewed as subordinate with her Christian
153 background, nonetheless are a vital element of Mary’s quest for identity and have, in fact, the ultimate claim to a traditional Sioux identity which Mary will eventually gain. While being married to her full-blood husband, Mary is surrounded by a living reminder of ancient Sioux culture in which ethnic affiliation is as crucial as the knowledge of ancient Lakota ceremonies, dances, songs, and rituals. Is her husband’s wisdom meant to differentiate half-bloods from full-bloods? Even learning about her husband’s ancestors seems at first strange to her; as she listens to Leonard’s stories, however, she realizes:
I came to understand why the Crow Dogs made it hard for me to become one of them. Even among the traditional full-bloods out in the back country, the Crow Dogs are a tribe apart. They have built a wall around themselves against the outside world. […] To understand them, one must know the Crow Dog legend and the Crow Dog history. […] For most people, what their ancestors did over a hundred years ago would be just ancient history, but for the Crow Dogs it is what happened only yesterday (CD 177).
By referencing the Crow Dogs’ heritage, Mary indicates the importance of history for a people, a tribe, which stands in stark contrast to the blending of Christian elements with some limited knowledge of the Lakota culture that makes up Mary’s comprehension of her own family background. Along with linguistic and religious differences, Mary finds herself caught in the clash between the white man’s, the half-bloods’, and the full-bloods’ worlds. As the title of Mary’s first autobiography suggests, the half-blood woman becomes a Lakota Woman through her husband’s teachings, in which Lakota identity, as carried through the paternal line 44, is protected to the extreme. Mary remembers that “[…] always I felt, and was enraptured by, his tremendous power – raw power, spiritual Indian power coming from deep within him” (CD 200-201). Leonard encourages Mary to keep on learning more about Indian religion, because at first the young woman “[…] was very unsure about the role of a medicine man’s wife, about the part women played, or were allowed to play, in Indian religion. […] Leonard helped me overcome these feelings of insecurity” (CD 201). Mary is eager to learn at first, however, as time passes, she
44 Traditional Lakota society was male-oriented, as was common among tribes of nomadic hunter-warriors, whereas the corn-planting Pueblos or the Cherokee tribes were women-oriented (cf. BB 180).
154 rebels against the limitations of the female role in traditional Lakota culture: “As for wear and tear: Having four children, being a medicine man’s wife, cooking and cleaning up for innumerable guests, most of them uninvited, listening to countless woes and problems, became just too much for me” (CD 262-263). Mary seems to alternate between pride and resentment. As she gets older, she sees that womanhood represents limitations. She feels the pressure of being a wife and mother, cutting short her own needs. Thus, one day she realizes that “I was going under. So a few years ago I panicked, packed up the kids, and simply ran away” (CD 263). On August 24th, 1991, Mary eventually marries Rudi Olguin, a Chicano, “after so many years of hardship, strife, and a nomad’s life, […]” (BB 241), who she hopes will allow her to take care of herself - a crucial aspect which her first husband has not understood. Therefore, she “[…] had tried to run away from the Paradise [the Crow Dog’s home] before I finally left Leonard Crow Dog for good. I couldn’t take the life there anymore. It was killing me, mentally, physically, spiritually” (BB 133). Rudi, on the other hand, appears to play the mentoring role for Mary, supporting her whenever he can. He “[…] is putting in a flower bed […]. Last week he fixed Mom’s roof. He is a talented artist, on paper and canvas. He can cut your hair or bake a pie. He can frame a house, or put in a swimming pool for some rich homeowner. He is good to me. […] He keeps me from drinking” (BB 247-248). Having found stability in her second marriage, Mary decides to work on Ohitika Woman once again with her co-author Richard Erdoes. Revealing to the reader what has happened to her since 1977 seems to be crucial to Mary’s process of self-exploration, now that she has thrown off her culturally proscribed restriction. In an enlightened moment, Mary prepares the memoirs of what would become her second autobiography. She finds a voice that is influenced by the way she was raised and by who she has turned into, a woman for whom “Indian religion is at the center of […] life. It is the spiritual side of myself. It is part of my heritage. It made me survive” (BB 235). She has indeed found a way to use the very signifier of difference that once set her apart as an object of disrespect. It is certainly an interesting move, and one that seems burdened with challenge. She goes one step further in exploring her heritage in her attempt to make it appealing to her reader.
155 Wilma’s and Mary’s ability to speak their native tongue echoes the pluralism of their unique understandings of Indianness. Both authors certainly achieve a great deal of credibility with their knowledge of their ancestors’ language, and with Wilma’s inclusion of third-person narrative with familial tales told in the voices of ancestors, as well as political pamphlets and letters. This way seems to represent a pluralism in which conflicting ideologies have a chance to play against each other. Additionally, this quality of these autobiographies definitely seeks to bring Indian identity into mainstream American autobiographical studies in such a way as to promote ethnic pluralism. Clearly, the texts do not only serve this function, but they imply a subject position in which pluralism is the only option. A variety of ethnic identities, sometimes in direct conflict, is filled with as many possibilities as dangers. In this sense, both authors may be said to be representing in their autobiographies Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, that is, the unexpected product of colonial discourse, when the colony is understood to be the interstitial space between colonizing and colonized cultures. Though Indians in the United States do not participate in a colonial situation that corresponds with Bhabha’s comprehension of the term, Wilma and Mary do occupy a liminal zone between two national/ethnic identities where one represents the supremacist power and the other, a minority regularly facing prejudice and/or political and social oppression. Bhabha describes hybridity as
[…] the sign of the productivity of colonial [or supremacist] power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategies of reversal of the process of domination through disavowal. […] Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects (112).
The very existence of this discriminated minority and the need of the supremacist power to keep it in the margins produce a culture of mutual negation and disavowal. Contrary to Wilma and Mary, Janet rejects and accepts all signs of her complex identity in a model of irresolvable internal conflict. The colonial hybrid appears in the liminal subject that, through discrimination, is turned “into the terrifying, exorbitant object of paranoid classification – a disturbing questioning of the images and presences of authority” (Bhabha 113). Janet undoubtedly struggles against classification: as Indian, as Coeur
156 d’Alene, as Native American: “I drive around aimlessly. This is the place we returned to most often in those running-away years, then the place where I ‘came home’ to visit my parents. […] But it isn’t home. No ancestral link to this place. No blood ties. Yakima Indian land. Not home” (BL 73). As she questions these classifications, she finds herself in the frightening position of rejecting all classification and thus losing any sense of identity, but this is an attitude that also celebrates possibility. In the absence of just one language that can synthesize that inexpressible identity, Hale negotiates her way back and forth between a multitude of affiliations and rejections. Thus, she illustrates Bhabha’s argument that
[h]ybridity has no […] perspective of depth or truth to provide: it is not a third term that resolves the tension between two cultures […] Colonial secularity, doubly inscribed, does not produce a mirror where the self apprehends itself; it is always the split screen of the self and its doubling, the hybrid (114).
Hale flees from a restrictive identification with one single aspect of a broader field of options. She moves from a strict, conformist background to a more random field of influence, as reflected in the hybrid dimensions of her autobiographical essays. There is a simultaneous push and pull between options for identity: for Janet, life is a constant negotiation between acceptance/rejection of all identities. The result seems to be a sort of cultural parody which opens up a rich, multicultural existence. It also carries with it the dangers of breaking ties with the past without having yet embraced the future. In Hale’s autobiography, however, it is clearly within this tension that creativity is born. Hale describes the experience of having a conversation with her 39-year-old niece,
[…] who had developed herself, learned through a long process to trust her own perceptions. We talked about the family and how dysfunction begets dysfunction. She had written a master’s thesis about dysfunctional families and how the dysfunction gets passed down from one generation to the next. Not intentionally. But it does get passed down. She told me how she and some of her siblings and cousins discussed their own healing, their desire to break the cycle. She and some of the others made effort to love one and another and reach out to family members. […] ‘Sometimes I reach out and I’m rebuffed. Well, I just figure they’re not ready. Everyone has to heal in their own time and in their own way. And I’m just going to keep on reaching out’ (BL xxxiii).
157 From her niece Janet adopts a special perspective on her own identity. The familial space is not closed off to influence from the outside. Between the central space of Coeur d’Alene Native American identity – the importance of family ties – and the central space of the niece’s identity – the place where she received her master’s degree from – Janet occupies the liminal hybrid space. She celebrates this space, finding a way to speak from the realm of female silence, making use of all her creativity and points of view of post- modern identity to delve into a quest of finding her place in this world. It is clearly this patchwork of identity that Hale highlights in her autobiographical essays: a polyphonic, diverse existence. In echoing her ancestors’ longing for a traditional future for their progeny, the title of her autobiography, Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter, seems to be looking down the generations toward a hopeful future, without discarding altogether the family’s ethnic heritage. Therefore, struggling against the imposition of categories upon her identity, one of the major themes in Hale’s autobiography is ethnic identity. Throughout the book she relates the white man’s (her family’s) conquest from the point of view of the vanquished (herself). In “Daughter of Winter” the author examines the high price demanded by her mother’s means of childrearing and ethnicity-building. Hale finds herself in that ‘no-man’s-land’ denying the existence of a Coeur d’Alene Native American identity. Within the linguistic binaries of Native American/Coeur d’Alene identities, the author finds no acceptable terrain for self-expression, refusing, as she does, to live within the restrictions of the binary. She writes of the ways identity is chosen and performed by the subject, its changeable nature challenging solidification. Two critical categories of subjectivity that collide with one another in the performance of identity are ethnic identity and gender roles. In A Chief and Her People Wilma, shaping herself into a modern, liberated young woman, carries on a marriage with Hugo, a native of Ecuador, soon realizing that all their interactions are being secretly controlled, in her husband’s imagination, by South American machismo and nationalism as male heroism, so Wilma “[…] stayed home with my baby daughter. I kept house, shopped, cooked, and cleaned. I evolved into my role of young wife and mother. […] but I was not completely sure I was comfortable with my situation” (MK 150). Hugo’s attitudes towards women, his wife, and their marriage, indeed, bare the roots of Ecuadorian identity in the patriarchal cult of male self-image of dominance. Thus, it does
158 not take long for Wilma, “[…] starting to feel restricted by the routine required of the traditional housewife” (MK 151). Mary, as a youthful woman, experiences a similar dilemma:
Sexually our roaming bands, even after we had been politically sensitized and joined AIM, were free, very free and wild. If some boy saw you and liked you, then right away that was it. ‘If you don’t come to bed with me, wincincala, I got somebody else who’s willing to.’ The boys had that kind of attitude […] (CD 65).
Especially in matrilineal societies such as the Cherokee, but also in nomadic societies as the Sioux, Euro-American definitions of male household heads increased the power of men and of nuclear families at the expense of women and of matrilineal kin groups. As a result, the colonial experience transformed tribal cultures, creating conflicts between men and women. Additionally, Euro-American culture introduced a variety of notions that powerfully influenced gender ideology, including Christian redefinitions of gender complementarity and gender hierarchy. Changing notions of sexual propriety decreased the autonomy of women. The distinction between public and domestic, which characterized gender relations throughout much of the Old World, was introduced to American Indian societies, serving to replace the complementary notion of gender difference with a more hierarchical one (cf. Maltz and Archambault 241). If women in Euro-American cultures have sometimes been characterized as whores or as ladies, then the equivalent for American Indian women must be ‘squaws’ or ‘princesses’. While this remark is far from original (cf. MK 19), it seems important to the understanding of the place of Native women, such as Wilma and Mary, in contemporary society. Both appear to have no valuable status in society, and no respect. They are inferior to their husbands or boyfriends and necessary only for their labor and for their sexual and reproductive duties. Mary elaborates on this issue:
There is a curious contradiction in Sioux society. The men pay great lip service to the status women hold in the tribe. Their rhetoric on the subject is beautiful. They speak of Grandmother Earth and how they honor her. […] The men kept telling us, ‘See how we are honoring you …’ Honoring us for what? For being good beaders, quillers, tanners, moccasin makers, and child-bearers (CD 66).
159 The barely 18-year-old Janet Hale is also inferior to her first husband, being exploited by him not only because of her domestic but also because of her reproductive qualities. She writes: “I have no fond memories of my first brief marriage to a white man who clearly looked down on me. […] Clearly this was not a marriage of equals” (BL 93, 94). Constant verbal abuse while growing up seems to make Janet vulnerable for additional abuse. During their short marriage, Janet suffers a great deal of both verbal and physical abuse from her husband. She recalls the following incidents:
Once he [her husband] handed me a matchbook cover in front of his hip, jazz- buff friends that advertised ‘Earn your High School Diploma at Home by Mail’ and said, ‘This is what you should do!’ But had I not dropped out of school I still wouldn’t have been out of high school yet. I wasn’t his age, after all. I was just a kid. But he and his friends got a good laugh out of the matchbook cover ‘joke’. [Another day …] he had a big, heavy ashtray from the hotel lobby (though I didn’t know what it was at first; I just felt the blow that knocked me on the floor), the kind that isn’t meant to go anywhere, with sharp metal handles in each side. This is what he hit me with. The wound near my eye spurted blood like a geyser. It left a scar, an indentation about a quarter of an inch from my right eye (BL 93, 94).
Stereotypically, then, all three women, Mary, Wilma, and Janet can be viewed as drudges and inferior to men. It is fair to note, though, that all of them eventually manage to represent themselves positively, chiefly by escaping machismo and male dominance, which is reflected in their present relationships to respectful men. Power rather than status is the key concept that unites Mary’s, Wilma’s, and Janet’s focus on gender. Therefore, power appears as their primary source for change: they emphasize economic control and independence as a means of creating and redefining their status in both the white man’s and in tribal society. Power is seen as an active reality that illuminates itself through individual life stages and through ancestral history. Power leads these admirable women to autonomy within their families as well as within the community council. In their autobiographies they also make an effort to place Sioux, Cherokee, and Coeur d’Alene women in their proper social context. Many of the chapters describe situations in which Native women are treated as integrated members of their societies, being given almost spiritual respect as wives and mothers, and being listened to their advice seriously, and their participation in tribal politics is accepted. Particularly, in Mary’s and Wilma’s
160 cases, the traditional notion of women’s power and authority is really valid and contributes greatly to their understanding of Indianness. Ethnicity can also be constructed within the family in the careful investigation of ancestors, as what Janet Hale calls Odyssey of a Native Daughter. Janet relates the following:
Gram Sullivan was born Angeline McLoughlin […] in the Kootenay Valley near the international boundary in 1875. Her father […] was the only surviving son of Dr. John and Margaret McLoughlin. […] Gram’s pa [father] did what many half- breed Indian boys before him had done: he just saddled his horse and rode away. He left the white world behind and wandered for a time before he came to the beautiful Kootenay Valley. He married a full-blooded Kootenay Indian woman named Annie Grizzly, who became Gram’s ma. Gram Sullivan was actually one- quarter white (that one quarter coming from her paternal grandfather, Dr. McLoughlin), but Gram was a dark Indian woman, much darker than I. As dark as my other grandmother, who was a full-blood (BL 114).
Hale’s act of passing on this part of her family history is as crucial to the passing down of ethnic identity as the history of distinction it represents. The differentiation between her white and Indian ancestors gives emphasis to the constructed nature of biological and group identity. This linking of Hale’s mixed-blooded ancestry with full-blooded traits might be interpreted as a deliberate linking of her own mixed-blooded background with her full-blooded ancestors’ history, in an attempt to present herself in a light that makes her less different, less of an outsider in her quest for an ‘Indian’ identity. Her mentioning of her full-blooded ancestry in this passage could also serve to strengthen this view, in its insistence on a rare breed of authenticity. If so, it emphasizes the complications of a mixed-blooded identity, where full-blooded ‘Indian’ identity is held up as proof of authenticity in a white man’s context in which full-blooded American Indians were practically erased from the continent and its history, through removal, relocation, and the horrors of assimilation. Both her ancestry and her own family background are established on the model of the mixed-blooded ‘Indian’. If the reading of her ancestral history agrees with the familial situation, how does Hale imagine Indianness? While in Mankiller’s and Brave Bird’s autobiographies ethnicity is maintained and transmitted through language (Wilma speaks Cherokee, Mary is capable of
161 understanding Lakota), Hale’s autobiographical essays inform the reader that Janet is not able to speak her native tongue. However, during her odyssey, she learns that
Gram Sullivan’s hair was like black satin. The looks of a full-blood. But not the soul of one. Not like Poulee, my other grandmother, who spoke not a word of English, never wore a pair of shoes in her life and was nothing if not secure in her idea of herself, her acceptance of herself as an Indian woman. Not a Siwash. Not a squaw. An Indian woman (BL 120).
Hale begins to appreciate her full-blooded Native American ancestry. Poulee, who for Hale turns into the family ark of Indianness, only spoke her native tongue as a result of strongly identifying with her full-blooded ancestry. The repeated phrase “an Indian woman” is a declaration of affiliation. The pointlessness of her grandmother’s native language in the white man’s world in no sense weakens its significance. In positively declaring a Native American background, while at the same time serving as a marker of the miscegenation that Janet has experienced in her family, Poulee’s knowledge of her native tongue comes to symbolize Hale’s conflicting condition of the hybrid subject. Hale speaks about her bloodlines, reinventing her ancestors’ lives and stories, by developing a fascinating drive to investigate specially her full-blooded ancestry. Gradually Hale commences to acknowledge the influence of this ancestry on her idea of Indianness, in that it claims to transmit a ‘history’ while at the same time shaping it. Here are further memories of Hale’s full-blooded relatives:
Gram loved her home in the Kootenay Valley and went back for visits. […] Sometimes Gram’s Kootenay relatives came to visit her. They could not (or would not) speak English. Gram and her relatives always conversed in Kootenay, when they came to visit. […] They wore moccasins and leggings and bright- colored clothing, and their hair (even the men’s) was in long braids. They did not wear coats. They wrapped themselves in blankets […] and wore exotic jewelry made of shells and animal’s teeth and glass beads. […] Mom was afraid of her mother’s exotic relatives, but she was attracted to them, too, fascinated by them. She liked the way they looked. She loved to listen to the smooth, flowing language she didn’t understand. […] For all her Irishness, I think Mom always felt a strong Indian undercurrent in herself (BL 121-122).
Though Hale acknowledges that most of her relatives, most of all her mother, do not identify themselves as ‘Indian’, she explains her mother’s fascination with the full-
162 blooded relatives as linked to their mutual origin. This mesmerizing move toward the ‘exotic’ relatives might be regarded as linked to the divine, the spirit, the all- encompassing idea that everything is related and that all living things play a significant role in keeping the Earth in balance (cf. Mankiller, every day is a good day 14). The theme of identity, of which spirituality is a part of, inhabiting a realm beyond the written word surfaces when Janet describes how her mother feels about her full-blooded family. On numerous pages she explains the importance of each of her relatives, full-bloods and whites, and their contribution to the family’s history, and the way they came together to create meaning in the tradition of their exclusive ethnic backgrounds. This task entails more than mere transcription; it requires a spiritual understanding of the deeper meaning of each ethnic background provided. It seems to be a concept that must have also influenced the author in writing her autobiographical novel The Jailing of Cecelia Capture. By revealing a fictional character’s history, she sought to discover the depths of what lay beneath Cecelia’s history. Hale clearly uses this technique of re-writing experience in exploring both her novel’s and autobiography’s main theme, the tracing of identity in terms of ethnicity, and spirituality through several generations of relatives. The generations in Bloodlines evolve from both her paternal and her maternal full-blooded ancestry, to her own mother’s mixed-blooded background, and back to Hale’s developing glimpses of identification with the awareness of a full-blooded Coeur d’Alene Indian. It is, in fact, her full-blooded ancestors who have preserved their traditions in their struggle against the white man, and they have sustained Hale’s maternal grandmother, and her generation, in their new life in an unfamiliar environment off the reservation. Hale’s mother, however, growing up in a mixed-blooded setting, unconsciously rejects full- blooded views of identity, strongly identifying with her Irish ancestry. Therefore, as a child she is afraid of her ‘exotic’ relatives. Rejecting their language, their appearance, and even their clothing marking ethnic difference, she defends her mixed-blood heritage. Janet, torn between these issues of identity as a child, rejects both her grandmother’s full- bloodedness and her mother’s mixed-bloodedness:
I tried to recall a time […] when I hated my Indianness. Really hated it, not just been hurt by prejudice, but a time I really wished I were not, did not have to be, an Indian. […] When I was six or seven years old, […] I was the only kid at
163 Christ the King [Elementary School]. Nobody would [ever] hold my hand. They refused to touch my brown Indian hands. I went home after school and filled a white enamel basin with water, then poured a cup of Purex bleach into it and soaked my hands. For a long time. As long as I could. My hateful brown hands. I hoped and prayed I could make them white. That I could make myself acceptable enough (BL 139-140).
Yet, she takes something from each world view to synthesize her own grasp of Indianness. Having been successful in the white man’s world as an author and academic, Hale soon feels the need that “[i]t was time to go [on]” (BL 155). Therefore, visiting Bear Paw 45 in Montana, the author “[…] felt compelled to complete the journey now, to close the circle” (BL 155). Reliving her ancestors’ suffering - “When the battle at the Bear Paw ended, 419 Indians – 88 men, 184 women and 147 children – lay dead on the frozen ground” (BL 158) - Hale draws heavily on her own experiences both on the Coeur d’Alene reservation and in multiethnic urban areas of the Pacific Northwest. Above all, however, this visit clearly turns out to be highly self-revelatory when
[t]he cold reached my bones, yet I stood in the snow and felt myself being in that place, that sacred place. […] I felt the biting cold. I was with those people, was part of them. I felt the presence of my grandmother there as though two parts of her met each other that day: the ghost of the girl she was in 1877 (and that part of her will remain forever in that place) and the part of her that lives on in me, in inherited memories of her, in my blood and in my spirit (BL 158).
Still, in the end Janet’s quest for Indianness remains somewhat unanswered. She admits that the Coeur d’Alene reservation can never again be her home, blaming her dysfunctional family of origin, her closest kin who caused her years of emotional pain, for this permanent estrangement:
‘You know, I haven’t lived here since I was ten. And I can never again.’ I can never live here, where I came from. My sisters are here now, […] and almost all their children and almost all their grandchildren. Our ancestral land, where they were born, but I was not, is their home; it can never be mine. I will remain, as I have long been, estranged from the land I belong to (BL 185).
45 Bear Paw in Montana is the Indian battleground where the U.S. army under General Howard defeated Chief Joseph and his people in the late 19th century. At Bear Paw there is a monument of both General Howard and Chief Joseph. Below the figures one can read the last words of Joseph’s surrender speech, “FROM WHERE THE SUN NOW STANDS I WILL FIGHT NO MORE FOREVER” (BL 157).
164 Nevertheless, Hale emphasizes that despite her substantial alienation from the land, she will always identify herself as a Coeur d’Alene, and she says she finds some gratification in the desire of her mixed-race daughter to consider herself a Native American:
[…] we [Janet and her daughter] are of the Salish people, the Coeur d’Alene tribe, and this is our country. […] It isn’t obvious that my daughter (whose father is of Anglo-Saxon descent) is Indian. But Indian blood shows itself, in her high cheekbones and straight, dark hair and in her dark, dark eyes that are so much like my own. My daughter can choose, as I never could, whether or not to be an Indian. She has always considered herself one (BL 185, 186).
The cultures of the Native American tribes have been transformed by multiple external perspectives. This process of cultural change in their lifestyles might be viewed as assimilation, taking on a new culture yet retaining one’s own. Both, the Sioux Indian Mary and the Cherokee woman Wilma, are able to fit in either culture and move back and forth between them, but they do not assimilate. As their narratives tell the reader, to these women, accommodating to society’s expectations means assimilation, and they are unwilling to make such a sacrifice. Assimilation is giving up their Sioux/Cherokee identity. Because both of them have never fully embraced the white man’s ideology, they are parts of multiple worlds, and they have become multi-cultured persons. Mary and Wilma have covered up a contemporary culture with their traditional culture, thus creating a culture which is individually shaped. This sense of identity allows them to develop a certain amount of comfort when moving in and out of each world that they live in for the time being. Janet also seems to feel that culture for her has changed. After her odyssey she is able to blend things from both worlds, sometimes even from more than two. She has got the two worlds socially, Coeur d’Alene and the rest of the world, and then there seems to be a third category – there is the work world which blends some of the social aspects, but within a different context. According to Frederick Hale (cf. 5), this dual cultural-geographical focus even ensure Janet Hale a place in the annals of Western American literary history. Therefore, for this member of the Coeur d’Alene tribe, there are definitely separate worlds, but they seem to cross over each other. Being Salish is a world, while being successful in the professional world of the white man and also living in this world, is again a separate world. Janet has learned to perceive herself differently at
165 different points in time. If she goes home to the Coeur d’Alene tribe, she is not the same person that she is as a writer living in New York (cf. BL 189). In the contemporary world she does not seem to have any particular problems, as long as she does her job. The third world, as such, is when she goes back and forth like she does towards the end of her mission for identity. She starts to view it as ‘a part of’ rather than a ‘separate’. Putting them all together has become her culture, her notion of Indianness. Culture and identity evidently dictate the three authors’ Indianness. Anchored in traditions of an ancient peoples’ history, Indianness remains a legacy of strength. Yet, the human struggle to maintain Indianness in a society that obstructs that aspiration through cultural reorganization and extinction, inadequate education, and economic deprivation is clearly also part of the women’s autobiographical narratives.
7.3.3 Theme Three: Mother-Daughter Bonding Relationships
Bonding, both in a positive and a negative way, as the formation of a close personal relationship between mother and child that endures through time, is another shared theme in these women’s lived experiences. Generally, for Native American women bonding begins at the time of conception, and the birthing process gives breath to the bonding relationship. Harjo (5) asserts: “The birth cord never pulls away until death; even then it becomes a streak in the sky.” In recent years feminist writers and scholars have come up with an ‘explosion’ of scientific, historical, and literary speculation on mothers and daughters. What does it mean to be a mother? A daughter? Those who write about mothers and daughters offer varying interpretations, but generally all agree on a number of basic facts. First, today it is a patriarchal, post-Freudian era. History is clearly male, depicting vague and nearly inaudible women’s voices from both the past and the present. Second, women constitute a majority of the world’s population but are often categorized as a minority. Third, all women are daughters. And fourth, most women, whether mothers or not, participate in some form of maternal caretaking. Motherhood is not decreasing in popularity either. Even though contemporary daughters’ lives certainly differ materially and professionally from those of their mothers, they share the common bond of motherhood. Although most
166 daughters will become mothers themselves, and although most daughters are closer to their mothers than to their fathers, a majority strive to be different from their mothers and so evince ambivalence about their closeness (cf. Werlock 171-172). Paula Gunn Allen argues that identity of one’s mother defines us individually as women. She writes: “Your mother’s identity is the key to your own identity” (The Sacred Hoop 59). This assertion is confirmed when Wilma and Mary discuss what their mothers and grandmothers 46 have taught them. Wilma’s mother Irene is a loving, caring woman who devotes her life to raising her eleven children. She is white, having “[…] no drop of Indian blood in her veins, […]” (MK 9). However, from the day she gets married to Wilma’s father, “[…] her own life became centered around Cherokee family life” (MK 9). She is clearly a very strong person, both mentally and physically. As long as the Mankillers live on the reservation, it is Irene who puts her own needs behind her family’s. Since Wilma’s family is very poor, “[…] ‘dirt poor’, [… in fact, they] were on the bottom rung of the poverty ladder” (MK 33), Irene has to keep her family’s house warm, especially in winter, when their
[…] only heat came from a wood stove. […] There was no electricity, and we used coal-oil lamps to light the rooms. […] There was an outhouse for a toilet. Mom used a wringer washer with a gasoline motor, and she had a clothing iron which was operated with natural gas. For washing and cooking, we had to haul water from the spring a quarter mile from the house (MK 32-33).
Despite being “on the bottom rung of the poverty ladder” (MK 33), Irene is able to feed all her children: “Somehow, we always had food on our table” (MK 35). Again, it is Wilma’s mother’s “warmth and love [… that] made up for the lack of material things” (MK 37). Irene teaches her daughter that the greatest thing is making sacrifices to help those one loves. She teaches her daughter about herself, about womanhood. Irene has undoubtedly sacrificed a lot to give her family and yet gotten so little, but that seems to be what she has lived for, that is, making sacrifices for the people she loves. It is this character trait that Wilma has learned from her mother, what she has been taught by her. As a matured Cherokee woman, Wilma claims that “[m]y family also remains very
46 I am including the grandmother’s influence on the young Native American girls too because most Native American children are raised by both their mothers and grandmothers.
167 important to me, and is a great source of joy” (MK 255). Wilma treats her own daughters the same way she was treated by her mother: “When my girls were growing up, I encouraged them to read, appreciate music, maintain a sense of humor, and dance” (MK 256). This behavior has been named the Motherline, which is defined by a woman’s status of being a mother herself, while at the same time having a mother (cf. Lowinsky 230). Lowinsky (cf. 227) refers to the Motherline as being a worldview, a wisdom that has existed since the beginning of humankind. Whenever women gather in groups, they tell one another stories from the Motherline. These are stories of female experience: physical, psychological, and historical. They are stories of the life cycles that link generations of women: mothers who are also daughters; daughters who have become mothers; grandmothers who always remain granddaughters. They are stories that illustrate that times have changed and that illustrates at the same time that nothing much changes at all. Wilma remembers these stories from her mother and also from her grandmother who were telling stories from the Motherline. They have filled out what she knows about what it means to be human. Lowinsky regrets that little of this world view becomes known in printed versions of lived experiences. Many critics lament the lack of narratives of women’s lives, and yet, women’s stories are all around. They do not hear them because their perception is shaped by a culture that trivializes women’s talk and devalues the passing down of female wisdom (cf. 228). Wilma is profoundly moved to see her younger self in her daughters’ development, while at the same time seeing her older self in her mother’s maturation. Watching both her children grow up and her own mother age seems to be an incredible experience for Wilma, feeling in the middle between her mother and her daughters. She is clearly the bridge between generations, which confirms her womanhood, the woman in her. Wilma seems to see the continuum of the women in the family, the pride of being a woman. Lowinsky adds that Wilma is granted a vision of what can be called the Motherline, “[t]he sacred experience of the feminine mysteries” (230). For Wilma the Motherline is the living knowledge of herself as life vessel, cords of connections tied over generations: “Like weaving or knitting, each thread is tied to others to create a complex, richly textured cloth connecting the past with the future” (Lowinsky 231).
168 Moreover, Wilma recalls that her mother has taught her to be a person first, how to have respect for others; she has given her daughter a lot of insight, that is, to give of oneself, and if Wilma has something, it is better to share it. After Wilma’s serious car accident, her mother’s teachings expose themselves in miraculous ways. By being entirely self-sacrificing, keeping in mind her people’s well-being, Wilma’s job becomes her “[…] main priority. […] I wanted to see to it that our people, especially those living in rural areas, had the chance to express their own special needs. I was determined to do this by using the ‘good mind’ approach” (MK 233). So the ambitious Cherokee woman manages to “[…] put together several federal and foundation grants. [… She] also recruited many volunteers to allow local citizens to construct a sixteen-mile water line and to revitalize several of their homes” (MK 233). Wilma’s relentless ambition to help her people by treating them respectfully becomes evident in these efforts. Irene also taught Wilma that if she believes in something, then she should really stand up for what she believes and voice those beliefs. If there are obstacles, she can overcome them. With this teaching in mind, Wilma ultimately gains the Cherokee’s total trust. As far as Wilma’s grandmother-granddaughter bonding relationship is concerned, she is convinced that much of her self-confidence is due to her grandmother’s way of treating her as a teenager. After the family’s relocation to San Francisco, Wilma feels alienated in the urban environment: “My self-esteem was at rock bottom” (MK 104). She decides to run away from home to be with her maternal grandmother where she “[…] began to gain some confidence. As I felt better about myself, I felt better about others. My grandmother deserves much of the credit. […] At a very critical point in my life, she helped me to accept myself and to confront my problems” (MK 105). At this point in Wilma’s life, it is her grandmother who shapes her life and identity, strengthening the grandmother – granddaughter bonding relationship greatly:
All in all, the year I spent [… with my grandmother] was just what I needed. I slept in the same bed with my grandmother, and we […] got up every day at 5:00 a.m. to milk the cows and take care of the chores. […] During our year together, my grandmother helped me shape much of my adolescent thinking. I spent much of my time with her, and never considered a single moment wasted. […] Grandmother Sitton [… was one] of the people I most admired as a young woman […] (MK 106).
169 Obviously, Wilma’s grandmother has taught her granddaughter how to be a woman, how to be a good person. She has taught her about basic values, she has taught her things she has come to prize, value in her life: family traditions, the solidarity meaning of family. In addition, at the grandmother’s house women have always been highly respected for the following attributes:
Although she [Wilma’s grandmother] was small, only about four feet ten inches tall, she was solidly built. She was also opinionated, outspoken, tough, and very independent. [… She] loved to garden, raise chicken, and pick peaches. […] Grandmother Sitton […] valued hard work (MK 106).
It seems as if Wilma’s grandmother is the matriarch of the family, taking care of the garden, the farm animals, making decisions. Due to her Cherokee upbringing Wilma regards elderly women as very prized people; they are a source of wisdom. Finishing up her autobiographical narrative, Wilma states: “Now, at my home at Mankiller Flats, surrounded by my books, my art, my grandchildren, and the natural world, I realize that my journey has indeed brought me back to the place where I was destined to be” (MK 256). This time, Wilma is the grandmother. Her grandmother has been dead for many years 47. Making peace with herself, closing the circle, Wilma might ask herself only one more question: How will it feel to reach the age her grandmother was when Wilma was a teenager? Clearly, both Wilma’s mother and grandmother have been very important to her. They have, in fact, always been there for her when she needed them, thus creating and maintaining lifetime bonding relationships. She has come to know in her body the story of where she came from, where her mother came from, where her grandmother came from. Through those bonding relationships Wilma has also been initiated into a great mystery: they might be regarded as the beginning of the thread that would tie her into the pattern of the Motherline 48, and tug at her until she begins to understand it, until she decides to write her own story, her autobiography. She has become part of a generation of women who would definitely be finding their own voices, telling their own stories, as Alice Walker in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens voiced it
47The reader finds out that Wilma’s grandmother “[…] was born in 1884 and lived until 1973” (MK 10). 48Lowinsky (231) defines the term as follows, “The Motherline is not a straight line, for it is not about abstract genealogical diagrams; it’s about bodies being born out of bodies.”
170 so beautifully: “Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength – in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own” (Alice Walker quoted in MK 107). Following the beginning of the thread that would tie Mary into the pattern of the Motherline, the reader learns about the day when she is born: “It was late at night and raining hard amid thunder and lightning. We had no electricity then, […]. No bathroom, no tap water, no car. […] Like most Sioux at that time my mother was supposed to give birth at home […]” (CD 8). Undoubtedly, Mary’s mother is a very strong person, considering the circumstances under which she is supposed to give birth to her daughter. Some time later when giving birth to Mary’s sister Sandra, “[…] the doctors […] performed a hysterectomy on my mother, in fact sterilizing her without her permission. […] In the opinion of some people, the fewer Indians there are the better” (CD 9). Being outraged about the unjustifiable incident at the hospital, Mary adequately continues describing the difficulties of motherhood. After Mary’s alcohol-addicted father has left the family, her mother
[…] became our sole financial support. In order to earn a living she went to be trained as a nurse. When she had finished her training the only job she could find was in Pierre, some hundred miles away. There was nobody there to take care of us while she worked, so she had to leave us behind with our grandparents. We missed her at times. We could see her only rarely. […] She did not have many chances to come home because she had no transportation. She could not afford a car and it was impossible to get around without one. So she was not there when we needed her because she had to care for white patients. It was only after I was almost grown-up that I really became acquainted with her (CD 16).
The role of a mother in contemporary society is characterized by both complex and contradictory elements. Motherhood has been idealized and glorified, while at the same time it is devalued as a profession. Images of motherhood in literature, film, psychology, and society have portrayed mothers in idealized, unrealistic ways, instead of as complex, multi-faceted human beings. These images of motherhood that permeate modern society and the individual’s consciousness have shaped women’s personal experiences as mothers, and daughters’ perceptions of their mothers (cf. Howe 45). Rich (cf. Of Woman Born 1) claims that motherhood exists on two levels: the societal institution and the personal experience. Both levels have been influenced by myths and images, which also
171 affect the relationship between mother and daughter. And these images of motherhood prove to be also true for Mary’s mother’s and her daughter’s bonding relationship. A major focus of the images of motherhood in contemporary society is the centrality of the mother role to the woman’s life and identity. A way to view this centrality is to examine the social pressures put on women to have children, to raise them well, and to keep any involvements in their own education, work, or public life secondary to this principal responsibility (cf. Howe 45-46). Mary’s mother is an excellent example to illustrate the predicament that arises from this concept. In order to financially support her family, Mary’s mother trains to become a nurse. After having finished her training, she turns into a ‘working mother’. This term clearly implies that women are not working when they are full-time housewives, and that a woman working outside the home is still primarily a mother. These implications cause Mary’s mother’s predicament: having a work place far from the family’s home, and having no car of her own give rise to neglecting her children, who miss and would need their mother’s attention. The societal view is that children are regarded as the woman’s primary obligation and responsibility, and above all, her ultimate fulfillment. Outside interests become secondary, and are seen as conflicting with the maternal role (cf. Howe 46). In this sense, Mary’s mother might appear to be an awful mother, who fails entirely in her maternal role of caretaker for her children. Disregarding the fact that she has to work because she is a single mother, her children obviously suffer from their mother’s absence. Thus, being employed proves to be limiting opportunities for Mary’ mother. The role of the ‘working mother’ can be seen as incompatible with other activities, such as childrearing. Another societal image of motherhood becomes apparent in a deeper analysis of the housewife and mother role: Children allegedly need the sole care from their mothers in order to develop normally. The reason why this image has been able to survive for so long is persistent male assurance to make society believe that women’s primary place is the home as wife and mother, reaffirming motherhood as the woman’s most important responsibility (cf. Howe 46-47). Mary proves that this image is incorrect when she states that she “[…] was lucky [… having] wound up with our grandparents” (CD 16), who appear to be good, “[…] warm-hearted grandparents […]” (CD 17). While Mary’s mother’s outside activity (having a job as a nurse) has indeed negatively influenced the
172 quality of her mothering, Mary and her siblings find loving caretakers, their grandparents, who “[…] protected us as long as they were able, […]” (CD 27). Therefore, it is clear that the grandmother–granddaughter bonding relationship is, for the young Mary, one of great significance. Under these circumstances it is the grandmother who teaches her granddaughter everything: how to be an Indian person, a Sioux woman, a good human being. She gets Mary acquainted with the Sioux language, Indian plants and herbs:
This my grandmother taught me. […] She also spoke the Sioux language, the real old-style Lakota, not the modern slang we have today. And she knew her herbs, showing us to recognize the different kinds of Indian plants, telling us what each of them was good for. She took us to gather berries and a certain mint for tea. During the winter we took chokeberries, the skin and the branches. We boiled the inside layers and used the tea for various sorts of sicknesses. In the fall she took us to harvest chokeberries and wild grapes (CD 19-20).
While Mary’s childhood is shaped by a strong grandmother-granddaughter bonding relationship, her teenage years seem to lack any kind of bonding relationship. Thus, she runs away from home several times because she
[…] could not share the values my mother lived by. […] My mother was at that time hard to live with. From her point of view, I guess, we were not easy to get along with either. We didn’t have a generation gap, we had a generation Grand Canyon. Mother’s values were Puritan. She was uptight. […] I understood [somewhat] how mom was feeling. She was wrapped up in a different culture altogether. We spoke a different language. Words did not mean to her what the meant to us. I felt sorry for her, but we were hurting each other. […] She is a good, hard-working woman, but she won’t go and find out what is really happening. […] There was that wall of misunderstanding between my mother and us, and I have to admit I did not help in breaking it down (CD 56, 57).
Mary’s teens seem to be years of separation, separation from her family, especially from her mother. The complete absence of a mother-daughter relationship through which ideas and values would have acted in Mary’s teenage years is precisely the intimate grounds of reality and identity: the family, the culture, and her relationship with her mother. Mary’s sense of her self is created through acts of cultural resistance: the most visible and dramatic of which is Mary’s running away from home, from her mother. Mary’s adolescent logic depends upon taking ‘escaping from home and from her mother’ as a shaping force in her life. Running away seems to have the power to do more than merely
173 ease her pain; it constructs the rhythms of her young life, while not having to listen to her mother’s ideas anymore, which she has tried to weave into her daughter’s imagination and into her life. Thus, for a short period of time, the mother has, in fact, been a powerful influence on Mary and her siblings because her opinions are rich with suggestions of shame and regret:
I remember when Barbara was about to have her baby, mom cussed her out. Barb was still in high school and my mother was cursing her, calling her a no-good whore, which really shook my sister up. […] my mother was just terrible, telling Barb that she was not her daughter anymore. My sister lost the baby. […] She could not get over her mother’s attitude. My other sister, Sandra, when she was going to have her eldest boy, Jeff, my mother did the same thing to her, saying, ‘What the hell are you trying to do to me? I can’t hold up my head among my friends!’ She was more concerned about her neighbors’ attitude than about us. Barb told her, ‘Mom, if you don’t want us around, if you are ashamed of your own grandchildren, then, okay, we’ll leave’ (CD 56-57).
On the one hand, both Mary and her sisters find themselves tightly caught in the daughter role of submission, silence and self-abnegation. On the other hand, their mother has contradicted and complicated this situation by teaching her daughters about Puritan values that are supposed to make the teenage girls feel strong and self-confident. By placing herself outside her mother’s values, Mary gains some control against confusing and paralyzing contradictions, and by telling the reader about her mother’s attitudes, Mary, as an adult, manages to establish a bonding relationship between her mother and herself for the first time: “Now that I am a mother myself, I have more understanding of what she went through trying to raise a wild kid like me. Finally we are friends” (CD 262). In running away from home, from her mother, in this act of resistance, Mary challenges her mother’s Puritan values by recreating herself as a strong, courageous, self- confident woman, who is ready to bond with her mother years later. Mary’s own entry into motherhood marks the change of the way she has been thinking about her mother and it redefines Mary’s connection to her mother, emphasizing the female body as the place from which new life, new bonding relationships are created. Thus, a mother- daughter bonding relationship becomes as inevitable as one’s own body. Motherhood here does not provide a previously mute self with the capacity of self-expression; rather, it appears to signal a new phase of the self, an emerging aspect of identity, and achieves a
174 certain degree of promise into the presence. Motherhood transforms Mary’s self and redefines this new attitude towards her mother as an identity of renewal. Especially by having gone through the excruciating pains of childbirth - by the age of thirty-seven Mary has given birth to four children (cf. CD 261) - Mary’s bonding with her mother begins. This process seems to recall God’s cursing of Eve in which he engraves the collocation of reproduction, femaleness, and pain. The images of blood recur throughout both of Mary’s autobiographies and build in the balancing structures of punishment and revenge. In the fifth chapter of Lakota Woman, “Aimlessness”, Mary retells the episodes of her unmarried sisters’ unplanned pregnancies. In the fifth chapter of Ohitika Woman, “Womb Power”, Mary reveals details about her own teenage pregnancy. Through the mother’s moralistic and cruel reaction to Mary’s and her sisters’ pregnancies, the young Sioux learns that at
[…] that time having a child out of wedlock was still looked upon as being very shameful among so-called respectable, churchgoing half-bloods. I was ostracized and felt unwanted at home and so I turned to the movement. The AIM became my family where I found my brothers and sisters. I went to Wounded Knee and Pedro was born (BB 63).
Making Mary feel unwanted at home is done with the purpose of punishing her for getting pregnant “out of wedlock” (BB 63). This reaction might be seen as a warning as well: Mary’s mother is watchful; her threats powerful. Mary, however, takes revenge by joining the militarist Indian movement of the 1960s. Her resistance, as she retells her sisters’ stories and her own, results from the fact of having to write about the unspeakable, the shameful incidents of pregnancy “out of wedlock” (BB 63). She invents a new identity for herself, a new self, and after the birth of her child she is even given a new name for her courage to have her baby delivered at the battle site: “After I had my baby during the siege of Wounded Knee they gave me a special name – Ohitika Win, Brave Woman, […]” (CD 3). It is this pregnancy she has been forbidden to speak about and be proud of. The given name, however, makes Mary’s belief in the power of language explicit. Mary tells the reader her birthing story, in which pain and blood figure prominently. Yet, blood can be interpreted here as a creative metaphor because her bleeding is not passive, not simply suffered as a wound. Instead, the submission to the
175 pain is clearly an act of bravery, emphasizing a body capable of change. The body is no longer speechless; it has become a textual figure created by the author. As a signifying subject, Mary chooses to represent her body as something other than the space of male desire: “I was not interested in dresses, makeup, or perfume, the kinds of things some girls are keen on” (CD 56). She depicts the connection between her body and her self as a problem in representation. Her body, giving birth to her baby boy, is the author’s text. It seems as if Mary has had to experience changes by suffering them in her body. This is why she writes so movingly about her resemblance to Ohitika Win, Brave Woman, who, according to legend, goes into any battle courageously. By participating in the siege and giving birth at the battle site, Mary has internalized conditions she can report in her autobiographies. Ohitika Win, Brave Woman has emerged through Mary’s own retelling with her self in the central role: she has become a new person whose goal is to claim selfhood by identifying the power she possesses: “As I looked at him [her baby boy] I knew that I was entering a new phase of my life and that things would not, could not ever be the same again” (CD 163). Implicitly an act of revenge, this determination places the self at the center. Her autobiographies focus on the self’s balancing act with spirituality, Indianness, and last but not least, with a mother-daughter bonding relationship that creates identity. The author seems to skillfully reverse the double predicament wrapping women’s words and women’s bodies and so finds a space where the subject of autobiography can write and be written. Her autobiographical mode consists of telling stories in order to textualize herself as narrator, and frequently as heroine. Repetition is present, as the self, whose identity has been structured by and through the narratives, writes herself anew. The revenge is read in Mary’s body. Although becoming a signifying subject means living through the double bind of oppression/expression, the authors’ autobiographical accounts suggest the ‘Word’ contains its own rebellion. Both Wilma and Mary have been taught cultural, personal, and spiritual traditions by their mothers and/or grandmothers. Each has been taught how to be a woman, how to be a person, how to have belief and voice it, how to be strong and endure. Distinct traditions have become their identities. Through their mothers and/or grandmothers they have been bonded to families, to female ancestors, and to their culture. Janet, on the other hand, has never experienced any kind of mother-daughter or grandmother-granddaughter
176 bonding relationship. In the introductory pages of her autobiographical essays, Hale states:
The most difficult piece to write was [the chapter] ‘Daughter of Winter,’ which is about my relationship with my mother, whom I loved, whose approval I always wanted but never had, who endured a great deal of pain and suffering in her own life. It was my mother who helped free me to write such a piece, though I know she didn’t realize that was what she was doing (BL xxii).
Signs toward a non-existing mother-daughter relationship are also seen as points on a spectrum between Janet’s submissive behavior and her mother’s greater degree of authority. However, Hale’s mother does not seem to be as much in control of her life as her authority might suggest. While her first marriage to a white man at age sixteen does not work out, because he “[…] had […] no music in his soul. No joy. Nothing good. Nothing” (BL xxiii), she is, in her second marriage to Janet’s father, completely under the power of her alcoholic husband. She is obsessed by her own childhood traumas and the details of her relationship with her first husband. Though she appears to have attained a degree of freedom from her first husband, she is dependent on yet another man, Janet’s father. Hale describes the moments when her mother turns her back on her alcoholic husband, running away with Janet to escape verbal and physical abuse caused by drinking: “We’re runnin’ from Dad and his drinkin’, which Mom had to tolerate for many years when the others [Janet’s sisters] were small” (BL 27). These moments might be seen as acts of pure self-assertion to regain power over her life. Instead of being covered with her husband’s blanket of male privilege, Hale’s mother chooses self-expression over muteness and submission, even if it is hard:
We lived in the rear apartment. It was a housekeeping room, actually, just one small, narrow room with a sink, hot plate, fridge … a sofa that folded down into a bed, a little table and two wooden chairs. There was a tiny separate room with a toilet and shower stall. […] And I didn’t have a coat or scarf, boots or gloves, no winter clothing of any kind. […] I remember being hungry there too. Often our only meal would be boiled barley with a little salt and a pat of margarine (BL 25, 26).
What first attracts Hale’s mother to a life freed from her abusive husband is the greater independence, in contrast to the painful silence as a wife of an alcohol-addicted male
177 chauvinist. She trespasses on the quite unknown realm of men, neither necessarily to be one of them, nor because she particularly identifies with them. In fact, in Hale’s autobiography male relatives hardly appear, and Janet’s great-great-grandfather, Dr. John McLoughlin, is a proud, but harshly judgmental and seemingly arrogant man:
Dr. John McLoughlin […] certainly looked formidable in his portrait, painted when he was in middle age. He was a powerfully built man (he stood six feet four inches tall – a giant of a man in his day – which was 1784-1854) with a stern countenance and dressed in a formal black suit. […] Margaret McLoughlin [his wife] is an old woman in her portrait. [… She …] is not white. She is an Indian. She was a Chippewa, my mother told me. ‘Doctor McLoughlin was not ashamed of her,’ my mother said, as though it were mighty big of him not to have been. […] What was there about her to be ashamed of? […] I resented my great-great- grandfather then, the eminent Dr. John McLoughlin, disliked him even. How dare he have such a condescending attitude towards his own wife? (BL 113)
In participating in the male world without a husband at her side, Hale’s mother wishes not to lose herself, as Margaret McLoughlin might have done, but to express herself; she may not be heard, but at least she will speak. Having freed herself from her husband after having been hidden under his blanket of male privilege for so many years, she anticipates hard times to come. Years later in a conversation with her mother, Janet recalls those tough times:
‘Do you remember how poor we were?’ she asked me. Yes, of course I did. She had lived through many, many hard times, she said. ‘What do you think I thought about?’ she said, a mean, hard edge to her voice that I knew well […]. ‘I thought about where my next dollar was coming from. I thought about how I might get hold of some potatoes, maybe a few onions. That’s what I thought about it!’ She would never discuss anything with me having to do with my early life with her. Unless she wanted to tell me what a horrid child I’d been. That made understanding all she’d done difficult. Very difficult (BL 27).
As this quotation proves, Janet’s mother rejects the dominance of her abusive husband, even though it means living in poverty, not knowing what will happen the next day, whether she will still be able to feed her child and herself. She turns her back on her husband, while at the same time starting to treat Janet in the most awful, humiliating way. Freedom wears away all kinds of humanity. Thus, the lack of humanity experienced
178 during those years, leads the author to question her mother’s explanation for their escape from the violent husband/father:
Dad had been horrible and evil, according to her, a low-down, no-good drunkard who had beaten her time and time again … See this scar … she would say … see this one? […] He was an evil brute, she said. […] My father, the man I knew, did not resemble the violent monster of her horror stories in any way except for the fact that he did drink (but controlled it fairly well through most of my growing up years. [… M]y father, unlike my mother, was a gentle person. He was soft- spoken and generous. He very rarely raised his voice, let alone his hand, in anger, despite that ugly, spiteful mouth of hers that would not stop. And when they got old and arthritis crippled her, he was the one who took care of her needs and did everything he could to make her comfortable … until he died (BL xxv).
Childhood memories give Hale the tools to reconstruct her dysfunctional family life, while at the same time discovering the belief system that has sustained her family for generations. She teacher her own daughter her version of history:
When I was a little girl my family lived in Idaho on our tribe’s reservation. We drew our water from a well. We lit our house with kerosene lamps. We had an outhouse. […] I remember telling my daughter these things when she was little. […] My daughter loved […] the stories I told her about my childhood (BL 165, 167).
The truth, however, is, as the author admits, that her childhood has been very different from what she reveals to her daughter: “I stitched together a happy childhood for myself, an expurgated version I could recall to my little girl. […] And I tried to believe in it. I had had a home. I had a place where I belonged, really belonged. I came from a family that valued me” (BL 169). When her daughter attends college, she has to write a paper about her family history, so Janet decides to tell her daughter the truth about her dysfunctional family: “Now that she has an interest in such things, now that she’s grown, […] I should take her home with me. Show her where I used to live. Tell her what I know of what used to be. Pass down what I know to her” (BL 170). Visiting the reservation with her mother, Janet’s daughter is torn between two incompatible views of her family’s history. In fact, she finds herself excluded from both views. Moreover, there is no way for the young woman to embrace both versions at once, even though her mother keeps on insisting that she “[…] wanted her [daughter] to know what kind of childhood I’d had […]” (BL 176).
179 Visiting her father’s grave, Janet explains: “This is where … my memories begin. It should be different. But it isn’t. […] I’m glad I got away from them and out of all that too” (BL 185). In her opinion, history is theoretical, an idea people invent to feel less lonely. Her reasoning is empirical: if you can’t be loved by your family, and you can’t hear them, then they don’t exist. Therefore, having any kind of relationship with this family is a belief in the hypothetical. Janet’s daughter seems to understand her mother’s logic, and urges her to let go of her past: “Mom, I’m glad you got out of that. Away from them, I mean. […] That’s okay, […]” (BL 185). Nevertheless, Janet keeps telling her daughter
[…] the stories, the history, who we came from: we are of the Salish people, the Coeur d’Alene tribe, and this is our country. The first ancestor whose name we know was a man born in about 1820, and his name was Colemannee, which translates as Dust. The name Campbell comes from Colemannee, and the Campbells are the last remaining family of what was once the powerful, but now little remembered, Turtle clan (BL 186).
When Hale’s daughter wants to know what it was really like to grow up in a tribal community, the mother cannot say, she can only speculate:
Had I been able to choose – if I could have passed for white – I wonder if I would have. Would I have gone far, far away from my beginning … let my heart forget all I was reminded of today: my poor, transient childhood, my mother and sisters, my alcoholic father and what I am connected to through them (and my children, through me): my homeland and history, my roots (BL 186-187).
While her daughter can choose whether or not to be an Indian, Hale has been trapped in her past her entire life. Speculating about what kind of life she might have had as a white person, might be seen as the glimpse of hope that has kept Janet alive and going. Thus, at the end of her journey, Janet has realized that that which lies beyond words is the ultimate realm of truth. She feels encouraged and starts trusting her own perceptions and intuitions, no matter how indescribable. Suddenly the author, having been disenfranchised as an Indian, alienated from her ancestors, tribal life and from her own family, draws strength and joy from her convictions. She experiences a fullness of life that has evaded her unsatisfying past life. She states: “I drive back to Spokane very fast,
180 cutting right through the spectacular scenery, thinking of how I’ll be there again all next academic year. Alone and on my own where I began. It will be good to be here again. I’m not afraid” (BL 187). For Hale this experience of fullness of life may not represent a sacred truth, as it has done for her ancestors, but a personal, spiritual truth. When she makes clear that she is not afraid to be back at the place where she spent her childhood, Hale clearly focuses on an individual dimension that transcends the ban against pronouncing her mother’s humiliating and mean behavior. The simultaneous importance and private nature of this act of articulation, and of writing, marks a transgressive moment. As Smith and Watson put it:
[…f]or the […] multicultural daughter, naming [or articulating] the unspeakable is at once a transgressive act that knowingly seeks to expose and speak the boundaries on which the organization of cultural knowledge depends and a discursive strategy that, while unverifiable, allows a vital ‘making sense’ of her own multiple differences (De/Colonizing the Subject 139).
Putting this phenomenon into words is for Janet a revelation of the most intimate kind. Perhaps this is a device for naming a truth that is otherwise difficult to name in autobiography, which, as a genre, according to Smith and Watson, “has functioned as the keeper of the ‘law of patriarchal identity’ ” (De/Colonizing the Subject 140). This putting into words, however, is these authors’ “ ‘making sense’ of […] multiple differences” (De/Colonizing the Subject 139) by naming or articulating the unspeakable. This articulating of the unspeakable is particularly poignant in the scene in which the author is describing her mother’s death to the reader. What the doctor, her sisters, and their children characterize as morbidity, she sees as ultimate truth, beauty, light:
Mom doesn’t recognize me when I arrive [at the hospital]. She is, of course, very, very ill, trembling in pain, her entire body shaking. Her face is grey. Nothing will save her, the doctor says, but a transfusion will make her remaining time more comfortable. She seems afraid of me. ‘Who are you?’ she asks breathlessly. It’s hard for her to speak. […] She’s in pain. She’s dying. […] I thought telling my mother would make her feel better … as if she felt bad about what she’d always done, as if she thought about it at all. […] Maybe I was also hoping that if I […] told her all about this family-scapegoat stuff I’d learned about, she would have to acknowledge what she’d done. She would be forced to think about it then and express some remorse. But that wasn’t her way. [… Thus, when her mother is] dying, [… Janet’s … ] own spirits are lifted. (BL 72, 73, 75, 76)
181
The author tries to explain these thoughts to the reader in non-religious, emotional terms, recognizing that this one final lesson is her mother’s sole legacy to her: Janet’s mother neither shows guilt nor remorse. Therefore, Hale does not feel the need to stay around for her dying mother. Instead, she takes a plane to L.A. where she starts a speaking tour. Hale seems to feel at ease at last. It is a sensation of privilege and power: a joyful acceptance, and one that extends even to the horrible acknowledgement of life’s ending. For Janet, it is the experience of acceptance that transcends the limitations of expression. When she becomes aware of the joy she feels inside herself, she has finally accepted that the conflicts between her mother and herself would have never been resolved. As she is explaining this experience to the reader, Hale embarks on a journey to explore new shores. The concordance between exploring new shores and her own sense of identity comes into play when Janet ponders that most private, inexpressible knowledge of the self:
I inherited a black-and-white photograph of myself as an infant that was taken at our house in Oceanside, California, before we went back home. […] At home I put it, […], on the table beside my bed. I am very little in this picture. I am sitting […] on a bed, a large pillow behind my back propping me up. I am wearing only a diaper. I have shaggy black hair and little almond-shaped black eyes. I look perfectly happy and healthy. I seem to be laughing. I keep the photograph of myself as a baby on the bedside table where I can look at it whenever I want. […] After a few days I put it away in a trunk, where I keep my own few […] belongings (BL 86-87).
Hale has named her difference, her inexpressible truth, even if only to herself, and even if it is called a photograph of herself as a baby. By putting it in a box, the author clearly signals the end of her old self, ready to embrace her new self. Years later, after her mother’s death, she embarks on another journey in order to explore yet another aspect of her self; she starts investigating her ancestors’ lives. Her focus on names and places is present in all of the following chapters. Though it seems that the author is conscious of the effects of her quest upon her self, she feels free to play with details of her ancestors’ lives in order to attempt to manipulate and question received notions of identity and experience. As a writer of fiction, Hale claims to experiment with the idea of identity (including ethnic identity) as artistic interpretation:
182
In fiction we create the illusion that we can know what someone else knows and feels. […] ‘Suppose you have a character in your story walk down the road and you describe his feelings as he does this. The feel of a light rain on his face, the gravel under his shoes, the sound of a car engine in the distance. See, you really only know those things from your own experience … how the gravel feels beneath your shoes as you walk over it. You give your experience to your characters. That does not mean, however, that they are you (BL 6).
This approach seems to accept the changeable, indefinable nature of subjectivity and to insist upon a language that is as vulnerable as that which it seeks to represent. From an involuntary beginning devoid of any kind of self, Hale moves toward a more Indian-centered identity through learning about her ancestors’ lives, not in a devout sense, but in a spiritual and genealogical sense. After her mother’s death, Janet takes upon herself responsibility for keeping her ancestors’ history alive. In several chronological accounts the author reveals the significance of her relatives’ lives that link her to her origins, not only out of duty, but out of a desire to reconnect with her past. For Hale, studying her past has less to do with her ancestors’ tribal orthodoxy, than with her adherence to an inner truth that was missing in her mother’s rejection of Indian values, influence and language and reliance on the laws of the white man as practiced by her white relatives. Janet’s new self, that inexpressible truth, is her devotion, her spirit, her sacred truth, which in both white America and on the reservation will be what sets her apart and marks her as different. Perhaps it is that loyalty to the facts of difference that Hale takes away from this lesson, and the willingness to try on the various linguistic masks of identity. Before Hale’s liberation from her mother’s grip, the author has focused almost obsessively on what it means to be a neglected, humiliated, verbally and physically abused child. Faced with her mother’s anger and hatred, Janet feels “[…] faint. My hands tremble and I sweat, though it isn’t warm. My head feels light. Or it hurts. I get headaches a lot when I’m little. Nosebleeds too” (BL 30). The use of the present tense to describe childhood memories might have been used to emphasize the girl’s anxiety as if her mother’s abuse is still happening at present day. With her mother’s massive mistreatment come familial conflicts that set the mother-daughter-bonding relationship up for years of anguish and misery, culminating in Janet’s alienation from her family,
183 particularly from her mother, her relatives and her ancestors. Despite Hale’s mother’s long history of child-abuse, the author never mentions that her mother has formally apologized to her daughter, let alone felt remorse. To this assertion, one might reply that perhaps abusive people do not tend to apologize for or regret their misbehavior, because they have gotten used to high levels of abuse that they accept it as the natural order of things. Indeed, Hale’s childhood is shaped by degrading and violent thoughts and acts, much of it ignored at first, and thus unconsciously accepted by the girl. One example of these acts is Janet’s friendliness towards her mother, despite the latter’s increasing acts of abuse, even though the author does admit that at times she “[…] resent[ed]” (BL 37) her mother. Endurance is another character trait that allows Janet to survive her unhappy childhood. She recalls the following incident:
My nephew, my oldest sister’s child, is climbing a tree beside the shed, hanging upside down by his knees from a limb. He’s seven years old. I’m ten. He’s a kid. I’m a woman. He can swing upside down by his knees. I can secretly bleed onto a bulky sanitary pad and endure the pain – worse than a toothache – worse than a sprain or bruise – worse than anything I’d ever experienced before. I stoically watch my nephew in the tree (BL 37-38).
In the face of this new ‘pain’ posed by turning into a woman, Janet is all on her own, enduring bravely. Her mother’s ‘anti-Janet’ sentiments come to a climax, when she packs her daughter’s suitcase and tells her to leave:
[The day before her mother tells her to leave,] she swears at me. Because I left a towel in the bathroom. Because I forgot to hang up my school clothes. Because I’m me. I decide to tell her off. She’s going to burn in purgatory, I tell her, unless she stops the swearing. For once my mother is dumbfounded. She doesn’t know what to say at first. She is very, very angry. [… Next morning], I wake up to the sound of her singing. […] She’s in good spirits, it sounds like. […] When she sees me, she begins folding the clothes … my clothes … and putting them into the open suitcase she has sitting on a chair beside the ironing board. […] ‘Since you’re so dissatisfied with me as your mother, you can leave,’ she tells me, […]. ‘Get the hell out of here.’ She’s smiling. I pick up the suitcase. It isn’t very heavy, but I’m only seven years old (BL 33-34).
After a day of wandering around aimlessly, the little girl has no choice but to return to her mother’s place to “[…] humiliate myself as I never have before. I have to beg my mother to take me back” (BL 34). This day’s toll in Janet’s emotional health is enormous. There
184 is no doubt that she suffers most heavily. Being back with her mother, the abuse does not stop. In fact, it is getting more and more intense, as the author divulges to the reader:
The constant uprooting would have been enough. But then there was also the verbal abuse. I was not normal, she liked to tell me. She mocked the way I walked and talked. She would attack me. Sometimes her attacks came from out of nowhere. Sometimes the smallest thing would set her off (BL 40).
‘Anti-Janet’ sentiments continue to increase steadily during Hale’s childhood, which culminate in the mother’s most repulsive verbal attack against her daughter:
‘And don’t you come to my funeral,’ she said […]. ‘I don’t want you there. Do you hear me? Answer me.’ ‘Yes.’ She’d said it before, and she would say it many, many times more. ‘I don’t want you at my funeral cryin’ around, pretendin’ you were a normal girl who loved her mother. Just stay the hell away!’ (BL 42).
During this time, a growing fear of the mother’s authority over the girl’s personality is certainly developing, which comes to a climax during this monologue of her mother’s. The latter is degrading her, while at the same time destroying any kind of self-esteem that Janet might have. As an adult, the author points out that, in order to understand the impact of her mother’s abuse, the reader must first look at how Hale defines her mother’s behavior:
I can overlook the other things she did … the hitting and slapping, whipping with a stick she would make me go outside and pick myself … things that would be called abuse today don’t seem like much. […] If that was all she had done, maybe I would resent it more than I do. Compared to the verbal abuse, though, and the constant uprooting, the whipping and slapping seems like nothing. Just nothing. It is the easiest to understand and forgive (BL 42).
The memory of this history of both verbal and physical abuse permeating all levels of the girl’s body and thinking grows stronger during Janet’s adolescence. When she reaches adulthood and writes her autobiographical essays, these sentiments about her mother cannot be ignored any longer. As a child and teenager, ignoring them might have been a strategy for survival. For the educated and grown-up Janet, however, ignoring them does not work anymore. First she seems to dismiss the identity of the abused child, then the
185 reader can perceive echoes of the effects that growing up in such an environment had on Hale. Commenting on the weight that such upbringing can have in a person’s life, Hale elaborates:
I’ve tried to be compassionate as I looked back over my troubled childhood … to believe that none of it was her fault. I’ve tried to believe that it wasn’t as bad as I remember. But to look with compassion requires distance and a feeling of safety … that you’ve gone beyond the reach of all that had harmed you way back when (BL 42).
While trying to justify her mother’s behavior, Hale cannot deny the negative influence these abusive deeds have had on her. Still, the reader will see how an Indian female subjectivity continues to surface, despite the erasing effects of its destruction by Hale’s own mother. This tendency appears to suggest the author’s rejection of her outsider status as both a woman and a Native American. As I mentioned earlier, Hale’s mother does not want Janet to attend her funeral. And yet, the author opts to remain at her mother’s death bed. With her sisters’ arrival, however, bad childhood memories are reawakened: “My middle sister and one of her grown daughters arrive with a hearty breakfast for Mom of scrambled eggs and ham in Styrofoam plates. […] I leave. […] I’m not feeling well. I can’t rest here. I can’t sleep. I’m not needed here” (BL 82). Neither being needed nor wanted are two of Hale’s recurring memories about which she frankly writes, emphasizing her outsider childhood and adolescence experience. Hale certainly deals with issues of internal censorship, but still refuses to accept the idea that her mother is not to be blamed. Dedicating 64 pages to childhood and adolescence memories could be taken as a sort of affirmation of Hale’s predicament as a young girl and teenager. Additionally, the author seems to be fully aware of the grave effects of that dark period in her personal history, and her mother’s actions reflect the precautions Janet might have had to take to protect herself from further abuse:
One morning, when I was in the seventh or eighth grade […], just as I was about to make my escape, she woke up and called me back. ‘You get back here right now!’ I went back. ‘Don’t think you can get away from what you are by getting away from me!’ […] ‘You think you can walk out of here … go to that damned dumb school and be somebody else, don’t you. Well, you can’t. You can’t fool
186 anybody, no matter how ‘nice’ you act … no matter how much you smile (and she mocked me here, how I looked smiling and simpering and trying to act nice […]) and put on a show. People will instinctively know what an evil thing you are. They’ll draw away from you in revulsion’ – and here she acted this part out, too, the innocent, confused expression on the faces of the people as they draw away from me – ‘and they’ll say, ‘There’s something about that girl. Something not quite right. It gives you a bad feeling to be around her.’ Nobody will ever want to be around you for long. Nobody decent. Now go. Get the hell out of here. Get the hell out of my sight!’ (BL 60-61)
Hale’s mother’s use of strong, demoralizing language leaves the reader baffled. One can just wonder why a mother would talk to a daughter in such a way. Though Hale recognizes that her mother “[…] was a master, an absolute master, of verbal abuse. Nothing she ever told me that her own mother did or said, and she’d told me plenty during those years when I was her forced confidante, could hold the candle to her repertoire” (BL 61), the author “[…] comforts her [mother] now in her illness and helpless old age as she tells me of the cruelty inflicted upon her that she cannot forget. She sheds a tear or two for herself” (BL 61). Here Hale’s mother seems to be minimizing her own cruel behavior toward her daughter, while blaming Hale’s grandmother for so much of her own suffering. In the same lines, Hale’s mother cannot help but reveals her egotistical personality by shedding “[…] a tear or two for herself” (BL 61). Hale herself strives to avoid language that could be deemed inappropriate by the reader, in order to perhaps avoid being on the same level as her mother. Janet chooses to not give up taking care of her sick mother, even in the face of the most horrible chapters in her personal history. While conscious of her mistreatment as a child and teenager, Hale has shown a strong tendency to downplay her Native American identity, erase the past of her familial history, and embrace the present as a successful writer and lecturer. Nevertheless, in the chapters to come the reader will see that there is less emphasis on Hale’s personal relationship with her abusive mother than the reader has seen in “Daughter of Winter”, and more emphasis on discussing her ancestors’ past from the vantage point of an outsider in regard to Indian identity, ethnicity, and language. This emphasis is undoubtedly apparent in the autobiography studied here, which, like all autobiographical writing, seeks to define and develop an identity.
187 In her treatment of an identity, the author first focuses on her relationship with her mother and later on exploring her ancestors’ past. After her mother’s death, Hale does not attend the funeral, instead she tells her daughter “[…] to represent me and her soldier brother as well as herself. She is the only member of our family who will be able to attend” (BL 83). Being wracked by guilt, Hale decides to “[…] write my mother’s obituary, which [turns out to be …] three times as long as the usual newspaper obituary notice, but is still very concise” (BL 84). Hale is also concerned with the social and familial implications of her absence from the funeral, and her focus once again shifts back to her childhood: “She [Hale’s mother] always told me I wouldn’t be welcome at her funeral. ‘Just stay away!’ That was meant to hurt me, to make me reform and not cause her more grief. Did she ever imagine I might not be there?” (BL 85) Her focus on the past is heightened by guilt and anxiety for not being present at the funeral because she is “[…] in Iowa when they bury her” (BL 85). Clearly, identification with childhood memories is rendered with discomfort and fear, touched with guilt – the fear of being excluded from her own family by virtue of her dysfunctional relationship to her mother. Similarly, the fact that there has never been a mother-daughter bonding relationship, one of the aspects of Hale’s alienation, is fundamentally linked to issues of Indianness and ethnic identity. Rather than a quest for personal or spiritual truth, her mother’s belief in the white man’s Catholic religion is represented as simply further evidence of an unacceptable ethnicity, which must be erased in order for Hale to continue her quest for identity. Hale’s mother’s identity is evidenced through linguistic and social markers, particularly through identification with her white relatives. Revealing intimate details of the relationship to her mother, discomfort and fear inspired by failure to please her mother surface in the form of guilt. Janet writes: “It’s all over by the time I arrive in New Mexico. Oddly this is the most difficult time. I held up as she lay dying, and when she died, and in those days before her funeral. But now that it’s all over, I feel like I’m starting to come apart” (BL 85). These lines share a discouraging tone that, as the reader shall see, serves a defensive function. Nevertheless, Hale directs the discouragement at herself or directly at family members, exposing misunderstandings that have originated in Hale’s non-existing mother-daughter relationship.
188 The representation of a non-existing mother-daughter relationship is essential in understanding the conflicted subjectivity of the adolescent Hale, who experiences the effects of her debased position within her own family as mockery. While there undoubtedly exist good relationships with her other children, Hale’s mother continues ridiculing Janet, even in the most painful situation yet:
[…] I began to menstruate in August of the year I was ten. My childhood was over, that is, the relatively carefree time before I had to concern myself with bras and Kotex and monthly killer cramps that everyone would tell me were nothing. ‘You’re a woman now,’ my mother told me. I hated it when she held my new woman status over my head: ‘What kind of woman are you?’ (on my lack of neatness, as though I were a disgrace to all women). I didn’t ask to be a woman. So what if I were a failure? (BL 36)
At the age of ten when Janet turns into a woman, the mother attempts to convince her daughter of a female identity, which is part of any woman’s life, while at the same time degrading and mocking her by wondering why her daughter causes so much commotion about her “new woman status” (BL 36). Hale’s mocking mother seems to be an exploration of the way how Janet has been suffering and why she has been becoming more and more alienated from womanhood. “Daughter of Winter” starts with Hale’s voice, going back to her childhood, and ends with her mother’s death, which the author describes as follows: “My mom is gone. In the end there are no resolutions. Only an end” (BL 86). While longing for an affectionate mother-daughter bonding relationship all life long, it seems important to mention that Janet’s alienation from both her mother and her family (ancestors) is one of the central aspects of her identity. It is an aspect, indeed, from which the author is so alienated that it also affects the way she relates to the world as a woman. Thus, in her autobiographical essays, issues of gender and ethnic identity are unavoidably linked in a double negation of citizenship. Having been raised on the reservation and later having frequently moved, Hale has never been able to identify with either the white man’s or the tribal world. However, if one examines the effects of a Native American identity, and the ways in which femaleness are present in her text, one will see that these elements can, in fact, be used to reconstruct and strengthen a hybrid identity overwhelmed by negation on several sides. After having learned more about her ancestors and having brought her own daughter to the reservation, Hale compares her
189 newly-discovered hybrid identity to the life of an FBI agent’s who stars in a new film about present-day Indians: “An FBI agent who is a quarter-blood Indian ashamed of his roots has to go back to the reservation his father came from to investigate a case. On the rez, he discovers Who He Is and learns to take pride in His People” (BL 187). Just like the FBI agent’s story this relentless native daughter’s odyssey has certainly brought Hale closer to her ancestors, has deepened her understanding of her people, and yet Hale reveals that “I don’t even know what it’s like to a have a place in my own tribal community, […]” (BL 186). Just as Hale has never been part of a tribal community, she has never had a place in her mother’s heart either, and she has never been able to experience a caring mother-daughter bonding relationship. For Hale her mother’s absence means the absence of an authority capable of confirming her memories and giving her a history. Without this link to the past, she seemingly lacks feeling the temporal rhythm capable of projecting the future which seems to have been permanently interrupted. She does not want simply the ‘past’, her desire is for the specific, permanent absence created by the death of her mother. Thus, she also desires not ‘a’ future, but ‘the’ future rightly intended at her birth and forever denied, partly because of her mother’s abusive behavior. Hale’s grief implies that her self-development has always been pessimistic, determined by the absence against which she projects her mother’s presence. Detached from the generational continuity of family, ancestry, and memory, Hale turns to her autobiographical essays for consolation, “[…] for therapeutic […] reasons” (BL 5), and for self-invention. Underlying her growing belief in the past is the notion that the self develops within a chronological structure which she, in turn, must replace with a narrative structure. Thus, nostalgia is built into Hale’s quest for the past, as it provides the continuity which the chaos of life challenges. Deficiency in Hale is displaced by autobiography’s compensation for the loss; indeed, Janet’s sense of loss generates an autobiographical mode dependent upon the closeness of others. Therefore, her mother’s death is seen as an end without any resolution. These thoughts might suggest that her struggle to maintain a sense of identity will continue. Moreover, Hale’s autobiographical essays might be understood as penetrating the various discourses in which the self is inscribed as the necessary condition for reading such levels as productive of both anxiety and liberation. Her conception of the relationship between herself and her relatives,
190 particularly her mother, depends on the sense that one can be born into consecutive states of consciousness by capturing and fighting through internal and external pressures, and to draw strength from the struggle. The external factors wear the names of patriarchy and history and represent the material conditions which seemingly work against change. Because these conditions are internalized through conditioning in one’s childhood, they are experienced as natural. Self-revision for Hale is a gradual process due to the demands of the medium in which she enacts change – language. While never having known a mother-daughter bonding relationship, Hale eventually identifies with history, her ancestors’ past, and finds in autobiographical writing the way to read her culture, her personal past, and to fashion a future. Hale has changed from the extremely promising writer of fiction to a conscious autobiographer whose awareness has proven capable of self-revision. ‘Change’ in Hale’s character, therefore, describes the area of reciprocity in which one’s history and one’s self may adjust each other as tradition and identity through the dynamic of ancestral nostalgia and self-restoration. The author, however, seems to maintain the sense of danger change always contains. In investigating her past, the powers of perception enable Hale to reconstruct the most significant moments in her past, and thereby, she starts to live as enthusiastically as her powers of perception make possible. Her odyssey, therefore, might be seen as snapshots with private and public memory as the camera. It marks a threshold, a moment in which that which most forcefully signals Janet’s entrapment also offers a way out. Hale’s desire to change gradually becomes obvious as she reveals her ancestors’ past. She works strongly from autobiography as an instrument of personal resolve and clarification which allows her to ‘see through’ both family and ancestral life, to blast away the illusions which cover them, and to transform their secrecies into the source for a new beginning, which provides an occasion for Hale to create a new identity, a new self. However, her desire, her need, and her capacity to change are not always simply working in the autobiographical essays to ready the scene for change. Instead, she describes the necessity for change with the inadequacy of the tools – words, selves, cultures – to effect change, in fact, with almost hostility of those elements to her task. The pressures intervening with change, the symbols of change set in a world which resists them, figure in the representations of change. The possibility of transformation is balanced against the simultaneous necessity
191 and unfeasibility of carrying it out, the impossibility of providing, in many incidents, what the task requires. In her last autobiographical essay “Dust to Dust” Hale is much more hopeful, thus empowering the reader about the need for change and the possibility of change. She claims: “I drive back to Spokane very fast, […] thinking of how I’ll be there again all next academic year. Alone and on my own where I began. It will be good to be here again. I’m not afraid [of any change]” (BL 187). Adjustment, the act of looking ahead, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering the world from a new direction is for Hale more than a chapter in her history: it is an act of survival. Until she has understood the assumptions in which she is ‘soaked’ she cannot know herself. And this drive to self- knowledge is, for Hale, more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self- destructiveness of a world that was dominated by her cruel, evil mother. Her commitment to language as her medium of struggle is signaled in the claim that revision is an act of rereading based on the assumption that language inscribes people in history and culture. Hale succeeds in reading the past like a text, thus writing a new chapter in history. Eventually, the future is seen to go beyond the past when the past is viewed in its limitations. Therefore, it is crucial that Hale focuses on the self-destructiveness of a world that was dominated by her cruel, evil mother whose memories seem to be flourishing as a concept despite the fact that the mother’s demise happened many years ago. The conflicted nature of Janet’s self – part enemy to the cause, part ally, part co- conspirator with history, problematizes and deepens throughout her autobiographical essays. For Hale, this genre, indeed, reveals what is unexplainable, what is impossible to contain, in her fictional work.
7.3.4 Theme Four: Racial Discrimination
Analyzing the authors’ lived experiences from the angle of racism, it becomes obvious that their definitions of racism bring about descriptions of anger, anxiety, hatred, and separateness. Although the magnitude and consequences of racist experiences vary with each autobiographer, the stories they depict are encounters of rejection, of constantly being reminded that their race is unacceptable.
192 Mankiller’s autobiography demonstrates a number of incidents of racial discrimination. Revealing her ancestors’ suffering, the author first gives a detailed description of Jefferson’s initial thoughts on Indians: “I would never cease pursuing them while one of them remained on this side of the Mississippi … [The Indians] are a useless, expensive, ungovernable ally” (MK 52). Wilma explains that in the early nineteenth century people applied the concept of equality only to white men. Neither white women nor any person of color, let alone Native Americans were included in this concept. As far as Jefferson’s thoughts on Indians are concerned, he also believed that nature was something to be conquered, and all Indians were supposed to be put into one group to be civilized (cf. MK 53). During his presidential administration from 1801 to 1809 the Indian policies designed in the late 1700s and early nineteenth century were harshly criticized by the President due to their failures. He, in fact, believed that “the proofs of genius given by the Indians of North America, place them on a level with whites on the same uncultivated state …. I believe the Indian to be in body and mind equal to the white man” (MK 53). This statement seems to imply the existence of an ideal of equality that has never existed though. Although Jefferson distances himself from earlier Indian policies, and looked at the Indian much as the eighteenth century philosophers did, he still believed that “[…] it was in the best interest of native people for them to take on the characteristics and qualities of the whites. [… In addition], Jefferson was a strong proponent of bringing ‘civilization’ to Indians” (MK 53). To realize this goal, “he even went so far as to encourage intermarriage as a final solution to the ‘Indian problem’. [… For him] assimilation was the only moral path to follow” (MK 54). Since traditional Cherokee identity is bestowed through maternal lineage, Mankiller explains that it was impossible for her ancestors to suddenly adopt an entirely different way of life. So by 1802 Jefferson abandoned any hope of a solution to the ‘Indian problem’ (cf. MK 54, 55). Therefore, he designed some new theories on how to solve the ‘Indian problem’. One of which was his theory on Indian removal: The Cherokees had to leave their homelands east of the Mississippi to settle down west of it. White settlers, however, kept on pushing them west, so they finally settled in present Arkansas (cf. MK 57). The racism inherent in these policies and theories can be interpreted as one race (the white race) thinking they are superior and better than any other race. By realizing that the Cherokees would not
193 adjust to the white man’s lifestyle, they were kept at a lower level and not allowed to succeed. Mankiller seems to have felt differing degrees of racism, all of which embodied negative connotations. One incident of racial discrimination occurs when Wilma is still a little girl:
I recall an incident that drove home for me the concept of racial bias. Soon after we moved to California, a woman came up to my mother and told her straight out that we were all ‘nigger children’. Then she called my mother a ‘nigger lover’. The woman said those things because of my father’s dark complexion. Mother was outraged by that repulsive word of contempt. Prompted by blind hatred and ignorance, it was intended to inflict pain. It must have stung like a hard slap on the face. My soft-spoken mother was so distraught by such a blatant display of malice that she jumped the woman […] (MK 99).
Here racism is defined as representing misinformation, hatred, ignorance and prejudice. In fact, it represents all negative aspects of humanity. Thus, in this incident of racial discrimination, Wilma’s mother clearly feels all these destructive manifestations of racism, is completely upset by them so that she physically attacks the woman. By the 1960s Wilma has encountered many more incidents of racial discrimination, involving Native Americans, but also African Americans, and Hispanics, who
[…] were making their presence known. For too many years, they had been acquiescent, fully resigned to their place in the barrios and the growing field. But they also knew wholesale poverty and prejudice. They felt the frustration of sending generation after generation to public schools where their language and history were shunned. The Hispanics also desired change. They did not want to wait anymore (MK 154).
At the same time black militants in San Francisco and around the U.S. become politically active. One of those groups is the Black Panther Party, which is “[…] the first activist group I [Wilma] truly identified with […]. They talked about problems I was familiar with. I had never seen any minority stand up to police, judges, and other white people” (MK 154), to fight racism, among other issues. As racial discrimination continues throughout the 1960s, Wilma comes to the conclusion that
194 […] whites […] could not be trusted. We [the Cherokee] would always remember the long line of treaties and promises. Most were as worthless as the politicians who drafted them. They were only pieces of paper filled with empty words as hypocritical as most of the white men’s promises (MK 166).
Knowing that the white man can never be trusted, it seems obvious that he will also continue discriminating against the Native American. And this is true for Wilma’s own understanding, too. Racism has continued to exist in her and her tribe’s experiences. However, there is reason for hope: The reader gets to know one of Redbird Smith’s, a Cherokee Chief’s, speeches. Following there are some extracts from it:
After my selection as a Chief, I awakened to the grave and great responsibilities of a leader of men. I looked about and saw that I had led my people down a long steep mountain side, now it was my duty to turn and lead them back upward and save them. […] My greatest ambition has always been to think right and do right. […] We are endowed with intelligence, we are industrious, we are loyal, and we are spiritual, but we are overlooking the particular Cherokee mission on earth, for no man nor race is endowed with these qualifications without a designed purpose. Work and training is the solution of my following. […] It is so simple and yet we have to continually remind our people of this. Our Mixed-bloods should not be overlooked in this program of racial awakening. Our pride in our ancestral heritage is our great incentive for handing something worthwhile to our posterity. It is this pride in ancestry that makes men strong and loyal to their principle in life. It is the same pride that makes men give up all for their government (Redbird Smith quoted in MK 170).
Quoting parts of a speech given by Redbird Smith, who in the early twentieth century wished to reawaken a racial pride that would withstand racial discrimination and prejudice, Wilma, however, knows that racism will always be around. It appears to be something constant and is carried forth primarily by white people. There might also always be covert racism that exists in society where one would least expect to encounter it. Wilma has, indeed, encountered it at every corner, at every level, and in almost every aspect of life. Nevertheless, Smith’s speech has taught the author a great deal about the importance of focusing on her ancestors’ racial pride that has allowed the Cherokee to survive in triumph. Hale recounts her scars of racism as a little girl. Whenever her mother takes her along to her sisters’ house, Janet’s father “[…] wasn’t overly subtle when it came to what he thought of my mother’s sisters” (BL 115). He tells his daughter: “I want you to watch
195 your aunts and listen to them. Observe them very carefully. You know why? Because the way those women are … that’s just exactly the way women should not be” (BL 116). The girl does as she is told and closely observes her aunts:
They were loud and aggressive and argumentative. […] They smoked and drank. They swore and said ‘shit’ a lot. They made stupid, snide remarks about Indians, too, whenever they could. For instance, there was the time one of my aunts had seen a man looking into a neighbor’s window. She went out in the dark and fired her little handgun […] into the sky and scared the Peeping Tom away. Though it was very dark, my aunt said she could tell the peeper was an Indian because he had an Indian shuffle. […] So my aunts smoked, drank, swore and were vulgar, not to mention racist (BL 116).
It is the author’s maternal family – her white aunts – who behave in very disrespectful, racist ways. Most of the bitterness and horror to be found in incidents, such as the one just quoted, is implicitly directed at the aunts’ Indian relatives charged with informally demeaning them because they are full- or mixed-bloods. They are presented as flawed and failed, inauthentic ‘whites’, especially in comparison to the more idealized white side of the family. By attacking their Indian relatives, the aunts comment on the latters’ inferior role in society. Thus, a racist ideology is fostered by these women. They might be the ‘carriers’ of ‘white’ identity, however, the reader will see that the maternal aunts in Janet’s family fail entirely to live up to the responsibility of passing on the white man’s tradition. Instead, they pass on racism. In experiencing the presentation of racist attitudes and values in her maternal female relatives, whom she often visits as a child, Hale is exploring the implications of and possibilities for her own subjectivity. The role of racial discrimination in Hale’s autobiographical essays is perhaps best exemplified by the author’s powerful description of Spokane and its inhabitants whose use of racist language has affected Hale as long as she can remember. Even as an adult, it “had the power to cut like a knife” (BL 119). Encountering racism not only shows Hale’s endurance, but also the author’s capability to withstand pain. Her mother’s experience with racism is one of the dominant life-lesson she passes on to her daughter:
But there’s a word that was used to describe an Indian, a ‘dirty,’ denigrating word, sort of like nigger. The word is Siwash. […] That was what my mother’s first husband called her, she told me when I was older. Despite her beauty.
196 Despite her white looks. Nobody could tell she wasn’t white if they didn’t know her. […] ‘Squaw,’ my mother’s first husband would call her when he felt mean, which was a lot of the time. ‘Stupid Siwash squaw. That’s all you are, you know. Just a Siwash squaw’ (BL 119).
No matter how white one looks, if there is racism around, minorities will be discriminated against. So Hale has to admit that her mother “[…] had to suffer racial slurs, too, as I had when I was growing up” (BL 119). Calling his wife, Hale’s mother, “Siwash squaw” (BL 119) is not only cruel but also echoes the pervasiveness of racism in the white people’s imagination. This scene, which distills a poisonous concoction of racism that would be disturbing for anyone, exemplifies family tragedy in order to survive and supercede it. Of course, the strategy of remembering the past to survive incidents of racism seems to be by no means proof of the presence of a strong Native American identity in Hale’s autobiographical essays. It is true, however, that her mother’s mixed-blood background is singled out for demonstrating racist behavior in the text in a way that, at last, displays a certain level of conflict and discomfort with an inherited identity. Hale’s mother seems confused about how to relate to her outsider status since by identifying “[…] very strongly with her Irishness” (BL 120) she is claiming it as her own when at the same moment she seems to be distancing herself from that identity displaying traditional full-blood Indian ways. Hale’s aunts, however, are especially singled out as the representatives of what the author sees as the most unpleasant aspect of whiteness, racism, and hence are Hale’s focus of the most hurtful instances of racism. The aunts have been raised as whites, and in Hale’s autobiography this white influence is of such strong presence that all the negative aspects of white, male society are portrayed through the racist aunts’ behavior. Since it is clear that their attitude towards Native Americans is based on prejudices, the aunts’ relation to their Indian relatives is revealed as hollow and hypocritical, even though “[…] they were kind to their [mixed-blood] mother. They took care of her for many, many years. […] They said she’d worked so hard when they were children. She had made so many sacrifices for them” (BL 116, 117). The often mean-spirited racist remarks that are heightened by the author’s aunts at members of their own family at times present stereotypical images of white identity, as in the example given earlier of one of the aunt’s conviction that the peeping Tom must have
197 been an Indian. When Hale’s mother’s association with the Irish community is described, the author does not criticize her mother for her attempts to identify with the white man’s culture:
Her [Hale’s mother’s] happiest childhood memories were staying with them [her Irish grandparents] on their farm. Mom knew all about County Clare, where they had come from, and she could speak with an Irish brogue, a little, every Saint Patrick’s Day (BL 120).
In short, both Hale and her mother seem to reject a superficial white racist identity, and not white people in particular. Many of Janet’s and Mary’s first racial experiences happen at school. Janet recalls being treated differently there, at first not understanding why until she learns about racism:
When I was six or seven years old, at Christ the King Elementary School in Omak, Washington, […]. I was the only Indian kid at Christ the King. […] At recess the nuns organized the kids in hand-holding games […]. Nobody would hold my hand. They refused to touch my brown Indian hands. Even when the nuns tried to make them (BL 139).
Being in grade school, people begin to dislike her, they do not want to hold her hand, and they ignore her. Hale, at that point in her life, is not familiar with the terms racism, prejudice, bias or discrimination. She, however, feels that the other children treat her differently because of her dark skin. Thus, the little girl repeatedly soaks her hands in bleach (cf. BL 140). If Hale’s attempt to bleach her hands is seen as a strategy for dealing with the pain caused by racial discrimination, it can also be seen as an attempt at self- definition: a self-definition that is constructed against identification with her Indian ancestry, while being inextricably linked to that people through bloodlines. The little girl’s conflicting urges to identify herself as white while knowing that she is, in fact, a mixed-blooded Indian, can be illustrated in the conflicts that arise in her family’s conception of both white and Indian identity. If Hale’s mother’s family is a concoction of white and mixed-blood ancestry, her father’s side represents the full-blooded family background. Because of her father’s abusive behavior that leads the wife and her daughter to keep on running away from him, his family history is barely known. Janet,
198 however, learns some details about her father’s first wife who he catches with a white lover:
What happened was she had a lover with whom she intended to run away. Dad had gone away on a job and was not expected back for days, but he came home early, and there they were: his wife and her lover getting ready to leave, packing the lover’s car […]. Dad had his hunting rifle with him. He probably carried it in case he spotted some game, a deer or maybe an elk, as he drove along the road. He took that rifle and shot and killed the man who would run off with his wife. He had to go to prison, but for only a year […] (BL 20).
Even though her father’s seemingly racist deed has put him into prison, it is Hale’s racist maternal line that constantly ridicules Janet’s Native American heritage. Her paternal family, on the other hand, does represent a lost, dignified Native American identity. Janet recalls that for her full-blooded father
[… t]he church […] was an instrument of assimilation, an authority sponsored and sanctioned by the government whose primary purpose was to ‘civilize’ the Indian and make him as much like a white man as possible. My father would recall, for instance, being beaten by a priest at mission school for speaking his own language (BL 150-151).
Perhaps this conflict in Hale’s childhood between the idealized Indian past represented by her father’s family and the degrading, racist whites and mixed-bloods of her mother’s family leaves Hale, as an adult, alienated from her Indian ancestry. Mary’s first racial experiences also happen at school. These experiences with racism create feelings of separateness. She tells the reader:
When I was in third grade some relative took me to Pine Ridge and I went into a store. It was not very big, a small country grocery. One of my teachers was inside. I went right to the vegetable and fruit bins where I saw oranges […]. I sure wanted one of them. I picked the biggest one. An uncle had given me a nickel to go on a wild spree with and I wanted to use it paying for the orange. [… However, a nickel wasn’t enough, so the storeowner made her] put that damned orange back. Next to me, the wasicun teacher saw me do it and made a face saying out loud, so that everyone in the store could hear it: ‘Why can’t those dirty Indians keep their hands off this food? I was going to buy some oranges, but they had their dirty hands on them and now I must try to find some oranges elsewhere. How disgusting!’ (CD 20-21).
199 Even though Mary is too young to understand the concept of racism, this incident leaves her confused and gives her a feeling of separateness, of being different from the white teacher. Mary’s grandmother keeps on telling her granddaughter: “Whatever you do, don’t go into white people’s homes. ‘Cause when they come into our homes they make fun of us, […]” (CD 21). One day the little girl makes friends with a white girl, so she believes:
[The white girl …] said, ‘Come to my house.’ I answered, ‘No, I ain’t supposed to go to nobody’s house.’ She said, ‘My ma ain’t home. […] Just come!’ […] The white girl had many toys, dolls, a dollhouse. […] Suddenly I heard the door banging, banging, banging. It was the little girl’s mother and she was yelling, ‘You open this door! You got some nerve coming into my home. You locked me out.’ She was screaming and I was shaking. I did not know what to do. […] She went into the hallway and got a big, thick leather belt. […] I ran as fast as I could back to my grandmother’s house. I told her, ‘That white woman is going to whip me’ (CD 21-22).
This conflict about what it means to be discriminated against by whites solely because of the color of one’s skin is brought to the forefront when the white woman shows up at Mary’s grandmother’s house: “Then she [Mary’s grandmother] went out standing in the doorway and told that woman, ‘You goddam white trash, you coming any closer and I’ll chop your ears off.’ I never saw anybody run as fast as did that white lady” (CD 22). The grandmother clearly confronts the white woman’s internalized racism, instead of being afraid of her. She calls the white woman ‘trash’, teaching her granddaughter an example of pride in their Sioux identity set by their full-blooded ancestors. The grandmother’s ability to fight racism and to be proud of her Sioux background goes on to have larger implications for the author’s self-image, so gradually the little Sioux girl begins to understand the implications of racial discrimination:
In South Dakota white kids learn to be racists almost before they learn to walk. When I was about seven or eight years old, I fought with the school principal’s daughter. We were in the playground. She was hanging on the monkey bar saying, ‘Come on, monkey, this thing is for you.’ She also told me that I smelled and looked like an Indian (CD 22).
Mary has encountered several incidents of racism in its varied forms, and they “[…] left me afraid of white people, […]” (CD 27). Later, when she has to attend boarding school,
200 Mary gets exposed to racial discrimination on a daily basis, which seems to complicate her relationship toward white people even more:
Beating was the common punishment for not doing one’s homework, or for being late to school. It had such a bad effect upon me that I hated and mistrusted every white person on sight, because I met only one kind. […] Racism breeds racism in reverse (CD 34).
It seems obvious that the young Sioux girl rejects white people because they treat her badly, discriminating against her, and contrasts them to her Indian relatives’ kindness that she has been exposed to while growing up. She knows the Sioux culture in a way it is not possible for her to know the white man’s way of life, and therefore, she does not seek out the latter as a replacement identity, as many native children have done in boarding schools. In reference to the quote cited above, it might be pointed out that what draws Mary to her Sioux heritage is precisely its familiarity, as well as its clarity. Certainly, racism does not end with Mary’s childhood years. As a young woman,
[d]uring my barhopping days I went into a Rapid City saloon for a beer. Among Sioux people, Rapid City has a reputation for being the most racist town in the whole country as far as Indians are concerned. In the old days many South Dakota saloons had a sign over the door reading NO INDIANS AND DOGS ALLOWED! I sat down next to an old honky lady. Actually she looked about thirty, but when you are seventeen that seems old. She gave me a dirt look, moving to another stool away from me, saying, ‘Goddam, dirt Injun. You get out into the streets and the gutter where you belong.’ […] ‘You heard me. This place ain’t for Indians. Dammit, isn’t there a place left where a white man (I remember, she actually said ‘man’) can drink in peace without having to put up with you people (CD 48-49).
When living on the reservation, Mary never thinks about being different. However, in the same way there has been separateness in boarding school, Mary experiences a definite separateness in the white man’s system later on in her life. The white racist woman is far from being subtle, causing uncontrollable anger, so that Mary “[…] felt the blood pounding in my head. In front of me where I was sitting was a glass ashtray. I broke it on the counter and cut her face with the jagged edge. In my insane drunken rage I felt good doing it. Possibly I would have felt good even had I been sober” (CD 49). Mary turns toward violence, not in search of revenge, but in a denial of the white man’s efforts to
201 impose his lifestyle upon her, all those efforts that have made her feel different and separate. She certainly does not want to go unnoticed. Rather, she wants to be singled out as an individual, or more importantly, as a Sioux. This attitude appears to represent a position from which it is possible to deal with racial discrimination while longing for contact with the authenticity of one’s own culture. It is a position that is definitely self- protective. Mary’s reaction creates a distinct separation from the white man’s beliefs, in other words, she ultimately rejects white culture. It seems that the young Sioux woman can finally triumph because she has rejected the ideology of misery that has created so many of her long dark nights in boarding school. This is the very process the reader can identify, as he follows Mary through her adolescence and adulthood: she definitely separates herself from the white man’s culture, and, with her marriage to a traditional full-blooded Sioux she is able to reestablish bonds of closeness with her Sioux background. As a result, the reader realizes how this connectedness to her roots causes a strong sense of identity that prevents her identification with the white man’s world. Indeed, one can see this triumph in another incident of racial discrimination that happens a few years later when Mary lives in Seattle:
[…] I went with my Blackfoot girl friend Bonnie to a little bar […]. We wanted to buy booze for a Christmas and New Year’s party. [… Mary’s friend looked for a phone booth to call her relatives] when a drunk white guy tried to force his way in, yelling at Bonnie to get out, that he wanted to use the phone, saying, ‘What’s so important for an Indian to make a phone call? I bet you don’t even know how to dial. Use a tom-tom!’ […] He had a beer bottle and he busted it on her head and face. She staggered out of the booth dripping blood. […] I rushed to her aid and we tried to fight him, […]. He hit her again, knocking her sprawling into the gutter. […] I yelled for the cops, but the white winos hid that guy and the police made no effort to find him. […] One white lady pushed me aside, shouting, ‘Get out of the way, I’m trained as a nurse, what you’re doing is all wrong. I told her, ‘Don’t push me. This is my friend.’ But she still insisted: ‘Get out of the way. Can you believe that? Those Indians are really something!’ I threw her against the car and she fell on her ass. The cops promptly arrested me (CD 50-51).
While the audacious Sioux woman who tries to help her Indian friend dominates the scene, and apparently, really fights the drunk, white man, she cannot escape the implications of being Indian in a society where Indian is ‘other’. Mary continues: “If you are an Indian woman, especially in a ghetto, you have to fight all the time against brutalization and sexual advances” (CD 51). Here the author hints at the difficult situation
202 of being Indian and female. Belonging to both stigmatized categories blocks Mary’s full participation in white society, leaving her exposed to even more incidents of racial discrimination. On the one hand, the author claims that “[b]y nature I am not a violent person” (CD 51). On the other hand, her thoughts and feelings about violence are closely bound up in her feelings about revenge: “When I get mad, I start shaking, my blood starts to heat up. [… ] if I see an Indian sister being abused, harassed, getting beaten or raped, I have to take up for her. Once I am in the middle of a fight, […] I enjoy it” (CD 51). The reader can clearly see how the white man’s racism influences her in a negative way. It is as though Mary has comprehended that through her whole lifetime there has always been an explicit separateness, which intensifies when being around white people as the incident in the bar proves when the police “made no effort to find” (CD 50) the racist white man. The Sioux woman can see the difference between the value of a white man and an Indian woman and the attitude of the police’s expectations, which are not subtle at all, that as Native Americans, one does not deserve being helped. It seems important to note that to understand the present, one must have some understanding of the past. The historical atmosphere of American Indian life in the Unites States must be acknowledged before racism towards Indians can be completely understood. The acquisition of wealth and power were goals in the conquest and colonization of the peoples of the New World. McNickle (46) outlines the realities of that time and
[…] the surge for strategies of colonial exploitation and profit. [… Competition for raw materials …] allowed no latitude for concessions to human principles. Any political power that was not prepared to override scruple where native people were concerned might find itself out of the race for preeminence in the market.
Moreover, Aristotle’s doctrine of “natural slavery” (Hanke 13) outlined a life of servitude for “one part of mankind” (Hanke 13) as set aside by nature to “masters born for a life of virtue, free of manual labor” (Hanke 13). This doctrine was clearly adhered to in the conquest of Native peoples and both slavery and racism became the first European policies introduced in the New World (cf. Hanke 13 ff.). The displacement of Indian tribes from their homelands in the name of progress was racially-motivated. From 1815 to 1850, the American Indian was rejected by white society as the U.S. shaped policies
203 which “reflected a belief in the racial inferiority and expendability of Indians, Mexicans, and other inferior races” (Horseman 190) and reflected a world dominated by a “superior American Anglo-Saxon race” (Horseman 190). By 1830, the assimilated Native American was deemed an improbability by political leaders as well as the American public. By 1850, American expansionism meant the extinction of inferior races that lacked the ability to transform their way of life. The stress of survival in the face of this violence brought by the white man in his goal, first to eliminate an entire people, and later to mold them into the likeness of himself, has cost Native Americans greatly (cf. Horseman 190 ff.). More than ever, continual racism has been a function of genocide and oppression by the dominant white society. It is obvious that it can be blamed as one of the culprits in the breakdown of traditional ways, a breakdown that began with the white man’s domination. It is particularly the Native American woman who faces powerful elements, such as racism, but also poverty and unemployment in her environment that maintain a heightened vulnerability and often contribute to alcoholism and binge drinking. Throughout the author’s autobiographical accounts the reader learns that Mary’s substance abuse, which in turn leads to violent behavior when encountering racism, is a means of competing in a non-Indian, brutal environment. The Sioux woman faces the never-ending domination and racism by non-Indians and describes the dilemma of her people as follows:
If you are an Indian woman, especially in the ghetto, you have to fight all the time against brutalization and sexual advances […]. Many of these brawls are connected with drinking, but many occur just because you are an Indian […]. I have often thought that given an extreme situation, I’d have it in me to kill, if that was the only way. I think if one gets into an ‘either me or you’ situation, that feeling is instinctive. The average white person seldom gets into such a corner, but that corner is where the Indian lives, whether he wants to or not (CD 51).
Racism definitely breeds despair, and despair among Native American tribes has produced alcoholism, which often leads to violent behavior in encounters with whites. Thus, the impact of racist patterns on Mary’s life is profound. From her perspective, the stage for going as far as murder is set because there is perceived inadequacy, alienation, insecurity and powerlessness. The realities of life for Mary as a Native American woman in the U.S. reflect such an environment. Particularly as a young woman, she uses alcohol
204 to deaden the pain of harsh social environments that regularly expose her to racist incidents. In order to cope with these situations, which leave her with feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness, Mary turns to violent behavior. Later on when she is married to Leonard, the medicine man, Mary encounters racism, mostly in a non-Native American environment. She describes the experience as ‘uneasy’:
One evening, early in 1975, we were on an Indian reservation in Washington State where my husband had to run some ceremonies […]. We had taken rooms in a motel inside a border town inhabited mostly by whites, half in and half outside the reservation. We were just leaving to drive back home. Leonard, as always, had his long braids wrapped in strips of red trade cloth. As we were putting our things into the car we noticed that the gas tank was leaking. It had been okay before. As we were standing around, trying to figure out how to fix it, two rednecks came up. They started making offensive remarks: ‘Look at those Indians, look at their long hair. How long since you’ve been to a barber?’ They just stood there, staring at us and laughing. [… ] The honkies laughed, grabbed Leonard’s braids, and yanked them hard. Then they jumped him (CD 53).
An inevitable fight breaks out between the whites and the Indians, when suddenly the police show up. Instead of helping the Indians, the police officers just “[…] stopped about fifty yards away and sat there, watching and grinning. By then the hoodlums were demolishing our car with their bats, busting all the windows” (CD 53). It is as though the police have turned the situation into one of racial discrimination by Indians against the white men: “ ‘Break it up, fellows, go home to the little woman. Call it a day!’ Then they started arresting the Indians” (CD 53). The policemen seem to have put justice aside in favor of exerting white, male power, dividing themselves into ‘good-cop’, on the one hand, and ‘bad-cop’, on the other. Due to their racially-motivated behavior, Mary’s psychological fissures keep on growing through which all of her feelings of abjection and otherness seep and intermingle. For white society, Indians, especially Indian women, are of no value and must be controlled to repress the challenge they might pose to hegemonic powers. No wonder, then, that the police are so associated in Mary’s autobiographies with injustice and racial discrimination against indigenous people: “It was the usual sequence. Honkies, be so kind, and go home! Then arrest the Indians for ‘disturbing peace.’ Put them in jail. Charge them. Let them get bailed out. Drag them into court.
205 Collect the fine” (CD 53-54). There is definitely an element of the outrageous to this incident. When Mary runs over to the police, telling them, “Look what’s going on. We didn’t do anything. They’re [the white men] hurting our men. Why don’t you do something?” (CD 53), the policemen “[…] said nothing, just started up their car and drove off” (CD 53). The reader gets a sense of authentic hatred towards these bigoted policemen; as in several other parts in Mary’s autobiographies, her overriding tone is one of anger, and it is clear that these racially-determined descriptions contain some measure of growing hatred towards white, male authority. This increasing anger results in Mary’s rejection of the self – replacing self-love for self-destructive behavior – her life starts to bear a strong fascination with the hopeless. She confesses that it “[…] seemed that my earlier life, before I met Leonard and before I went to Wounded Knee, was just one endless, vicious circle of drinking and fighting, drinking and fighting” (CD 54). No matter how hard Mary tries to fight racial prejudice and racism, she is marked by her consciousness of marginality and otherness. Throughout most of her life, Mary stays isolated from white society, describing herself as “[…] a loner. […] I was scared of white people and uneasy in their company, so I did not socialize with them. […] I had no place to go, but a great restlessness came over me, an urge to get away, no matter where” (CD 56). While the author does not explicitly link her outsider status to her mixed-blood identity, it seems plausible that this is a key component in her longing for change. She appears to be a social outcast, her marginalization assumes a concrete dimension. The opening lines of chapter 8 set the negative mood of racial discrimination that predominates Mary’s life:
I do not consider myself a radical or revolutionary. It is white people who put such labels on us. All we ever wanted was to be left alone, to live our lives as we see fit. To govern ourselves in reality and not just on paper. To have our rights respected. […] Actually, I have a great yearning to lead a normal, peaceful life – normal in the Sioux sense. I could have accepted our flimsy shack, our smelly outhouse, and our poverty – but only on my terms. Yes, I would have accepted poverty, dignified, uninterfered-with poverty, but not the drunken, degrading, and humiliating poverty we had to endure. But normality was a long time in coming. Even now I don’t have the peace I crave (CD 111-112).
Much of Mary’s discomfort and alienation is traceable to racially-motivated episodes, such as the one described earlier. Her willingness to fight and her instinctive knowledge
206 of being able to kill somebody if “[…] one gets into an ‘either me or you’ situation” (CD 51) are declared at the outset of Lakota Woman, as central to her identity and a defining fact of her character. Hers are highly male character traits which she does not really try to conceal. She has no trouble getting into a fight for justice and against racism; she does not seem to be disturbed by comments made to her by white policemen. However, for Mary there is no escape from her position of a mixed-blood Sioux woman. She is obsessed with defining this status, with trying to justify Native Americans’ rights to lead ‘normal lives’, free from racial prejudice and discrimination. Mary, nonetheless, is singled out by the institutional authority figures - the policemen - as different. By far the most courageous Native American woman in the fights between whites and Indians, Mary often finds cause to question the police. As a consequence of such challenges to authority, the police humiliate her, reducing her instantly to otherness, to not being worthy of any kind of justice. To demonstrate to the white men, who actually cause most fights, the difference between objective and subjective judgments, the police follow the “usual sequence” (CD 53), that is letting the white men go home to their wives, while the innocent Native Americans are arrested. This technique of using ‘objective’ classifications as the basis for racial discrimination and ostracism is symbolic of all downgrading of people into categories of otherness based on isolated elements of their behavior or identity. As the police single out the Indians’ deviation from what they perceive to be the white (male) norm, in order to mark difference, they might as well use any derogatory names for Native Americans, their rebelliousness to adjust to white society, or any other feature of their behavior or physical self that does not conform to the status quo. Once again Mary is reminded by white authority of her otherness: “[…] the shape of my cheekbones, […] the slant of my eyes, the color of my hair, […] the feeling inside me” (CD 23). The author’s physical appearance, which clearly deviates from the ideal of white society, becomes a symbol of her multifaceted social alienation, but there are other elements in her autobiographies that underline her difference too. The title of her 2nd autobiography Ohitika Woman and the name Brave Bird undeniably mark her as a Native American (Sioux) woman. Thus, her name comes to embody her outsider status and is constantly being misidentified or misrepresented by whites. Gradually, Mary though starts appreciating both her name and her physical looks despite the fact that the
207 symbolic meaning of her name and physical body (her signifiers) is found to be of little value. The more Mary becomes involved with her Lakota past, the ancient Lakota language, her ancestors’ rites and ceremonies, the less she feels any dislike for these outward manifestations of her identity; yet these signs are all that white society is willing to read her by. She is accordingly read, judged, ostracized, and discriminated against. Consequently, Mary spends much of her energy attempting to hide from public view: “I was a loner, always” (CD 56). Just as the Sioux woman prefers not to be seen by whites, neither does she wish to call attention to herself by seeing or meeting them. It is only when Mary is a mature woman that she meets whites who respect and treat her well so that she can come to the conclusion that “[…] my white […] friends had also taught me a lot which had influenced me in many ways”(CD 244). It seems as though Mary’s social alienation has decreased with age and she has taken on a more open-minded viewpoint regarding white people. At a certain level, her praising words of whites are presented in the manner of peaceful speech, and are definitely appropriate, as the words of any mature woman. The reader becomes aware that Mary has overcome, at least partially, her fear and mistrust of white people. It seems as though her greatest fear to be an involuntary source for racist behavior has also decreased in intensity. Because she has so often been the victim of racial discrimination, Mary understands perfectly the power dynamics of racism. When the white policemen laugh at her, they strengthen bonds amongst themselves while pushing Mary even further out of their world and deeper into separateness. In Ohitika Woman, Mary informs the reader that she is being taught the traditional Sioux language by her first husband. Gradually, she begins to use this newly-gained knowledge as a weapon to overcome silence. Leonard’s relatives have neglected to learn English, exerting their linguistic power at Crow Dog’s Paradise. At first, Mary rejects this power. The refusal of her ancestors’ language is symbolic of the refusal of the past and an identity as expressed through linguistic boundaries. While it represents a rebellion against the ‘Law of her Ancestors’, it also excludes Mary from the family circle:
Beside being tumbled headfirst into this kind of situation, […] I still had another problem. I was a half-blood, not traditionally raised, trying to hold my own inside the full-blood Crow Dog clan which does not take kindly to outsiders. At first, I
208 was not well received. It was pretty bad. I could not speak Sioux […]. I was […] treated as an intruder (CD 176).
Thus, racially discriminated against by both white society and her husband’s family, she now finds herself completely alone. Mary’s status as outcast from both white and traditional Lakota society leaves no space for her, so Mary falls seriously ill:
The shock of having to deal at the same time with the myth and the reality, with trying to break through the Crow Dog buckskin curtain, […] was too much for me. I broke down. I got sick. I was down to ninety pounds. My body just collapsed. I could no longer stand up. If I tried, my legs would cramp up and hurt. My joints ached. I told Leonard, ‘I don’t feel good. […] I am sad, always. I think I am going to die […]” (CD183-184).
Mary creates this sickness to hide behind it. Instead of making her difference less obvious, her attempts to escape magnify it. This extreme alienation lasts up to the point when
Leonard said he would do a doctoring meeting for me. He put up the peyote tipi for me. […] I ate the sacred medicine. I kept eating and eating. I was so weak I could not sit up. They made me lie down on a blanket. Leonard gave me some peyote tea to drink. It was old tea and very strong. I drank two whole cups of it. [… Later Mary was told that] mine was not a sickness of the body, but of the mind. That I felt nobody loved me, not Leonard, not his family, not the people I cooked and washed for. I was sickening for want of love (CD 184).
While Mary can be said to be as rootless and alienated as most half-bloods in contemporary American society, she does seem to start displaying a special quality of connectedness to the people around her and to her past. After Leonard’s healing ritual, Mary feels generally liberated:
Then I saw that the strange woman lying dead in my bed was me. Myself. And a great weight was lifted from me. I could breathe again. My heart was beating. I felt good. What was dying, what had died, was my former self, but I would go on living (CD 185).
By the end of her first autobiographical account, Mary is able to easily challenge proscribed gender roles and endure racial discrimination, leading a ‘modern’ life, complete with children, a husband, and a considerable knowledge of her Lakota past:
209
The rest of the story is told quickly. I am thirty-seven years at this moment. Leonard is fifty. […] I have borne Leonard three children: two boys, Anawah and June Bug (Leonard Jr.), and one girl, Jennifer. [… Leonard] performs sweat lodges and pipe ceremonies for Indian prisoners in America’s penitentiaries. Wherever Native Americans struggle for their rights, Leonard is there (CD 261, 263).
Yet, far from telling the reader about the joy of having found her place in contemporary society, Mary’s final lines are tinged with a threatening sense of alarm. The apparently optimistic description of her present life does nothing to relieve the creeping uneasiness that predominates:
As for wear and tear: Having four children, being a medicine man’s wife, cooking and cleaning up for innumerable guests, most of them uninvited, listening to countless woes and problems, became just too much for me. I was going under. So a few years ago I panicked, packed up the kids, and simply ran away. My flight stopped at Phoenix, Arizona (CD 263).
The acknowledgement of running away that closes Lakota Woman leaves Mary caught up once again in despair and isolation, blurring the line between inside (Crow Dog’s society) and outside (the white man’s society), reinscribing her outsider position as she runs away. Ohitika Woman that follows Lakota Woman is significant for Mary’s attempts at leading an independent life, seeking to break free from socially set roles, both in white as well as in Lakota society. While the mature Sioux woman is marked by power and social independence, the strength and liberation that she has achieved also brings on a creeping fear of missing her Native American tradition while living in the white man’s world. And that proves true because it does not take her long to return to the reservation because none of her assertions of freedom have meant happiness for Mary: “We [Mary and her children] are now back in Rosebud, where we still have the yearly Sun Dances at the old Crow Dog place” (CD 263). Life on the reservation is portrayed more often than not, in Ohitika Woman, as one far from liberation or one that leaves hardly any opportunity for self-expression. It is in fact linked to hopelessness. In chapter fifteen “Bleeding Always Stops If You Press Down Hard Enough” the author explains that
210 […] Lakota society was male-oriented, as is usual among tribes of nomadic hunter-warriors. […] In some ways we have overromanticized the good old days when the ‘red knights of the prairie’, the proud, hard-riding warriors, […] ruled the land west of the Mississippi River, when millions of buffalo were there for taking. Women held a place of honor then, but even then there were many customs that were not romantic at all. […] Women did almost all of the work. […] women did all the work. And the dumb white man thought he could improve upon a system like that (BB 180).
While no explanation is given for the fact that women in ancient Lakota society had to work so hard, it is implied that Lakota women’s present lives are infested with the white man’s ideas gone horribly wrong. Mary states that in traditional Lakota belief
[w]omen were more honored […] than among whites. During much of the nineteenth century, many American women did not have the right to own property. Our women always did. The tipi belonged to the wife, […]. Among whites, even the upper-class lady could take no part in politics. American women did not get the vote until 1920. Compare this with the women of the Iroquois Longhouse, who elected the tribe’s chiefs (BB 181).
These reassuring insights are directly contrasted to the present situation of Lakota women, which can be explained as follows:
Under the outside pressure of white power and suppression, the old ways were destroyed. The tiyospaye, the extended family, disintegrated. Much that was positive among our traditional society was wiped out, and much that was negative was not only preserved, but enhanced. White society, until very recently, ran according to male values. […] The whites’ attitude of male superiority rubbed off on us. The dominant culture forced its values upon our tribe (BB 184).
Mary hints at the white man’s feelings of superiority, which has led to a situation of (racial) discrimination against Lakota women. The Lakota women’s independence, more than the Lakota men’s, was taken when the white man imposed his ideas upon the ‘inferior’ race. The immediate effect of this statement upon the author is that she writes: “I have a feeling that many of our men resent women, and I know the reason” (BB 185). Racial discrimination in the past has led to Lakota women being treated worse than before the white man’s interference. Today it is poverty that makes the Lakota women’s and men’s situation even more deplorable:
211
Poverty is now worse than ever. The poorest counties in the whole USA, Shannon, Mellette, and Todd, are in the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations. We have to cradle-to-grave everlasting unemployment. Dependence on the meager government handouts is destroying the soul of our people. Poverty, dependence, and misery breed anger. Anger, which cannot vent itself upon its causes, turns against itself. Those who are powerless often work off their frustrations upon those who are even more vulnerable (BB 186).
Thus Sioux men rape and abuse their wives, “Some men take it out on the women. […] There is a lot of wife beating going on” (BB 186, 187). These manifestations of the white man’s influence on Lakota culture seem to be a punishment for the Lakota’s ongoing resistance to adjust to white values. Though Mary has learned to live as an independent, divorced 49 woman in a man’s world, she cannot escape the fact of her Lakota ancestry, which constantly implicates her. She is, in fact, filled with a Lakota identity. Unfortunately, for these three contemporary Native American autobiographers – Mankiller, Hale, and Brave Bird – racism has continued to exist in their lived experiences. There might have been fewer racially-motivated incidents at one time or another. However, racial discrimination against Native Americans in general, and against these authors in particular, has not gone away. As a reader and interpreter it is very sad to acknowledge that because it appears that it is something that is constant. It is always there. It seems as though racism is carried forth primarily by people with some sort of authority, such as teachers and policemen. Many of the incidents that these authors have described prove that there is a lot of covert racism that exists in society where one would least expect to encounter it. Particularly Hale and Brave Bird have encountered racism at every corner, at every level, and in almost every aspect of life. In the religious world, in the academic world, in the economic world racism is there. It clearly seems to be a real blemish on these authors’ existence that it is there. Moreover, the harms caused by racial discrimination at an early age have scarred the inner beings of these Native American women. As adults they have learned to cope with racist experiences yet such episodes continue to be demoralizing.
49 After a fight about the disappearance of some sacred items, Mary finally leaves Leonard for good (cf. BB 52), claiming that it “[…] wasn’t his fault and it wasn’t my fault. The conditions were at fault. I left” (BB 52).
212
7.3.5 Theme Five: Reciprocity and Inclusiveness
Native Americans have systematically practiced reciprocity and inclusiveness for thousands of years, beginning in infancy in the biological family and in the clan family and continuing throughout life. As Wilma states in the “Authors’ Note”: “This book is more than the story of Wilma Mankiller. It is also the extraordinary story of the Cherokee people […]” (MK xiii). The practices of reciprocity and inclusiveness are clearly amplified by these contemporary Native American autobiographers. Particularly to Mankiller, inclusiveness means embracing family and clan. It means belonging and connection. Despite poverty, the author confesses that the “[…] warmth and love in our home made up for the lack of material things. My parents had a strong relationship and always seemed to be very much in love” (MK 37). Individualism seems not to be there either. It does not mean anything because a single person does not make the world, nor does the world make a single person. It is all inclusiveness. Margaret Craven in I Heard the Owl Call My Name explains that idea very movingly:
The Indian knows his village and feels for his village as no white man for his country, his town, or even his own bit of land. His village is not the strip of land four miles long and three miles wide that is his as long as the sun rises and the moon sets. The myths are the village, and the wind and rains. The rain is the village, and … the talking bird, the owl, who calls the name of the man who is going to die (Craven quoted in MK 222).
These lines make obvious that Native Americans look at the whole world, at everything and at everybody in it. Otherwise it is not the same. One cannot take out one segment, then it would change the entire complexion of the world. What both Mankiller and Craven hint at is the idea of wholeness. Reciprocity, on the other hand, means giving and receiving to Mankiller: “Besides maintaining our language, many Cherokees preserved a sense of community in more than one hundred distinct Cherokee settlements scattered throughout our Nation. People shared what little they had with one and another” (MK 182). In fact, the strength and uniqueness of Native American cultures are in their relationship with and respect for
213 nature, so reciprocity has often been linked to the environment. Everything has been put there for a reason. There is no harm in people taking a certain portion out, but it has to be replenished; that is why
[… t]he protection of our land and water and other natural resources are of utmost importance to us. Our culture not only exists in time but in space as well. If we lose our land we are adrift like a leaf on a lake, which will float aimlessly and then dissolve and disappear. Our land is more than the ground on which we stand and sleep, and in which we bury our dead. The land is our spiritual mother whom we can no easier sell than our physical mother. […] We believe that one’s identity should be with his tribe. We believe in tribalism, we believe that tribalism is what has caused us to endure (National Indian Youth Conference policy statement quoted in MK 181).
Regarding the land as their spiritual mother, Native Americans today carefully protect it. Moses and Wilson write: “Without their land the people [Native Americans] would be set adrift in a world removed from their ancestors” (4). In the early 19th century, however, many Native American tribes, including the Cherokee, could not do much
[…] to combat the wholesale theft of the land and future of so many Cherokee children. […] We cannot accept their [the white people’s] religion or their plan of action. We are content to remain here as we are and will not be a party to any agreement to change our way of living or endanger our homes (MK 171).
Therefore, (re)claiming the Mother (the land) can be seen as a metaphor for acknowledging the realities of the past and recognizing the conditions under which Native Americans have had to live, basically contextualizing the land or the environment. Acknowledging the land definitely feeds one’s spirit, and the ability to recognize and nurture the self is strengthened, as Mankiller corroborates that
[… t]ribal elders told me that when they were young and trying to make a go of it, no one ever gave up the dream of a revitalized Cherokee Nation. People would walk to one another’s house in those rural communities and sit on the porches and discuss ways to keep the Cherokee culture and the Cherokee government alive. People rode horses over the hills to attend community meetings. Men and women got together just to talk about how best to retain our traditions. They spoke of the old days of our tribe, and they told stories to keep our Cherokee spirit strong (MK 182).
214 Keeping this ancestral spirit alive means recognizing how each individual life fits into the scheme of one’s community, one’s tribe, and one’s obligation to other Indian people, in particular. Incorporating the ancestors’ dream of a revitalized Cherokee Nation demonstrates the recognition of the spirit of others. Likewise, remembering this dream is a metaphor for recognizing what the present-day Cherokee have been given amid the chaos of the past; it embodies Wilma’s own gratefulness, good memories, and affirmations of life. It seems clear that for Mankiller both reciprocity and inclusiveness are not distinct phases or stages in her life, but rather they are fluid depending on the environment, and the current and past circumstances of her life. For example, within a few years of the author’s return to the reservation, Mankiller manages to become the first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. Using knowledge gained in school, Wilma is working hard on the realities of the present before she is able to reconnect with the land and her ancestors’ traditions. On October 5, 1892 W. A. Duncan wrote a letter that was published in the Cherokee Advocate stressing the importance of the land: “I do not want to see our Cherokee people without homes. The title in common to our lands is the strongest guarantee against the homelessness of many of our people” (MK 167). Thus, Wilma’s homecoming signals the transition from a life of alienation to a fulfilled life of reciprocity and inclusiveness, a life-change marked by breaking old patterns, testing new ones, and developing emotional, physical and spiritual resources. After having been diagnosed with systemic myasthenia gravis, a form of muscular dystrophy that can lead to paralysis (cf. MK 228), Wilma ‘hears the messages’, which come from the environment, friends, family, from her own body and from the spirit world in the form of dreams and assurances, for rebalancing the self. The context of the messages before Wilma’s full recovery is generally characterized by hopefulness and a high level of encouragement: “I did not want merely to cope with this disease – I wanted to beat it. I wanted to rid myself of it. I wanted it to go into total remission” (MK 228). The context in Wilma’s full recovery is characterized by even more assurance and validation:
Within only a very few years, I would become […] principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. That vision of the spiritual leader would come true. […] but [… it] would [not] have happened if it had not been for the ordeals I had survived in the first place. After that, I realized that I could survive anything. I had faced
215 adversity and turned it into a positive experience – better path. I had found the way to be of good mind (MK 229).
Embedded in this revelation is the transition into ancient, cultural Cherokee roles and expectations of elders. Wilma is expected to become the chief of the Cherokee Nation as foreseen by a spiritual leader and is willing to do this as long as she remains in her Cherokee community. In the last paragraph of her autobiography, Mankiller contrasts the reaction to her own life with her Cherokee husband’s life, which in turn makes her thoughts go back to the idea of reciprocity and inclusiveness:
Having Charley in my home reminds me every single day of the needs for contemporary Cherokees to be on guard. Having Charley nearby reminds us to be sure to do everything we can to hold onto our language, our ceremonies, our culture. For we are people of today – people of the so-called modern world. But first and foremost, and forever, we are also Cherokees (MK 257).
For Wilma, an assurance comes at the lowest point in her life, on the heels of an emotionally discouraging period and prior to her election to become principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. The experience of having Charley around, however, describes a message of hope that she has remembered for some time and reinforces a belief in traditional Cherokee principals that her ancestors have employed for thousands of years. So the context of Wilma’s second marriage to a full-blood Cherokee is marked by a man who has reinvented himself as a member of the Cherokee tribe, who has never given up his sense of community, of clan, of family, of nation. The story of the renaissance of Cherokee people after the well-known Trail of Tears and numerous relocation policies is, indeed, similar in some ways to the story of Mary Brave Bird and the Lakota people. Mary’s autobiographical accounts illustrate the ability of a battered people to not just survive but despite everything, to thrive because of their strong sense of reciprocity and inclusiveness. During the 1970’s siege of Wounded Knee the Sioux express concern that the traditional values and ceremonies that have sustained them since the beginning of time have been ‘slipping away’. So they make it a priority to recapture, protect, and maintain traditional tribal knowledge systems and lifestyles that can clearly be described as a whole or interconnected way of viewing
216 things. Once again the environment is not seen as a social justice issue but as an essential element of life. Mary gradually learns that the Sioux have evolved from people who understand their reciprocal relationship to their families and to all other living things:
The words we put into our songs are an echo of the sacred root, the voices of the little pebbles inside the gourd rattle, the voices of the magpie and scissortail feathers which make up the peyote fan, the voice from inside the water drum, the cry of the water bird. Peyote will give you a voice, a song of understanding, a prayer for good health or for your people’s survival. [Peyote makes all Native Americans understand that …] they are no longer Navajos, or Poncas, Apaches, or Sioux, but just Indians. They learn each others’ songs and find out that they are really the same. Peyote is making many tribes into just one tribe. And it is the same with the Sun Dance which also serves to unite the different Indian nations (CD 101).
Peyote and the Sun Dance are means for contemporary Native Americans to remember their place in this world. Mary, as well as many Indians, have lived in an artificial world completely separate from the natural world for so long, they have little understanding of their place in the world and do not seem to understand that everything in the natural world is integral to the continuation of (human) life on Earth. When Mary during the siege of Wounded Knee hears Native Americans from all kinds of tribes talk about revitalizing their communities, they talk about protecting the natural world and about restoring balance and harmony in their families and societies. By reviving traditional ceremonies and dances Leonard, Mary’s first husband, starts to preserve Lakota tribal culture and heritage while reinforcing the crucial value of traditional knowledge of reciprocity and inclusiveness. These efforts lead to a reshaping of the images of Native Americans, in general, and of the Sioux, in particular:
Leonard said: ‘Well, there was a road from here to over there, a ghost road. I could not see it but I knew that it was there and I walked on it. I came to a hill and a lone man stood there. When he saw me he sat down and waved to me to sit down beside him. I went up the hill and he showed me a big Indian camp, tipis, buffalo, horses, men hunting, women tanning, like in the old days, and that man told me, “That is your people over there, that’s where you’re going to be. That’s how you shall live. Now you go back. Teach your people. Teach them to live the old way” ’ (CD 151).
217 It seems as though during the siege all Native Americans present accept their responsibility to make sure the unborn will always know what it means to be descendants of the first people of the American continent. Most of all, the siege of Wounded Knee has the purpose of reconnecting indigenous people to the basic idea of reciprocity and inclusiveness, which for Mary means an end to the arguments and rows with her mother: “ I said, ‘Yes, I’m a mother now and made you a grandmother.’ Suddenly we got along very well and could understand each other. Her anger did not last and somehow things were better between us after this” (CD 167). At last, the young Sioux woman understands the importance of a kinship system, which Steiner defines as follows:
Little is known by non-Indians of the jet-age functions and modern forms of the kinship system. […] the young Indians often say that the modernized kinship is one of the most vital elements of the new tribalism. It offers them the mobility to explore and experiment with new ways of revitalizing tribal life (146).
Pedro, Mary’s firstborn son, who grows up with this revitalized sense of reciprocity turns out not to be an alcoholic but a young Native American man who “[…] has become a yuwipi man. He runs meetings and puts on sweat lodges. He is a good singer. He has pierced many times as a sundancer” (CD 262). Steiner concludes that “[…] the kinship family does more than care for the child. It recognizes his participation in the life of the larger family; he has his work to do, and his contribution to the communal well-being is appreciated and rewarded” (147). So Pedro is lucky enough to never have felt isolated or abandoned while growing up, for he has always had several groups of relatives to whom to turn for comfort and reassurance: “At the age of four little Pedro could already sing many Native American Church songs and use the gourd rattle” (CD 252). Mary’s son has undoubtedly been raised and regarded as an important member of the community. What Steiner describes as a “return to Indian values, to Indian humanism” (150), Mary has, indeed, been able to accomplish in real life, at least as far as the raising of Pedro is concerned. For Mary tribal life is certainly built upon human and natural needs and values based on reciprocity and inclusiveness. In Ohitika Woman the author dedicates several chapters to the significance of reciprocity which becomes visible in the simple honesty and friendship of some of the
218 traditional Lakota. For example, Leonard’s sincere love for life despite all the hardship still leaves room for sharing both spiritual and material things with others. In this tribal atmosphere Mary, for the first time, can partake in her husband’s enjoyment of life. It is particularly through traditional ceremonies that Mary is able to express an uninhibited naturalness in the same way she shares Leonard’s celebration of life:
During a sweat you must have only pure thoughts, sing with the spirits, experience the beauty of being united with all living things on this earth. You must think of the White Buffalo Calf Woman who came to us singing: ‘With visible breath I come walking.’ Visible breath, to me means the white hot cloud rising from the sweatlodge. For me Lakota ceremonies are my way of living in balance, of recognizing myself as an Indian. They are the drumbeats of my heart. They open a magical door for me. I walk through it, and on the other side, see a different reality, the true image of the universe (BB 100).
Enjoyment is too mild a word here. Celebration is truer. For the essence of Mary’s understanding of inclusiveness is its love of man in his natural state, to whom no experience seems to be alien. Thus, love of life to Mary means the love of every living thing. Her passions are specific, down to earth. Her love, be it for a stone or a star, is definitely real. Steiner confirms this attitude by writing:
It is said, years ago, many years ago, when the Indian was alone in his country, he cherished every little thing. He cherished the auger, the bow, the stones, the buffalo hide, the deerskin to make moccasins with. He cherished the corn, the kernel of corn that he planted with his hands to make his flours, his bread. He cherished the trees. He believed the trees had a heart, like a human being. He never cut down a living tree. A tree was a living thing. It was not to be cut, or hurt, or burned. Every living thing that grew from the green earth of nature, he cherished. In the skies he cherished the king of the flying species – the eagle. He cherished the little birds as well. He cherished the skies and stars as well. He cherished human beings, all people, most of all. He cherished himself (Steiner 153).
It appears that if every living thing is cherished and worshipped equally, it is then natural to the traditional Sioux that every living thing is shared as well. In this context, inclusiveness definitely extends beyond the human being, beyond kinship family. The most important value therefore is sharing everything one owns with others or having something to give it away. While white people strive to acquire material things, Native
219 Americans are trying to reach balance by living in harmony with the spiritual universe. It is Leonard who teaches Mary to satisfy her spiritual needs by spiritual means:
He taught me so much about ceremonies and how to prepare for them. He took me on walks and taught me how to recognize the different healing herbs. He had a good influence on me. He opened the door to me, a door that led me back into being Indian and not merely a half-breed. He was always there for the people. He brought me back to the pipe, and shared with me his dreams of spirituality. And to suffer at the sun dance was good for me (BB 52).
While Lakota Woman tells the reader of a half-breed woman who is alone and alienated from both the white and Sioux culture, Ohitika Woman depicts a spiritually grown woman, strongly affected by gratefulness and at peace with herself. Mary ends up describing a spiritual quest, at whose beginning she is distracted, dissociated from herself. By watching Leonard live the traditional Lakota beliefs, she is gradually overcome with joy, pleasure and an understanding of what reciprocity and inclusiveness mean to a Sioux person. Thus, her story ends in a positive affirmation:
I try to raise my own kids in a traditional way while trying to get them a modern education. I know that this is a hopeless contradiction, but then I’ve never lost hope yet. I will endure. I will fight to the end of my days – for everything that lives. MITAKUYE OYASIN – ALL MY RELATIONS (BB 274).
Janet Hale has for many years lacked any kind of opportunity to embrace family and clan. She has not experienced belonging and connection until the day she decides to go on an odyssey to discover her bloodlines. So reciprocity, for Janet, is not instilled during childhood, which is rather shaped by her parents’ recurring break-ups, leaving reservation life for often up to several months at one time, and Hale’s experiences in multiethnic urban areas of the Pacific Northwest. As a mature woman and mother of two children, Janet is, much the same as Mary, lonely and alienated from both her Coeur d’Alene background and her ancestors’ culture. Hale’s quest for her tribal past is placed into the context of Native American history and its connection to the story of the Euro- American expansion westwards. The about 200 pages of Bloodlines are divided into eight chapters which trace chronologically the author’s Native American legacy and the outlines of her life. It seems as though this autobiographical account is only partly linear
220 because Hale quite often circles back in time to emphasize elements of her past that relate to her personal story, which is clearly one of desperately wrestling with one’s own life and heritage. Hale is definitely on both sides of two cultures, and in the case of Bloodlines the strength of indigenous and white influences on the author has shaped this autobiography. Basically, Hale focuses on her private life while mentioning historical events merely as associative milestones for her memory without trying to determine the impact the latter made on her. It can, however, be undoubtedly stated that the Euro- American influence upon Hale is determinative. She emphasizes the significance of personal relationships and the impact of turning points in her life on her psychological development. In what might be one of the most revealing lines in this work, and before beginning her own account, the author quotes Wallace Stegner, in a brief citation printed on a single page: “The guts of any significant fiction – or autobiography – is an anguished question” (Stegner quoted in BL ix). Hale seems to ask two questions: First, she seeks to come to grips with the dysfunctionality which she believes has been passed from her dysfunctional family to her own life. Secondly, she attempts to understand her estrangement from her Coeur d’Alene tribal heritage. It appears obvious that most of Bloodlines can be read as a quest for answers to these two inquiries. Therefore, one might claim that much of Hale’s therapeutic efforts read less like a historical account than one told from a psychiatrist’s office as the author seeks but never really finds the solution to her own “anguished question” (Stegner quoted in BL ix). Late in her autobiography, Hale explains to the reader that after marrying as a teenager, she has retrospectively created a happy childhood – filled with reciprocity and inclusiveness – so that she is able to share with her own children, a clean version of the reality that has burdened her own early years. After her son and daughter have reached adulthood, however, the time has come to re-examine both her own and her relatives’ past which continues to haunt her and alienate her from her ethnic roots (cf. BL 166-169). In fact, in her preface the author acknowledges frankly: “Once I longed to belong to the family I came from. Not anymore. I’m one of its broken-off pieces now” (BL xxxiii). Correspondingly, she explains that “some families will, if they can, tear you down, reject you, tell you you are a defective person. […] If you come from such a family and you have no one else to turn to, then you must, for the sake of your own sanity and self-respect, break free, venture out on your
221 own and go far away” (BL xxi). Thus, Hale proceeds to disburden herself from the obligation of her deceased mother’s legacy in the longest chapter of the autobiography, called “Daughter of Winter”. In this shocking section, she narrates how her mother has been “a master, an absolute master of verbal abuse” (BL 61) who, rather than seeking to increase her daughter’s diminished self-esteem as a Native American, reminds her that she has been her worst pregnancy, swears at her repeatedly, inflicts guilt feelings on her, and briefly expels her from their modest apartment in Omak, Washington, when Janet is seven years old. Because of a lack of any sense of inclusiveness and reciprocity, Hale rids herself of other relatives on her maternal side too. The author’s description of her mother’s sisters illustrates this more concisely than any other paragraph in Bloodlines: “They were rude and crude. They smoked and drank. They swore and said ‘shit’ a lot. They made stupid, snide remarks about Indians, too, whenever they could” (BL 116). In the end, her “anguished question” (Stegner quoted in BL ix) remains unanswered. Hale admits that. She also concedes that the Coeur d’Alene reservation can never again be her home, and she blames mostly her dysfunctional family, close kin who caused her years of emotional pain, for this permanent estrangement. Nevertheless, Hale insists that in spite of her considerable de-tribalization, she will always identify herself as a Coeur d’Alene, and she says she finds some fulfillment in the desire of her mixed-race daughter to consider herself a Native American (cf. BL 185-187). Confronting not only the painful facts of her life but those of the difficult lives of several generations of her relatives, her family history turns out to be extraordinarily complex, shaped by the annihilation and oppression of Indians by whites, complicated by mixed marriages and their identity and value conflicts. As Hale investigates her past, she recognizes the deep roots of her struggle for survival and achievement, and becomes aware of the existing bond that can connect her to her culture. While the author comes to understand that values, such as reciprocity and inclusiveness, do not exist in her family, she is not able to forget, let alone to forgive, and fortunately for the reader she presents an uncensored version of her life. Thus, for Janet reciprocity has not been instilled during childhood. Nevertheless, she is able to reach a certain understanding of it by researching her past, so that she develops the desire to want to give something back. Her need to reciprocate is, in fact, directed toward other Native Americans; the author agrees to teach at a tribal college in
222 Washington State: “I drive back to Spokane very fast, cutting right through the spectacular scenery, thinking of how I’ll be here again all next academic year. Alone and on my own where I began. It will be good to be here again. I’m not afraid” (BL 187). It appears that Hale, as an Indian woman who has had the opportunity to go to school and has been in the right place at the right time, feels fortunate. As a result, Hale believes she has got to give back those gifts that have been given to her, so she agrees to teach Indians at a tribal college. Reciprocity and inclusiveness are portrayed as two sides of a coin: the benefit and responsibility of belonging. Mankiller and Brave Bird describe how these two concepts characterize the Native American clan structure. As young girls they become aware that they have their nuclear family. They are connected to this biological family that they are born into. On top of that both Mankiller and Brave Bird are part of a bigger system because they are in a clan. People have obligations towards them and they have obligations towards other tribal members. Mankiller and Brave Bird simply know they belong; they have confidence; reciprocity and inclusiveness seem to be real commitments tribal people have to each other. Hale, on the other hand, has not experienced any sense of reciprocity during her childhood. As a mature woman, however, and after having explored her ancestry, she is able to understand this concept and its implications. So to all three Native American autobiographers, reciprocity and inclusiveness mean being connected to family, community, tribe, and earth in a way that builds upon the strengths of individuals for the benefit of the whole. This theme seemingly enables them to regain and retain their cultural heritage and combat oppression in the dominant culture.
7.4 Connections to Other Women
Collins states: “We realized that while each woman’s life follows a distinctive course, there is a general pattern that unites us all” (363). The life experiences of these Native American autobiographers are certainly similar to women in other populations and cultures and incorporate corresponding issues, including connection – the need to uphold, connect, and support each other; creation – the ability or choice in bearing and raising
223 children; oppression – experiences with racism, sexism, and classism and voice – the struggle to be seen and heard.
7.4.1 Connection
The research of Belenky et al., Gilligan, and Eichbaum and Orbach has identified connection as a foundation of women’s lived experiences. All three Native American autobiographers voice the need for supporting each other as a way of connecting. Mankiller emphasizes several times throughout her story that “[… m]y own story has meaning only as long as it is a part of the overall story of my people. For above all else, I am a Cherokee woman” (MK 14). By revealing the story of her people, their history, and their ancient culture, Wilma manages to establish a strong tie or connection between herself and her past, which works in ways of mutual support for each other:
[… through] the stories I heard from the old ones, I managed to learn the history of the Cherokee people. […] At different times throughout our history, we have been described as ‘vanishing Americans’ or have been considered relics of an ancient past. Despite all that, we not only survived – not intact, certainly – but we kept enough culture and tradition to sustain us through all the battles of the past and those yet to come (MK 44).
It seems certain that this mutual support for each other (the telling of traditional stories to keep a culture alive) creates a closer connection to Wilma’s ancestral past, which, on the other hand, serves as a way of connecting. The Cherokee elders are the role models for the adolescent Cherokee woman. As an adult, particularly when she gets actively involved in tribal politics, Wilma employs this task of being a role model herself, for example she helps “[…] to get as many native people as possible trained at the university level in environmental science and health, and then help to integrate them back into their communities” (MK 217). She is surely concerned about her image when doing this job and must truly be regarded as a role model trying to support young Native Americans by giving them an education so that they can, in turn, get re-connected to their communities. Mankiller also discusses the need to uphold, to connect, and to support each other in such
224 a way that more Cherokee can exceed or excel and show the non-Indian world that a Native American can do and accomplish great things:
My work was my main priority. I was determined to work closely with self-help projects and program development. I wanted to see to it that our people, especially those living in rural areas, had the chance to express their own special needs. I was determined to do this by using the ‘good mind’ approach” (MK 233).
Wilma presents the reader a number of excellent examples of the need for supporting each other as a way of connecting. In the early 1980s, Wilma
[…] established a partnership between the Cherokee people living at Bell 50 and the Cherokee Nation. Our goal was to bring members of the community together so they could solve their common problems. From the beginning, the Bell residents realized they were responsible for the success or failure of the project. They knew they were expected not only to develop long-range plans, but also to implement their community renewal, with our staff members acting only as facilitators and funding brokers (MK 234).
The Bell project turns out to be very successful because “[t]he local residents were able to build on our Cherokee gadugi tradition of a physical sharing of tasks and working collectively, at the same time restoring confidence in their own ability to solve problems” (MK 234). Wilma has just completed another round in her understanding of the depth of her need for supporting each other as a way of connecting:
That is why the project and its overwhelming success were important to me. Bell meant so much to me, […]. For me, the Bell project also validated a lot of the things that I believed about our people. I have always known that the Cherokee people – particularly those in more traditional communities – have retained a great sense of interdependence, and a willingness to pitch in and help one another (MK 235).
After having been relocated to San Francisco, the young Cherokee Wilma certainly suffers from an immense lack in self-confidence: “My self-esteem was at rock bottom [especially as a Cherokee girl having to attend a white school]” (MK 104). The
50 Bell is a poor community with about 350 people, of which 95 percent are Cherokee, who are able to speak Cherokee. It is located about ten miles from Wilma’s home, Mankiller Flats (cf. MK 234, 235).
225 effect of this negative self-view is detrimental. Wilma even “[…] felt like nobody had any time for me, I felt there was not one single person I could confide in or turn to who truly understood me” (MK 104). However, her father’s support by telling his daughter traditional Cherokee stories and by urging her to read helps her in such a way that she starts to be able to cope with life in an urban setting, entirely alienated from her reservation background. The author explains that “[… her] love of reading came from the traditional Cherokee passion for telling and listening to stories. […] Charlie Mankiller [Wilma’s father] loved to read [and tell stories]. He was extremely well-read, especially in the context of his life and times” (MK 44). Regardless of the education she receives in San Francisco, her accomplishments as a single mother in attending college while at the same time raising her children, and her self-scrutiny, Mankiller heavily relies on connecting to her Cherokee relatives for support:
My sister Linda and I sat up late every night [… to think …] about our old home in Oklahoma. My big sister Frances and I talked about our life back at Mankiller Flats. We tried to remember where a specific tree was located and how everything looked. That helped a little, […] (MK 73).
Regularly applying this retracing technique, Wilma and her sisters continue their belief of supporting each other as a way of connecting. In the pages that follow, Wilma acknowledges her growth, the emotional process of emerging by validating her self- worth, not as a victim, but as an active participant in city life:
I began to gain confidence. As I felt better about myself, I felt better about others. […] In many ways, the Indian Center became even more important to me than the junior high and various high schools I attended. […] – at the end of the day, everything seemed brighter at the Indian Center. For me, it became an oasis where I could share my feelings and frustrations with kids from similar backgrounds (MK 105, 111).
At the Indian Center she continues the process of recognizing her defensiveness, clearing the way for hearing other teenagers’ stories and permitting attitude and behavior changes. Her new attitude opens an ability to see the necessity of supporting each other as a way of connecting. Wilma comes to understand that those teenagers’ stories are not different from her own.
226 The Indian Center is a place where support is not just given to Native American children and teenagers, but
[… t]he Indian Center was important to everyone in my family, including my father. […] Besides his union activities, he also became involved with projects at the Indian Center. For instance, when the question arose about the need for a free health clinic for Indians living in the Bay area, he rallied the forces at the Indian Center to get behind the issue (MK 111-112).
In fact, Wilma’s father does not only voice the need for supporting each other as a way of connecting, but “[w]hen he believed in something, he worked around the clock to get the job done. He was always dragging home somebody he had met, someone who was down on his luck and needed a meal and a place to stay. […] My dad never gave up on people” (MK 112). In a role-model like way, Charlie Mankiller manages to build trust and credibility while at the same time reawakening deprived people’s spirit through his efforts to connect with them. For this remarkable Cherokee man, one not only builds trust with oneself, but with others, including members of the community, and institutions outside of the extended family network. A common activity is supporting people in need with food and shelter. This is clearly most evident in the life of Wilma’s father. In chapter two of Lakota Woman, Mary also emphasizes the need for supporting each other as a way of connecting: “Our people have always been known for their strong family ties, for people within one family group caring for each other, for the ‘helpless ones’, the old folks and especially the children, the coming generation” (CD 12). Mary adds that
[e]ven now, among traditionals, as long as one person eats, all other relatives eat too. […] Feeding every comer is still a sacred duty, and Sioux women seem always to be cooking from early morning until late at night. […] Grandma was the kind of woman who, when visitors dropped in, immediately started to feed them. She always told me: ‘Even if there’s not much left, they gonna eat. These people came a long way to visit us, so they gonna eat first. And whatever is left after they leave, even if it’s only a small dried-up piece of fry bread, that’s what we eat.’ This my grandmother taught me (CD 13, 19).
Contemporary Sioux women are significantly concerned with supporting each other, which not only acts as a way of connecting but also as a way of exploring the self and the
227 past. They must strive to attain knowledge of themselves and their past in order to reach through the layers of forced forgetting:
At the center of the old Sioux society was the tiyospaye, the extended family group, the basic hunting band, which included grandparents, uncles, aunts, in- laws, and cousins. […] Grandparents in our tribe always held a special place in caring for the little ones, because they had more time to devote to them, […]. The whites [however], destroyed the tiyospaye, not accidentally, but as a matter of policy [… and tried to force …] the Sioux into the kind of relationship now called the ‘nuclear family’ (CD 13).
That the Sioux awaken to see the world with ‘traditional eyes’ has certainly never been the whites’ intention. Nevertheless, Mary’s autobiographies appear to be projects she has undertaken as revisions of the inaccuracy of the whites’ beliefs of the Sioux lifestyles, of whites’ understanding of relationships as ‘nuclear family’. The ‘supporting each other’ aspect of contemporary traditionalist Sioux invokes the ancient Sioux ideal in order to connect these women and men to their precursors from whom they can draw strength, with whom they can stand, and through whom they can gain self-knowledge. Thus, Mary’s autobiographical accounts of both her own and her people’s story clearly speak about human life the Sioux share with their ancestors, about the values that persist, and about the bond deepening beneath their differences. Especially Ohitika Woman stands as a marked rebellion to the legacy produced and legitimated by the whites’ vision of family relations only appropriate as ‘nuclear family’. The fact that a functioning support system does exist in contemporary Sioux society demonstrates to the reader how little is still known about the unheard voices of Native American women autobiographers and the implicit language that will evolve from an American Indian woman speaking about her life. The descriptions of supporting each other as a way of connecting offer the reader a way to remember the incomplete history of the Sioux’ past, the past Mary feels deprived of until she meets her first husband, while they offer the author a way to restore herself as a Lakota woman through which Mary’s self might get to know her commonality as a woman. She certainly recognizes that Native American people in general have been prohibited by white society from looking at each other, and from learning of traditions and origins, and have therefore been detached from connections which could heal this forced separation. Mary approves of the fact that indigenous people need to know each
228 other in order to remember their history. Her insight reflects with particular clarity on the Native American woman autobiographer whose ability to rectify history is circumscribed within a discourse that allows her to be more than the vision for white, patriarchal history. For although one’s own past might be the most available subject of study, Mary’s grandmother, for example, who “[…] was a Sioux” (CD 17), has been denied hers and seems to have denied the knowledge of this denial:
Grandma had been to mission school and that had influenced her to abandon much of our traditional ways. She gave me love and a good home, but if I wanted to be an Indian I had to go elsewhere to learn how to become one. […] She was Catholic and tried to raise us whites, because she thought that was the only way for us to get ahead and lead a satisfying life, but when it came to basics she was all Sioux, in spite of the pictures of Holy Mary and the Sacred Heart on the wall. Whether she was aware of how very Indian she had remained, I cannot say (CD 19, 23).
The author accentuates this sense of loss when confessing to the reader that the grandmother has tried to raise her grandchildren in the white man’s way, which implies the absence of the traditional Sioux way of life. And yet, the author suggests that one can remember ancient Sioux culture and describes her wise grandmother’s true self as follows:
She also spoke the Sioux language, the real old-style Lakota, not the modern slang we have today. And she knew her herbs, showing us how to recognize the different kinds of Indian plants, telling us what each of them was good for. She took us to gather berries and a certain mint for tea. During the winter we took chokecherries, the skin and the branches. We boiled the inside layers and used the tea for various sorts of sicknesses. In the fall she took us to harvest chokecherries and wild grapes (CD 19-20).
This passing-on of ancient Sioux knowledge from the grandmother to the granddaughter appears to be somewhat like the mutual ‘gaze’ between women, which is capable of generating ways of supporting each other in order to reconnect to one’s culture and history. For centuries whites have prohibited Native Americans from looking at each other, and from learning of their traditions and origins. Activities, such as collecting berries, enable Mary to connect with her grandmother, which in turn allows her to get to know her people’s traditions and customs. Mary’s grandmother’s gaze is so powerful as
229 to be capable of producing nothing less than an incredible desire to learn about Sioux ancestry. Therefore, it does not take long until Mary and her sisters “[…] started seeking for our roots, for a faith, for a meaning of life” (BB 23). No longer reading a book about Native Americans written by whites, which she is forced to do when attending boarding school, Mary now reads in both the look and in the stories of her Lakota relatives all she needs to know about discovering her past and the essence of ancient Lakota culture. Their encounter marks a site of desire, directed by Mary and her sisters, in which the young generation – alienated from its roots – finds traditional Sioux people and themselves fused in the activity of learning about their background, of creating common knowledge, which again ties them closer together. The power Mary discovers in these encounters exists in its potential to create knowledge where she may know herself as a Lakota woman by seeing herself caught in the act of witnessing traditional Sioux people. By bringing together the alienated, young people with the traditional, older generation, this encounter constructs the possibility that Mary and her sisters may experience something other than ignorance and silence. In an increasingly intensified desire to learn as much as Mary can about her ancestors from traditionalist Sioux, specially her husband, a medicine man, the reader can assume that she has established an appropriate image for herself, which entails full acceptance and identification with her Lakota past. When the young Sioux woman shares the same beliefs as her Lakota relatives, those radical acts and all it took to produce them, those revisions, mark a difference sufficient, in Mary’s words, to enable a new self: “What was dying, what had died, was my former self, but I would go on living [with my new self] […] Indian religion is at the center of my life. It is the spiritual side of myself. It is part of my heritage. It made me survive” (CD 185, BB 235). This may definitely seem like the greatest of facts gathered from Mary’s autobiographies to bring to bear on the reader; it is, indeed, this eruption of the search for identity that offers a way to break through the white, patriarchal power of dominance and submission. In this act, Mary’s change incorporates recuperative power. This outlook on life offers a significantly different portrait of identity than the one the Sioux have been schooled to reproduce. Mary is not being pulled away from her Lakota relatives, and thus she can think over the possibilities traditional Lakota community offers. Mary, however, emphasizes the dangers of the persisting white man’s influence upon Native Americans,
230 and many passages are written about the schemes designed by whites to fight off any Native American attempts in which American Indians search for their ancestry and are pulled away from tribal members in order to be forced towards a ‘proper’ bonding with white people:
[…] Gathered from the cabin, the wickiup, and the tepee, partly by cajolery and partly by threats; partly by bribery and partly by force, they are induced to leave their kindred to enter these schools and take upon themselves the outward appearance of civilized life (Annual report of the Department of Interior, 1901 quoted in CD 28).
Even today Native American children still suffer greatly when having to attend a boarding school:
Even now, when these schools are much improved, when the buildings are new, all gleaming steel and glass, the food tolerable, the teachers well trained and well-intentioned, even trained in child psychology – unfortunately the psychology of white children, which is different from ours – the shock to the child upon arrival is still tremendous (CD 29).
Mary’s great efforts in gaining knowledge of her past describe an appreciative way of looking ahead that is earned by refusing to drown in what white patriarchy would consider the Native Americans’ dangerous character trait of being uncivilized. Mary successfully alters the patriarchal myth of domination and submission by setting the scene of her quest for identity within the context of ancient Lakota culture. Thus, domination and submission are not forces that affect Mary so much anymore. Instead, showing interest in her Lakota roots proves fertile, and the author’s self is restored within a discourse of Sioux traditions and customs in which remembering is made possible. Therefore, the author observes traditional Lakota people, especially Leonard, starting to imitate them by “[…] getting myself baptized in the Native American Church” (BB 73). These scenes of observation from which Mary’s new self is born set the encounter that generates a whole new identity, which gradually reveals the author’s power to remember herself as a Lakota: “I have become aware that real ‘Indianness’ means […] being in the power […]” (BB 75). Yet her newly-gained knowledge is fragmentary, incomplete because it lacks people with whom to share it. She is afraid to become alienated once
231 again. During her quest, however, Mary gives up the fear of not finding equally-minded people. Particularly during ceremonies, such as taking a sweatbath, the author becomes aware that “[...] we’re all equal in the circle, and if one is weak, to try to give […] strength and try to help each other. [… With equally-minded people] I like to sweat […] because we support each other and exchange our spiritual thoughts” (BB 97, 98). In beginning to be reconnected to her roots, the author experiences the need for supporting each other, a source the author indicates to some extent as a source of remembering as well: “[… The sweatbath] was another good thing for me. I met a lot of elders. I watched their different ways, heard different tongues” (BB 99). The white man’s influence on Mary’s upbringing has given her a self which is unsuited to her as an offspring of the Lakota people. So the author’s great indebtedness to Native American elders teaching her traditional ways is undoubtedly favorable to Mary as a Native American autobiographer. Only those who have a personality, indeed, only those who have a self, well-established in their traditions, are able to understand what it means to Mary to want to escape her former self. Being taught by Leonard primarily, Mary has surely been blessed. Ohitika Woman, in which the author has established an identity deeply rooted in her Lakota past, offers a radically different notion of selfhood, one that fuses the personal with the political, the woman in the autobiography with the woman writing the autobiography. The longing for a Lakota identity depends on a connection between autobiography and the material conditions in which it is written and focuses on the double bind presented in a culture in which women, especially minority women, who speak/write are forced to use the oppressor’s language; that is, to become, partly, involved in their own oppression. Mary’s autobiographies offer no way ‘out’ of language but ‘through’ language; awareness of internal and external pressures, which are the double bind, presents a way to battle the violence of the white man’s language in which basically all women are spoken rather than speaking subjects – picking up on the double play within ‘subject’ is to speak. Thus, Mary begins to tell her story, to write words like these, through which she is also living:
A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are in the ground. Then it is done, no matter how brave its warriors nor how strong their weapons. –
232 Cheyenne proverb. I am Mary Brave Bird. […] I am a woman of the Red Nation, a Sioux woman. That is not easy (CD 3).
For Mary, as a writer, language has the capacity to trigger memory and remember a community of women isolated within a culture which has told them nothing of origins, nothing they needed to know, nothing that could make remember themselves. Mary’s words, however, awaken that community as she remembers herself, discussing the need to uphold, to connect, and to support each other so that more (Indian) women are not just spoken but become speaking subjects. I will turn next to Janet Hale writing within another ‘tradition’ of connection. As the research of Belenky et al, Gilligan, and Eichbaum and Orbach has revealed that connections are the foundation of women’s lived experiences, one can assume that these connections were relatively well-working patterns among indigenous people that evolved in ancient times and were well-established by the time the white man set foot on the American continent. For most tribal people this tradition of connection has survived up to the present. Hale, on the other hand, rarely speaks of this tradition of affirmative connection in Bloodlines. Instead, she confesses that her work “[…] is a collection of autobiographical essays, […]. In some of the pieces I try to articulate my experiences growing up in a dysfunctional family, to say this is how it was, this is what happened to me, this is how it made me feel” (BL xxii). It seems as though certain parts of the book must have been extremely complicated for Hale to write: “The most difficult piece to write was ‘Daughter of Winter’ which is about my relationship with my mother, whom I loved, whose approval I always wanted but never had, […]” (BL xxii). This chapter in particular differs from the standard understanding of connections, because it describes a connection that is both unbelievably harsh and exceptionally destructive. Read as a sequence, the following lines appear to compose a prayer seeking comfort through the joining/connecting with each other:
The body of the text subsumes all the words of the female body. […] To recite one’s own body, to recite the body of the other, is to recite the words of which the book is made up. The fascinations for writing the never previously written and the fascination for the unattained body proceed from the same desire (Wittig 10).
233 The passion to be inscribes her body. Until we find each other, we are alone (Rich 14).
The desire inscribed in the female body textualizes the “passion to be” (Rich 14); that is, makes it both an empirical and representative issue in which coming together or connecting depends on the other who is willing to give a part of his or her own self. Each of the two epigrams state a longing human’s discourse in its reliance on the body as the place of the self-other connection, and in its conceptualization of the autonomous body as “alone” (Rich 14) and desiring. Hale, indeed, creates within her body (and mind) a site of someone speaking within herself, confronting the other (her mother – the loved object), who does not speak in affectionate terms. Instead, Hale’s mother “[…] swears at me. […] She is very, very angry. […] She was a master, an absolute master, of verbal abuse” (BL 33, 61). And it is, in fact, this connection, one could say, of Hale’s mother’s destructive presence with her agonized daughter that I will examine in the following subsection. The interchangeability of selves, which Hale can hardly prevent from happening, indicates how notions of what constitutes the self can differ theoretically and culturally. Growing up with an abusive mother, the author comes to accept the possibility of her self being inhabited and transformed by another self; that is, her mother’s self. Indeed, as a girl who “[…] loved [her mother]” (BL xxii), she would abandon her self for the empowerment of her mother’s self–infusion. However, Hale cannot experience this infusion as magnificent reward. It rather represents the displacement of identity. Self- confident, autonomous individuals would probably not experience themselves as profoundly penetrable by an abusive mother; or, on the contrary, of the abusive mother as the medium in which they live, move, and have their being. The desire for such experience and the particular form it takes is clearly shaped by cultural, psychosocial, and linguistic factors. For example, when Hale as an adult still desires to be filled with her mother’s love, she is seen as a passive person, without organization or will, waiting to submit and to serve. As a girl, Janet has had “[…] to go home and humiliate myself as I never have before. I have to beg my mother to take me back” (BL 34). As an adult, Hale has not yet reached the required “[…] distance and a feeling of safety … that you’ve gone beyond the reach of all that had harmed you way back when” (BL 42). When her mother is on her deathbed, Janet is once again the inert person who is waiting to submit and to
234 serve, even though her mother has made it clear on several occasions that she does not even want Janet present at her funeral: “I don’t want you at my funeral cryin’ around, […]. Just stay the hell away” (BL 42). Still, the reader can make out that in her request to be submissive and subservient, Hale has focused all her will and longing on self- transformation so that she and her mother may be unified, at least through death, in love. While the plea is phrased humbly to acknowledge that such a unity comes by being “compassionate” (BL 42) alone, the author grieves for it so intensely that her self becomes defined, and not obliterated, through the process: “[…] I resent my mother. […] I really feel trapped … by my own body as well as by circumstance” (BL 37). Her wish to grasp her mother’s love, even after years of futile attempts to do so, seems to represent a culturally feminized function, especially in her acceptance of service, submission, and suffering. In patriarchal literary tradition selflessness and marginality have been culturally constructed as a woman’s place. Thus, while the abandonment of the self in other contexts, such as work and politics, defines the powerlessness of women (cf. The Personal Narratives Group 4 ff.), the ability to shift the grounds of identity from self to another’s self (her mother’s self) seems to represent the most fully empowered human condition for Hale. Numerous attempts to connect to her mother’s self come together in the author’s imitation of her mother’s thinking during the latter’s most complex human moment: the mistreatment of her daughter:
‘Here’s your goddammed pillow,’ she said, throwing it at me. […] ‘I hope you’re very comfortable,’ she said, her voice cracking with emotion. ‘I hope you remember this night forever. […] Remember this night when I’m dead and gone, when I’m six feet under.’ She was almost in tears at this point. I had to be very careful I didn’t provoke her further. I shut my eyes and lay very still. [… Because of her mother’s abusive behavior, Hale continues writing that] sometimes you obsess about death. Your own. To think your consciousness will come to an end … blackened out just like before you were born (BL 40, 41).
Having been mistreated by her mother for so many years, Hale starts to misuse her self by thoughts of death. Her mother’s ill-treatment here reverberates through its violent dimensions as Janet’s body on the border between pain and love becomes the central figure for the complex structure of the self/other relationship that shapes the author’s identity. The sick longing to connect with the experiences offered through her mother’s
235 mistreatment and the desire for the mother’s unreachable love are significant for Hale’s autobiographical essays and mark the combination of word and body as a destructive force. The author’s lifelong search for establishing a connection to her mother defines the legacy of Bloodlines in which the presence of an absent other (Hale’s mother) is an integral part of Hale’s self. For Hale, her mother’s abusive behavior lies at the boundary between activity and passivity. The structure of reception seems passive because it depends on her mother’s whims: “Sometimes her attacks came from out of nowhere” (BL 40). If one could earn a parent’s love by accepting abuse, Janet would no longer be limited by the realm of human action. Instead, she would be able to actively receive her mother’s love. This experience seems to have occurred to Janet in combination with illness: “But sometimes [when Janet is sick] Mom allows me to lie with her for a while, to lie in her arms. I’m happy then” (BB 29). So only when Janet is sick does she receive some attention from her mother. Nevertheless, it is not an everyday experience, yet it is experienced as occurring within Janet’s self in such a way that the boundaries of identity expand to include the other, to enable sensing a connection to her mother. And by desiring for the other/the mother so fervently, the experience becomes active: Janet shapes her few positive experiences with her mother by starting to write: “Sitting in that miserable storage shack, I wrote poetry, and lots of poetry” (BL 49-50), specifying what she wants to result from a loving connection to her mother, and trying to guide the pace and depth of these connections. Thus, writing poetry replaces Janet’s longing for connection to her mother over quite a long period of time during her childhood, emphasizing the closeness of passivity and activity. Intentional/abandon, pain/happiness, doubt/faith, and denial/exaltation mark the boundaries which Janet’s poetry weakens as it represents them. For each pair is by and large included under the leading couple, self (Hale)/other (Hale’s mother), which at first divides their roles in relation to passivity and activity, only to fuse them in the satisfying experience of writing poetry. Writing poetry might be regarded as a means to cover up or forget the source of Hale’s suffering, however artfully presented. Engaging in acts of creativity certainly produces inspiration, which enables the author to keep on enduring her mother’s abusive behavior. She reports that, “I didn’t even want my new poems back myself. What did I
236 want with them? I knew what they said (though I’ve quite forgotten now). The important thing was sending them out … out and out and out they went … out into the world beyond […]” (BL 51). Sending her thoughts out into the world appears to be the written reconstruction of Janet’s suffering, rather than the verbal reconstruction of it. Her creative power to write and the therapeutic role of language in her poetry are clearly an outstanding way of expressing her feelings, the anger and resentment she feels towards her mother. Janet is definitely the sufferer not of being a badly-behaved child, but of her mother’s verbal abuse. So the author’s destructive experiences are concretely turned into poetry in a way that addresses Janet’s particular problem of connecting futilely to her mother: Her poems are both physical and creative acts; the source is experienced as outside the body, yet the experience itself is profoundly embodied: feelings of abandon, of being caught up in a hopeless situation, of a longing desire for her mother’s love are not passively contemplated. Janet’s sensations are substantial enough to make her cry out occasionally, which causes her mother’s considerable consternation. Janet confesses to the reader that one day
I come home to a mother who swears. Her whole family swears. My father does not. He always hated her swearing too. She swears at me. Because I left a towel in the bathroom. Because I forgot to hang up my school clothes. Because I’m me. I decide to tell her off. She’s going to burn in purgatory, I tell her, unless she stops the swearing. For once my mother is dumbfounded. She doesn’t know what to say at first. She is very, very angry (BL 33).
So effective is Janet’s response to her mother’s swearing that the latter is speechless, which however, makes her anger grow bigger and bigger. Undoubtedly, the relation between hearing and speaking is simultaneous, as if Janet can only stage the obvious, as if she must speak up to her swearing mother. However, her audacious demeanor indicates she is creating a situation she has not fully thought about: The mother is gripped by Janet’s response, which is causing her to turn even crueler:
She gives me the silent treatment all evening. I feel strangely triumphant. […] The next morning I wake up to the sound of her singing (this is her lifelong trick when she wants to wake someone but doesn’t want to do it directly). She’s in good spirits, it sounds like. […] When she sees I’m up, she begins folding the clothes … my clothes … and putting them into the open suitcase she has sitting
237 on a chair beside the ironing board. ‘Since you’re so dissatisfied with me as your mother, you can leave,’ she tells me, closing the suitcase […] ‘Go on now. Get the hell out of here.’ […] I’m only seven years old (BL 33-34).
For Hale’s mother hearing and understanding her daughter’s words is reason enough to throw the seven-year-old girl out into the streets. The symbolism of this deed compares this woman to a calculating, devilish monster who has no scruples whatsoever. No further interpretation is necessary; the mother’s behavior is instantly understandable. The mother’s dominance and her privileged relation to dominate are based on the one thing worth doing: mistreating her daughter by throwing her out into the streets, completely unconcerned about what might happen to her child out there all on her own:
Then I wander, carrying the suitcase. Don’t know what to do. Don’t know where to go. I walk along the dirt road that runs beside the Okanagan River. Everyone knows bums sleep under the bridge that crosses that river. I can too. But what about food? […] Finally my head is aching, aching from trying to think of a plan, trying to think of ways I can survive. I sit down on the ground and cry. When I am finished, my head hurts more than ever (BL 34).
Contrast Janet’s inconceivable experience of suffering to her mother’s thoroughness in humiliating her daughter and her lack of satisfaction until the early next morning when she tells Janet to “[g]et the hell out of here” (BL34). She carefully folds her daughter’s clothes, putting them into a suitcase. This act undeniably combines wickedness and a certain degree of deceitfulness. This woman’s body is not silent at all. It seems as though Janet’s mother derives some sort of sick pleasure from degrading her daughter. In other words, female wickedness can speak itself, it is representable. When the little girl realizes that there is nothing she can do but to return home to her mother, the latter “[…] makes me admit that I broke the commandment that says ‘Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother’ when I criticized her for swearing” (BL 34). And so, Janet continues enduring the mother’s abuse longing for a loving connection to the latter. It is only in the poetry of her childhood and adolescence and later in her work as a professional writer that Hale develops a rich and flexible discourse of a happy self, of a content body, and of an identity unrecognizable in her mother’s treatment of her daughter. Still, the author has never given up the longing for a loving connection to her mother, so her final attempt to experience this kind of connection is when her mother is on her deathbed, “[…] I comfort
238 her now in her illness and helpless old age as she tells me of the cruelty inflicted upon her that she cannot forget. She sheds a tear or two for herself. I wipe them away” (BL 61). To continue to foreground the lack of connection to her mother, the author portrays her as an entirely selfish person who only thinks about herself, even when facing death. The story of Hale’s dying mother, which is embedded in the story of Hale’s quest for selfhood, reveals a story within stories that is told about who Janet is and who she might become. It offers the author’s insider account of the doubled narrative of feminine and marginal where the story a woman struggles to tell about herself is at odds with the script she receives from the white man’s culture. Due to the significance of representing her mother’s perishing body – “She has lupus, too, and ailments of old age and conditions caused by her arthritis […] and by her forced sedentariness. […] Her eyesight is so poor, she can no longer make out the images on the TV screen” (BL 58) – the body figure available to Hale composes a language of self-representation. The weakening and gradual dying of her mother’s body offers a lexicon of figures of a self that continues to dramatize the mother’s manipulative capacity embedded in the dynamic exchange between passivity and activity. Much of Hale’s own power, however, resides in her capacity to transform these imposed and internalized limitations into enabling strategies of self-invention and revision. She asks her mother:
What about yourself, Mom? You talk about how mean they [her husband, her children, …] were to you … what about the way you treated me? Do you remember how you used to send me out of the house every morning in tears? Do you recall, at all, those venomous early-morning attacks? How you would nag me as I got myself ready for school: ‘Look at you. You make me sick the way you primp and preen in front of the mirror as if you were a pretty girl. Get that idea out of your head. Look at me when I’m talking to you. Look at me, damn you. You’re not pretty. You’re not. You’re not anything!’ (BL 60)
But does Hale really play out these strategies? In a way she does by writing Bloodlines, but directly “[c]onfronting my mother was always out of the question. It was ridiculous even to consider doing it now with her in this condition” (BL 60). Hale can confront her mother only in writing. She represents the aspects of this uncommon connection in such a way as they further her own healing, which will result in a newly defined self. Hale contemplates the experience of watching her sick mother die, of the latter being a
239 prisoner to a body that suffers, from passivity to activity as her own wounded body is slowly recovering from years of abuse. With her mother’s body in pain at the center of expecting death, Hale reinvents her self by deepening the differences between her own and her mother’s beliefs. Her sudden realization of the complete lack of any kind of connection to her mother transforms her own way of thinking so thoroughly that the suffering and years of abuse represent an identity, if not the female self-portrait of a life. All there is left in the end can be summarized in a few words: “My mom is gone. In the end there are no resolutions. Only an end” (BL 86).
7.4.2 Creation
The research of Cole, Minh-ha, and Keller are reminders that issues of creation cannot be overlooked in understanding women’s lives. Perspectives on being a woman with unique abilities to create are also referenced by Mankiller, Brave Bird, and Hale. The centrality of a woman’s body to give life should certainly be given space for analysis. The authors of my primary literature, indeed, emphasize again and again the importance of a woman’s ability to create; an ability where the Word made flesh is both theme and structure. Mankiller states that
[… a]mong the Lakota, there is a very well known saying that ‘a nation is not defeated until the hearts of the women are on the ground.’ I think in some ways Rigoberta Menchu, the Nobel Peace Prize Winner – Guatemalan human-rights activist – may be a good rallying force for all of us. She represents to me the very best of what native womanhood is about (MK 250).
Considering the content of this quote, it is easy to refine the presence of the female body and its creative powers to a point of abstraction outside its own physicality. Because a native woman’s body is the focal point of faith for a whole nation’s survival, her body includes the bodies of all the faithful and they in turn compose her body (as in the analogy of what native womanhood is about and the community of believers). Acknowledging the creative ability of the female, Mankiller presents the reader with the Cherokee genesis story, in which the world her tribe has inhabited is addressed with “Mother Earth” (MK 15). Once more, there is an obvious link between the female body
240 and Mother Earth, out of which “[…] the animals, birds, and insects multiplied [were born]” (MK 15). It seems as if this genesis story emphasizes the simultaneity, non- coincidence, and creative ability of the female body and Mother Earth’s productivity. The woman and the world blend in their ability to create, creating from Mother Earth and the female body the original fusion of the same resources that created the animals, birds, and insects, and the tremendously assimilative powers which devolve from these creative powers seem to threaten to engulf the specifically female in Mother Earth. The female body in Cherokee mythology is, in fact, a complex figure signifying closure as well as the capacity for creation. These gifts of the womanly body correspond to an equally complex set of figures for representing Native American women’s identity in which the capacity to create generates intersubjectivity, and closure is revised as the refusal of certain culturally-imposed imperatives. Mankiller explains that “Europeans brought with them the view that men were absolute heads of households, and women were to be submissive to them. It was then that the role of women [and the respect for their ability to create] in Cherokee society began to decline” (MK 20). Mankiller, in fact, has carved out spaces, significantly and explicitly, in which she has been able to exchange the male-dominated Cherokee culture’s constraints for boundaries of her own choosing: Wilma definitely leads an increasingly public life and manages to combine the pattern of marriage, child-bearing and child-rearing, and domestic labor with a life in the public which results in her election to become “[…] my tribe’s first female chief” (MK 250). Thus, Wilma chooses to use her create powers to give life to her children, and in a metaphorical sense, to renew the lived experiences of her tribe, the Cherokee people, by being their leader. She can certainly be seen as a vigorous reformer who has altered the patterns of male-dominated thinking because she might have wanted to offer even further enclosure. The especially complex space in which she has dwelt is the female body, entirely being aware of its creative abilities: her own body is certainly located within and has embraced and honored the body of Mother Earth. Wilma’s life-changing experiences begin as illnesses - she is, among other health problems, diagnosed with systemic myasthenia gravis (cf. MK 228) and they have produced a discourse evolving from the body in pain, through the body on the way of recovery, to the healed body.
241 Crow Dog, also known as Brave Bird, focuses on the complexity of the female body as a source of creative power and on its significance to the Lakota as a people. The making and unmaking of Mary’s self in both her autobiographies through the medium of language appears to find its most intimate figure in the female body. Her experience of her own body is framed within the conceptual boundaries of traditional Lakota culture:
The men pay great lip service to the status women hold in the tribe. Their rhetoric on the subject is beautiful. They speak of Grandmother Earth and how they honor her. Our greatest culture hero - or rather heroine – is the White Buffalo Woman, sent to us by the Buffalo nation, who brought us the sacred pipe and taught us how to use it. […] The men kept telling us, ‘See how we are honoring you …’ […] For being good beaders, quilters, tanners, moccasin makers, and child- bearers (CD 65-66).
For the female body, which is symbolically more powerful than the male body, forms the ultimate frame within which creative events occur. To unmake the female body through forced sterilizations is to remake them in the image of patriarchy: “For a number of years BIA doctors performed thousands of forced sterilizations on Indian […] women without their knowledge or consent” (CD 79). Bodily wounds (which, for example, Mary’s sister Barbara has received) represent the white man’s own fragile and broken body. To have the female body share in the wounded, male body – by, for example, sterilization – creates an atmosphere for remembering. In the chapter “Moon Power” in Ohitika Woman, the author writes that
[… w]hen a Lakota woman says: ‘I am on my moon,’ it means that she has her period, and that has a special magic and mythical meaning for us. Being on our moon is surrounded by ancient but ever-strong beliefs, by legends and mythology, by customs going back to the dawn of time. It is the widespread belief, not only among us Sioux but among most Native American tribes, that a menstruating woman has a special, overwhelming power that nullifies the power of the men, even that of the medicine men. […] I truly believe that at the time of our monthly cycle some men are afraid of us (BB 209).
Mary puts a lot of emphasis on the female body as metaphor; as material; and as the intimate grounds of “overwhelming power” (BB 209). The female body becomes for Mary the topos where a woman’s unique abilities to create are situated. In her extremely detailed description of the Sioux Genesis story, Mary focuses on the significance of
242 female power for ancient Lakota culture in a way that foregrounds the connection between women’s ability to create and women’s bodies as one that operates along other lines than patriarchy’s imposed status of women as inferior to men. Following are some extracts of the Sioux Genesis account:
And then it was time for Tunkashila to create woman. There was no moon then. It was still the period of sacred newness. The sun […] threw it [one of his eyes] on the wind of his vision into a certain place, and it became the moon, and it was female. And on this new orb, this eye-planet, he created woman. […] ‘How will I walk over that land?’ the woman asked. So the sun created woman power and woman understanding. […] He [the sun] instructed the woman in her tasks, which she learned through her dreams, through her visions, through her special woman powers. […] Tunkashila let blood roll into the woman. She walked on the lightning, but she also walked in a blood vein reaching from the moon to the earth. This vein was a cord, a birth cord that went into her body, and through it she is forever connected to the moon. And nine months of creation were given to her. And the Spirit told her: ‘You are the caretaker of the generations. You are the birth-giver. You will be the carrier of the universe’ (BB 209, 210).
For Mary, as well as any traditional Lakota woman, the female body is unquestionably plural in its capacity to signify different levels of experience. Thus, it is certainly a cliché of interpretation to attribute to menstruating women an unclean body due to their withdrawal from the community:
It is not that menstruation is looked upon as something unclean, as in some non- Indian cultures, but that a woman’s moon power is so great that it turns all other powers upside down. A woman should not even handle food, or cook for somebody, because that might cause stomach trouble. A man should not even talk to a woman who is on her monthly cycle for it could harm him, making him break out in boils or pimples. If a man should have intercourse with a menstruating woman, it could drive him mad. Moon blood can make flowers wilt […] (BB 212).
If one reduces a menstruating woman’s body to uncleanliness, one certainly misreads as passivity their enormously active power. Doubtlessly, historians and critics have evidenced an aversion to studying native women who have always been feared during their periods with an intensity that wipes out the category of passivity and reproduces female power. But this dislike makes it even clearer that women’s lost powers during their periods are specifically a result of the white man’s influence on Native American
243 lives, a displacement of the disgust these women evoke in many white chroniclers. But with what other than the female body, do women create life, give life? Indeed, the unique contribution of women resides in that specific place of the body with its unique abilities to create. Mary also celebrates the awareness of these creative powers by focusing on the female body rather than fleeing from it: “[Because of so many forced sterilizations being performed on Native American women] I was happy at the thought of having a baby, not only for myself but for Barbara [her sister], too [on whom sterilization has been performed without the latter’s consent]” (CD 79). That is, while a pregnant woman in Lakota culture deserves honor, to the white BIA doctors she appears to be little other than someone who needs to become infertile because “[i]n their opinion, […] there were already too many little red bastards for the taxpayers to take care of. No use to mollycoddle those happy-go-lucky, irresponsible, oversexed [… Native American] women” (CD 78-79). The procedure of sterilization might be better understood as a way of crushing a woman’s original powers, depriving her of this uniquely female experience of her body. Indeed, some of the BIA doctors’ behavior towards Native women borders on the inconceivable playing out the basic motifs of genocide. So when a woman’s creative powers are gone, her desire to create goes unfulfilled and the experience of desiring borders on anguish, the hunger in the scene leaps forward. In the same way, Rich’s line quoted in the epigram, “The passion to be inscribes the body” (14) is from a poem entitled “Hunger” which repeats the vital connection between female powers and hunger in which Mary enjoys life; that is, she is happy about being pregnant, even though she is still a teenager, with neither a high-school diploma nor a job to support a baby. Denial and longing may be coupled in Mary’s vision of pregnancy, but in her visions of creative, female powers, the differences between her body and those of all (Native American) women dissolve in a joyful melting away of physical boundaries. The joy of this intense fusion is lessened only partially by the hospital doctors’ claim that Native American women are not wanted to exercise their female powers, which, however, does not weaken Mary’s determination to have her baby
[..] in the old Indian manner […]. In the real ancient tradition our women stuck a waist-high cottonwood stick right in the center of the tipi. Squatting, holding on to that stick, they would drop the baby onto a square of soft, tanned deer hide.
244 They themselves cut the umbilical cord and put puffball powder on the baby’s navel. Sometimes a woman friend was squatting behind them, pressing down on their stomach, or working the baby down with some sort of soft belt. They would rub the baby down with water and sweetgrass and then wipe it clean with buffalo grease (CD 157).
The woman friend first performs the duties of a midwife, but her and the laboring woman’s attention turns directly toward increasing intimacy during the birthing process. So far from a white doctor’s understanding of a hospital birth, equally connecting and intimate concepts dominate Mary’s descriptions of giving birth; in fact, these themes linger on and involve fulfillment and wordiness in a way men’s writing does not. Men’s personal narratives are, in fact, consistent within the larger pattern of men’s autobiography: they are organized around turning points and alterations (cf. Gunn 7ff.), whereas women’s writing certainly develops themes and patterns of becoming. Male autobiographers employ the same rhetoric of tears, fears, and nurture (cf. Gunn 7ff.), but affective experience and language is more fully elaborated by women and more central to their lived experience. Mary, in fact, hungers for and counts as great gain extraordinary incidents, such as giving birth, that mime her ancestors’ lives in the form of pain and bleeding from wounds in their bodies. Moreover, the physical marks of giving birth can certainly be applied to any woman’s birthing experience. At the same time, most women invest their ordinary experiences of hungering, pregnancy, birthing, and lactation with ever deepening spiritual experience. Mary recalls that “[…], just as the morning star came out, my water broke and I went down to the sweat lodge to pray. [..] As I walked away from the vapor hut, for the third time, […] I felt that the spirits were all around me” (CD 161). Although Mary’s understanding of spirituality might be characterized by para- mystical phenomena, her autobiographical account is grounded in the ordinariness of blood, hunger, and the body:
I did not always have lofty thoughts about traditional birth giving on my mind during the last week before I went into labor. More often I was preoccupied with much more earthly things such as getting safely to the toilet. Being in my ninth month I had to urinate frequently (CD 159).
Still, the female birthing experience appears to have a kind of authority that is inaccessible by males. In Mary’s enthusiasm about her creative abilities, she starts
245 responding intensely to the notion that the single perfect way of female creativity is open to repetition in giving birth to more than one child. So she has “[…] borne Leonard three children: two boys […], and one girl, […]” (CD 261). Thus, giving birth emphasizes the structure of women’s ability to create. When one endures the pains of labor, the promise of keeping one’s culture and traditions alive is renewed, as Mary believes when she writes: “I believe that the government tried to extinguish all visible reminders that Indians once made their stand […]. It will do them no good. They cannot extinguish the memory in our hearts, a memory we will pass on to generations still unborn” (CD 169). Because giving birth as a process focuses on enabling a generation to carry on traditions, a woman’s pain during labor becomes a part of any woman’s life taking on the efforts of pregnancy and birth. They are thoroughly nutrition to a people’s culture. In fact, in giving birth, the boundaries of Mary’s body and any woman’s body become permeable: Women are no longer separated from each other, no longer alone, no longer isolated selves. Giving birth represents a devotional act toward one’s traditions and one’s people. So Mary feels encouraged to give birth during the siege: “The people inside the village […] came to me saying, ‘Mary, you’re our last chance now to have a baby born at Wounded Knee.’ I did not want to disappoint them” (CD 160). By giving birth, Mary remembers her people’s culture as her own body renews itself. That she experiences this process so intimately and centrally further establishes her female abilities in the fusion of a creative and spiritual body. Additionally, this miraculous female body with its incredible creative abilities Mary inhabits is an effective reality of open wounds, flowing liquid, and indeed, a porous body. As the Sioux, both men and women, regularly perform the traditional ritual of the Sun Dance, for which the participants inflict wounds upon themselves by piercing their skin and flesh (cf. CD 258), the blood they lose during sun dancing is an equally resonant image for Mary as her suffering body during labor:
[After Mary’s water broke …] nothing happened until Tuesday morning when some stuff came out of me. […] The pains lasted all night. On Wednesday morning they became harder. […] My friends kept me strong. […] The pains were bad and they lasted so long. And they were so real, blotting out everything else. […] I gave birth inside a trailer house (CD 161, 162).
246 Mary’s revelation of her birth experience focuses on blood and pain, the two issues of the Sun Dancers’ wounding as well: “Leonard’s chest [for example] is a battleground of scars from more than a dozen piercings. [… He] told me, ‘I took five steps with those skulls [embedded in the flesh of his back] and it felt as if my heart was being torn out through my back” (CD 253, 257). Leonard’s scars are a permanent reminder of his suffering, for his desire “[…] to help someone dear to [… him]” (CD 253). Mary simply sees him in his wounding and bleeding. Her own menstrual blood and the blood of child birth signal women’s creative powers and by association, the symbolical link between Leonard’s blood and Mary’s blood makes the possibilities for imitation even richer. Therefore, it does not take long until the young Sioux woman participates in a Sun Dance ceremony herself:
I have sun-danced myself. I did not pierce until the second years after I began living with Leonard. At first I did not understand the whole ritual, but I felt it deeply. I understood it with my heart even though not yet with my mind. […] It made me feel good because I sensed the strong feeling between the different people […]. [Later], I pierced too, together with many other women. […] Leonard and Rod Skenandore pierced me with two pins through my arms [… But unlike during child-birth] I did not feel any pain because I was in the power. I was looking into the clouds, into the sun. Brightness filled my mind. […] I felt nothing and, at the same time, everything (CD 257, 260).
If sun-dancing with its renewing characteristics can be a wounding act (“The sun dance is a ceremony of life renewal, […]” (BB 57), wounding during child birth can be a renewing act. Thus, Mary demonstrates none of the contemporary squeamishness in the face of this flowing, liquefying, bloodied body which is so suggestively engaged in the passion of giving birth to a new body that will rise from her labor. Mary’s third child, in fact, is born during a Sun-Dance ceremony:
My third child, also a boy, was born at the Paradise in 1981. He is a sun dance baby because he came into the world during the sun dance, on July 30, the first day of purification. [… Since it is a …] ceremony of life renewal […] a new life at this, our most sacred ritual, was received as a good omen (BB 56, 57).
Correspondingly, because Mary’s creative abilities and the substance of her faith are so structured on the imitation of this particular ceremony, the Sun Dance, there seems to be
247 virtually no limit to what she will do to heal and merge with the pierced bodies of the sun dancer: She tends to all of her husband’s friends, she helps the most miserable, she is a pierced sun dancer during this “most sacred ritual” (BB 57), and she gives birth to five children altogether. In turn, Mary’s own body becomes the source of food: She exudes, for example, milk that nourishes and strengthens others; that is, her newborn babies. Although she herself appears to consume so little, her body becomes a source of food; even as the ordinary processes of eating cease - for example, during the siege of Wounded Knee the Native Americans’ food supplies are running dangerously low (cf. CD 136) - extraordinary bodily liquids, such as milk, are produced to feed Mary’s baby. By converting the limited resources of the body into nourishing substances, the Sioux woman associated with giving birth and feeding the infant reproduces her ancestor’s miraculous survival in spite of unthinkable hardship imposed upon them by the white man. In Ohitika Woman the author makes this connection explicit:
Summer Rose [Mary’s fifth child] looks very Indian, much more than I do. She looks like a genuine little full-blood. I like that. She almost makes me feel like having more kids, […]. I felt strange bringing new life into the kind of world we have but the spirit moves in strange ways. Maybe there’s a reason for babies to be born. Maybe this generation is not vanishing or dying. Maybe the earth will still renew itself as the ghost dancers of old had hoped for (BB 62).
In order for Mary to interchange part of her self; that is, her creative abilities with the mainly male sun-dancers’ suffering, gender does not seem to be perceived as a barrier. It is definitely not that gender disappears, but its ideological construction as ‘limitation’ and ‘flaw’ is escaped. The suffering during a Sun Dance ceremony offers something other than the absence of ‘male’ or ‘female’: In its anatomical maleness and its semiotic femaleness, it acts out two positions of desire. That is, one can see the desire of and for both the female and male functioning within this exclusive suffering in a way that weakens the male mode of desiring. For when Mary hungers for getting pregnant, her desire is not reducible to the desire for a male body, but persists as desire for the whole male being, so it seems that women’s bodies are changeable: They swell in pregnancy and are capable of producing milk. This is integrated fundamentally into Mary’s self. However, a large number of traditional Lakota men’s suffering, mostly during the Sun
248 Dance, also involves bodily change due to piercing, and their mediations on and visions of people in need most frequently focus in the painful changes they undergo while performing this ritualistic dance. The specific form of their suffering and spirituality seems closely linked to their piercing of a body capable of miraculous transformation: from the suffering through the bodily demonstration preceding life renewal. It seems clear that the sun dancers’ bodies, symbolically, are feminized as they bring together a woman’s suffering during child birth and wounding/bleeding, as “[i]t is still, to be sure, the ‘wound’ which psychoanalysis correctly identifies as the mark of the woman, the inscription of (sexual) difference in the female body […]” (De Lauretis 101). But what the wounds make comprehensible, in the pierced sun dancers’ bodies, is that something has happened on this site: The wounds in the dancers’ flesh contrast to a natural opening in women’s bodies – the vagina – that is regarded as the frightening site of castration. The psychoanalytic linking of woman and wound is meant to symbolize “the figure of an irreducible difference, of that which is elided, left out, not represented, unrepresentable” (De Lauretis 101). Yet, Mary certainly does not interpret this similarity as lack, but as a symbol of her empowerment. So in 1977 during a ceremony, Mary is greatly honored: “Two medicine men, Bill Eagle Feathers and Wallace Black Elk, gave me a new name – Ohitika Win, meaning Brave woman” (BB 179). What an empowerment for the self- conscious half-blood Sioux woman, who has undergone multiple child births, bleeding and wounds in order to be called Brave woman! To read the sun dancers’ suffering as both male and female, rather than neither male nor female, allows one to see how fundamentally their agony during the process whereby they become bleeding figures illustrates similarity to a woman’s birthing experience. One can also reconstruct how Mary’s learning to read the meaning of a Sun Dance ritual and performing in it informs her life as a Native American:
I could hear the spirits speaking to me through the eagle-bone whistles. I heard no sound but the shrill cry of the eagle bones. […] It was at that moment that I, a white-educated half-blood, became wholly Indian. I experienced a great rush of happiness. I heard a cry coming from my lips: Ho Uway Tinkte. A Voice I will send. Throughout the Universe, Maka Sitomniye, My Voice you shall hear: I will live! (CD 260).
249 Mary has surely learned to position herself in relation to her body and thereby to reread herself as a subject in the process of being ‘one’ with her Lakota ancestry. Thus, her choice is not between two positions of difference, in which she has learned to take her place as the ‘unrepresentable’ or the ‘repressed’ in white, male discourse, but the negation of an ‘either or dilemma’ allows for some revisionary power against the cultural role prescribed to Native American women by white society. To join Leonard, a Lakota medicine man, to choose the community of traditionalists, and to invest desire in learning about ancient Lakota culture involves a change in social reality; for the gradual change of Mary’s standing in Lakota society is largely defined by her spiritual experiences and the ways in which this culture has come to understand that fact. Since a woman’s body is a body that nurses the hungry, so one can read the sun dancers’ ambitions in a way that they also try to feed the starving by inflicting wounds upon themselves. Once again, this connection between a woman’s body and the sun dancers’ bodies may be a natural one. When the dancers’ physicality and their suffering are mentioned, the author seems to link them to the symbolization of woman as flesh, and woman’s body as food. The connection is most explicit at the climax of a Sun Dance when the dancers become food – in a symbolical way - for the people who they try “to help” (CD 253), their bodies behave as the nurturing female body does: “[…] Indians give their own flesh, year after year, to help others” (CD 253). The connection between Mary’s suffering during childbirth and men’s suffering during a Sun Dance ritual must be situated within an appropriate frame that could verify the woman’s pain as authentic. The need for a witness that characterizes women’s autobiography has its roots in the discourse I have been describing. To witness to one’s own suffering is to be certain; to hear the report is to be in doubt. The doubt of others, particularly of men, amplifies the suffering of those struggling to bring their experience into language. Therefore, Mary, more so than Wilma, is driven by the need to verify the source of pain as truly intense rather than mild because the danger of woman’s painfully intense experience seems to lie in its accessibility to exaggeration and in its powers of deception, since woman might generally be seen as more susceptible both to overstatement and the inherent dangers it poses. Once the painful experience’s authenticity can be confirmed, for example through a midwife’s account who is present
250 during the birthing experience, then the presence of a woman’s creative powers can be read in the visible alteration of her body. Thus, the material fact of the female body in tremendous pain offers the proof of an inner and invisible, but exceptionally painful experience, as does the sun dancers’ experience. Mary’s tormented body presents a kind of fact on the frequently underrepresented significance of women’s creative powers, which result in one of the most excruciating experience - child birth. Because expressing pain is a specifically human act, the body experiencing pain from a source such as birthing is level with the sun dancers’ pain as the sufferers mime their ancestors’ agony during this ritual. The tension between physical pain (the body in extreme need) and spiritual escape (the sun dancers’ bodies redeemed by and absorbed into their ancestors’ bodies) marks the site of creative abilities as the gathering line of both pain and joy. Along this seam Mary’s concept of identity in joy appears to be articulated. For pain and joy are certainly connected throughout the crucial concept of child birth as well as throughout the sun dancers’ salvation of people in need; while salve means health or wholeness, it certainly results from Christ’s agony on the cross. This ambivalence is condensed in a scriptural passage often cited as testimony to God’s love: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). God’s love is figured in the act of handing over his child to unimaginable pain from which Christ emerges as the image of salvation. Suffering unimaginable pain during a sun dance ritual certainly equals the Christian God’s love as the Lakota ancestors’ offspring are also born under excruciating pain from which sun dancers emerge as the image of salvation. This gift of salvation, however, seems to be loaded with levels of sacrifice and suffering that are not lost on those for whom the belief in them offers a suitable model of identity. The relationship between pain and joy occurs as the imagination fuses the suffering sun dancers’ selves with the image of the sick, the helpless, or the needy during the performance of this ritual. The identification appears to release pain into possibility. The limitation of the Sun Dance ritual is fully enacted if the person being prayed for, while the dancers are suffering from pain, is healed. The suffering dancers symbolically merge with the sick person at every point along the continuum even if they succumb to utmost pain themselves. In this shared experience, the suffering dancers experience their pain within a context that offers
251 healing and recovery as its closing frame. The promise of closure seems to also demonstrate the temptation of imitation because the person healed has not only symbolically joined the Lakota dancers, but also his ancestors in their maltreatment at the hands of the white tormentors. To sum these thought up, one might say that the self- torture a Lakota undergoes during a Sun Dance ritual is equal to the pains experienced during child birth. It seems that during birthing the woman also merges with a broken or suffering body (her ancestors’ bodies). Through her suffering she is able to give new life in remembrance of her people and their ancestors. Mary, indeed, receives Lakota blessings for being a creator:
When the baby was born I could hear the people outside. They had all come […] and when they heard my little boy’s first tiny cry all the women gave the high- pitched, trembling brave-heart yell. […] and I really thought that I had accomplished something for my people. And that felt very, very good, like a warmth spreading over me. […] They wrapped my baby up and laid him beside me. They brought in the pipe and we prayed with it, prayed for my little boy […] (CD 162, 163).
Mary becomes aware of what she has done for her people: Her pains unite with her ancestors’, forever changing her life: “As I looked at him I knew that I was entering a new phase of my life and that things would not, could not ever be the same again” (CD 163). Because women bear children and carry the greatest responsibility for rearing children, creation – the choice to create or not – is, indeed, an issue for all women. Janet Hale, for example, chooses to use her creative abilities: She gives birth to a boy and a girl. Unlike Mankiller’s and Brave Bird’s detailed description of their pregnancies, labor and child-rearing, Hale does not go into any details, even though she appears to be happy to have “my boy” (BL 98). On a trip to Idaho with her son and her father, the author visits the Coeur d’Alene Indian reservation where she lived on and off during her childhood years. Listening to her son’s singing, Hale, for the first time ever, starts to link herself and her child to her ancestry:
He [Hale’s son] began, as we sailed along the highway heading east, to sing like a flute. Dad told him his flute sounded beautiful, and it did. […] My little boy kept up his flute for a long while, an hour or more. It was a happy flute, but
252 subtle, too, and full of emotional intensity. This was the first time I thought about connections to people who had come before, connections to the land – about ancestral roots that predated the white society that had superimposed itself onto North America.
The more perfectly her son’s singing fits his mother’s desire for it, the more it appears visited upon her by an interest in her ancestry, her bloodlines. The visions which follow her son’s singing are all “[…] about my posterity … of the possibilities of my own bloodline continuing through the ages” (BL 103). As Hale grows older these visions approach an almost obsessive desire to investigate her ancestry. To interpret this fixation as a gift from her offspring enables her to control the capacity of the fixation to hurt. It is, in fact, her children who appreciate the place of their origin more than their mother does:
A summer day in 1976. My son and daughter (they are twelve and five) are swimming at Lake Coeur d’Alene. They’ve only known the San Francisco Bay area before now, the only swimming they’ve done has been in a crowded municipal pool. Both are taken with this area: the mountains, clear lakes, evergreen trees – the plentitude of space (BL 163).
All of a sudden Hale can image pain, all the pain that she has suffered throughout her life, as a blessing. That this interpretation is chosen by Hale individually rather than imposed upon her makes all the difference. One can argue that she is surely trapped by an ideology that links suffering with pain, and, indeed, she has experienced horrible pain at the hands of her own mother, and that only by watching her own children does she actually become aware of her own suffering as part of her ancestors’ anguish, thus developing curiosity for her roots, and beginning to understand her own suffering as something beneficial. Yet, her revision of suffering from pain to blessing is experienced as choice to the extent that she believes to be chosen despite her unworthiness (which is a result of her mother’s ill- treatment of her daughter) to be distinguished by pain and suffering. Through the gift of having children, Hale is lifted out of the miserable world of white people - Hale has lived in San Francisco for many years (cf. BL 91ff.) – into a visionary realm. Thus, there is a kind of correspondence between the physical circumstances and the way to healing. Hale has, indeed, merged her pain with a process that could lead to joy by way of observing her offspring as they enjoy their ancestors’ homeland. It seems though that for the author chosen by her own children to receive these favors, there are no ways out but only ways
253 into and through the experience of suffering. Pain empties awareness of purpose and progress; there is only the growing moment of agony released from all boundaries. Pain forces the past and the future to move away to the edges of awareness; however, by seeing her present experience within a continuum, by imagining a purpose in the pain, she chooses and starts controlling a totalizing and obliterating phenomenon that has shaped her life. Detailed descriptions of her ancestors’ lives mixing her own pain with that of her ancestors’ abound. Indeed, the promise at work in hoping to find some sort of connection to her past saves the chapters on her family’s history from their purely factual aspect. States that are not, on the one hand, available in the natural world (visions and dreams), or are meaningless as natural states (misery, pain) are invested with meaning and transformed into sensations of hope:
[…] I [Hale] had a dream about a turtle. (We are the last family left of the Turtle clan). A dream, in other words, about the family. […] The dream was saying that our family only appeared to be dead, stepped on, broken into million little pieces. The family – or the power of the family – lives on in some form and is strong. The dream didn’t make any sense. It was only an expression of my longing. My unconsciousness would not, after all these years, accept what I knew to be true. The family isn’t dead, it said. Give it up, I said. Let it go (BL xxxi).
However, thoughts of presence and abundance become ones of absence and lack where the lack of family ties and familial support/comfort form occasions for Hale’s niece, for example, to fill up the needy aunt:
My niece, at thirty-nine, was a person who had developed herself, learned through a long process to trust her own perceptions. We talked about the family and how dysfunction begets dysfunction. […] She told me how she and some of her siblings discussed their own healing, their desire to break the cycle. She and some of the others made efforts to love one another and reach out to family members. ‘The family is so important,’ she said. ‘[…] I’m just going to keep on reaching out’ (BL xxxii-xxxiii).
With this constructive approach, with these healing thoughts, the niece’s view is not at all reduced to mere pain, or experience without meaning. Thus to be influenced by her niece becomes an act the more precious in its choice of gift: the niece’s very encouragement and her positive outlook. To write about this attitude as a way of defining one’s identity,
254 as Hale certainly attempts to do, is to make visible and permanent an invisible experience. Unfortunately, it does so only in the most difficult situations:
Once I [Hale] longed to belong to the family I came from. Not anymore. I’m one of its broken-off pieces now. But this niece and others were trying to make what’s left of it strong again. I would like to believe the family has the power to regenerate itself. I told my niece about the dream I’d had that was about the family, the dream of the turtle (BL xxxiii).
In her heart Hale knows that her self is founded on a single, exemplary life and does not alter even in the spectacle of her niece’s optimistic view. The niece’s seemingly miraculous attempts at mending the family, however, set the stage for Hale’s quest for her roots. So full an example is this niece, so successful at influencing the aunt that Hale needs never again feel lonely and alienated. Nevertheless, in this balancing act, the niece holds Hale’s world in tension. Thus, the imitation of the niece’s approach is a difficult road and not simply an easy voyage to liberation. The way to her roots seems clearer after her odyssey because now Hale has newly-discovered knowledge, an example. At the same time, however, any connection to her family/her ancestors/her homeland is thereby inherently doomed to fail from the start; thus, it is difficult not to feel estranged, as Hale does, even after she has delved into her past:
‘You know, I haven’t lived here since I was ten. And I never can again.’ I can never live here, where I came from. My sisters are here now, the oldest one and the youngest one and almost all their children and almost all their grandchildren. Our ancestral land, where they were born, but I was not, is their home; it can never be mine. I will remain, as I have long been, estranged from the land I belong to (BL 185).
For Hale, it is, indeed, unattainable to feel any kind of connection to either her family or her ancestry. But by being a mother, her own children, especially her daughter, are there to help her deal with this inescapable feeling of estrangement:
‘What are you thinking about, Mom?’ ‘The day we buried my father. It was so cold. So very, very cold.’ ‘I know. And you had no coat of your own.’ ‘That’s right. I didn’t even have a coat of my own.’ ‘Mom?’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘Mom, I’m glad you got out of that. Away from them, I mean’ (BL 185).
255 The way to a happier self appears to be easier for Hale after having broken ties with her family; now she has her own family, a daughter, who is an advocate, a mediator, and an example. At the same time, however, any longing for reconnecting to her family seems futile. What one can see from the preceding discussion of estrangement is how very rich and flexible an object of desire this longing for connection to a past, to roots, can be. For in contrast to what one might expect to follow in the way of conventional practices from the narrowness of orthodox views, Hale’s and her daughter’s expansively body and mind construct a tremendously varied body and mind of response. As Hale’s focus of confidence, her daughter’s encouragement forms the mother’s standard for judging the satisfactoriness of not wanting or being able to be part of her family. Thus, not wanting to be part of her family and her ancestry anymore anchors the author to the dynamic for loss and absence simultaneously inscribed as presence: memories help Hale at first to construct a bond with her roots because memories are certainly seen as a human’s device to reconnect, to remember; yet, memories soon come to be unfavorable to Hale, for they have never really been her goal. They offer less and less satisfaction for Hale’s search for identity. In fact, they may draw her away from her appropriate imagination of self: a life worthwhile living for her children and a job as a self-sufficient author and lecturer. Hale concludes: “ ‘This is where … the closest thing I ever had to a home. This is where my memories begin.’ It should be different. But it isn’t. ‘Yes, it’s all right. I’m glad I got away from them and out of all that too.’ It’s getting late. Our journey home, our visit, is over” (BL 185). So little does Hale’s journey back to her roots offer in the way of satisfaction that she is driven further into her present life for comfort and the creation of a satisfactory self, which does definitely include her children. And the images formed from her memories must certainly be revised as metaphors, symbols, and signs of her family and ancestry rather than as memories in themselves for fear that Hale’s world might be experienced falsely as providing a substitute for the absence of familial life and an identification with an ancestry where it should evoke, painfully, the family’s presence. The act of remembering takes place in the realm of memories, of course, with no act apart from its memories. The remembrance is not only detectable in its creation of memories – that is, in its making up – but also as it invests available memories (those
256 supplied by Hale’s upbringing) with meaning. Therefore, memory can also be an imaginative act: for Hale, the remembered family member may be a disappointment compared to the living person, but compared to an absent and dead family member, the memory is vibrant and more present than the absent family member. Absence appears to be understandable in the dimension of loss and is certainly not discernible by the senses. The two-dimensionality of memory seems to recover some of that loss as constitutive, as a creative act of the remembered family member. Hale’s ancestors must be dead, absent, to be reborn in her mind; thus, their rebirth in Hale’s mind depends on their absence. Remembering, therefore, is an act of making them up, like imagining, and certainly no longer passive. The activity of transforming absence into presence is a project that for Hale turns out to be heavily-burdened with loss. Nevertheless, Hale’s quest for a self, an identity and her creative abilities to compose Bloodlines overlap as their dynamics of memory and the interpretation of self and other recall prosopopeia: autobiography’s domain. Summarizing this chapter, I reach the conclusion that as women Mankiller, Brave Bird, and Hale hold the future in themselves. This is definitely a great gift; they seem to be blessed to be women. It is surely their and any other woman’s very being. Because women bear children and carry the most responsibility for nurturing children, creation is surely an issue for all women.
7.4.3 Oppression
“Women are oppressed because they are women and because their perceptions are seen as worthless,” writes Schaef (93). Mankiller’s, Brave Bird’s, and Hale’s lived experiences offer evidence (cf. chapter 7.3.4 of this dissertation) that Native American women are oppressed as women and as a culturally distinct group of persons. Stereotypes have certainly limited Indian women more than any other group in the entire United States. There is definitely a need for (Native American) women to be vigilant and watchful about what is happening to them as women, because oppression can be devastating to them.
257 7.4.4 Voice
The research of Belenky and her colleagues has found women struggling to have their voices heard. Gilligan has written about voice as one of the distinctive differences between men and women. Many feminist literary critics have reshaped women’s thinking about human experiences and have required females to take a different view of women’s moral development, their personality development, and decision making. In the study of literature scholars have started to ask why the canon was dominated by a small group of white men, and why some forms of genres were valued above others throughout the centuries. Traditionally, knowledge, truth, and reality were constructed as if men’s experiences were normative, as if being human equaled being male (cf. Personal Narratives Group 3). Hale, more so Brave Bird, and above all Mankiller struggle hard to have a voice. Mankiller, for example, believes that Native American women can have a voice by letting other women, especially younger Indian women, know they can achieve anything they strive for. And they are not alone as long as they have role models, mentors, other women that they can identify with and relate to (cf. MK 233ff.). Mankiller’s autobiography seems to be part of the larger effort to undermine this white male construction that being human meant being male for many centuries. She strives to create a more inclusive, more fully human (Cherokee) concept of social reality. This process of reconstruction definitely challenges what has been defined and taught as the common intellectual and cultural heritage (cf. Personal Narratives Group 3). Mankiller clearly voices that this heritage has excluded her and her people’s experience. Throughout her autobiographical account, Mankiller argues that what has been presented as an objective view of the world is recognized by women as being the limited and limiting perspective of a particular gender, class, and race. So when Mankiller first gets selected “[…] to serve as the first woman deputy chief in Cherokee history, […] one of my supporters put it, at long last a daughter of the people had been chosen for high tribal office” (MK 242). With this newly-gained voice, Wilma announces: “Women can help turn the world right side up. We bring a more collaborative approach to government. And if we do not participate, then decisions will be made without us” (MK 242). And it is exactly this listening to women’s voices, analyzing women’s writings, and learning from
258 women’s experiences that have been crucial to the feminist reconstruction of one’s understanding of the world. Since feminist theory is grounded in women’s lives and in society, women’s personal narratives are basically main documents for feminist research (cf. Personal Narratives Group 4). And Mankiller’s autobiography does, indeed, present and interpret a woman’s life experience. The very act to giving voice to a whole life surly requires considering the meaning of the individual and social dynamics which seem to have been most important in shaping Mankiller’s, but also Brave Bird’s and Hale’s self- portraits. Both Mankiller and Brave Bird, less so Hale, address the dynamics of gender, which, according to the Personal Narratives Group (cf. 4), emerge more obviously in the autobiographical narratives of women than in those of men. Indeed, for the autobiographers that I have studied, their life stories are told with many references to the dynamics of gender. Their autobiographical accounts seem to be stories of how they negotiate their gender status both in their daily lives and over the course of a lifetime. Mankiller and Brave Bird, in particular, voice that one can understand their lives only if one considers gender roles and gender expectations. Neither Mankiller, Brave Bird nor Hale have accepted the norms; rather they defied them, writing their own personal life on a background of defying gender roles and gender expectations. If women’s autobiographies both present and interpret the impact of gender roles on women’s lives, they are really appropriate documents for revealing several aspects of gender relation; the construction of a gendered self-identity - “The beauty of society today is that young Cherokee […] women can pursue any professional field they want” (MK 246) - the relationship between the individual and society in the creation and maintenance of gender norms – “True tribal tradition recognizes the importance of women. Contrary to what you’ve probably read in history book, not all tribes were controlled by men” (MK 250) – and the dynamics of power relations between women and men – “Many tribal groups do not have women in titled positions, but in the great majority of those groups, there is some degree of balance and harmony in the roles of men and women” (MK 250). To this one might add that since all women’s autobiographies describe a process of construction of the self (cf. Personal Narratives Group 5), Mankiller’s and Brave Bird’s accounts are rich sources for the exploration of the process of gendered self-identity: both authors conclude that their selves have always
259 been with them, waiting to be discovered, uncovered, only to turn out to be relatively stable. Mary finishes Ohitika Woman with the following words: “There is an old Lakota song that begins: ‘To be a man it is difficult, they say.’ Well, to be a Native American woman is even harder. […] But I’m still fighting. I try to be sincere, try to hold on to the medicine, try to make my kids understand what it means to be Indian” (BB 274). Mankiller’s concept of a stable identity includes the Cherokee’s notion of the communal self:
For we are people of today – people of the so-called modern world. But first and foremost, and forever, we are also Cherokees [because an individual’s identity never …] stands apart and alone from the rest. My own story has meaning only as long as it is part of the overall story of my people. For above all else, I am a Cherokee woman (MK 14, 257).
Hale’s gendered self-identity, on the other hand, is a construction of the mind and continually shifting. And yet, her autobiographical essays are verbal reconstruction of developmental processes, they seem to serve the reader interested in exploring the relations between Hale’s development of subjectivity, the acquisition of ancestral knowledge, and the development of the author’s distinctive feminine identity, which seems to neither accept family values nor ancestral culture:
Had I [Hale] been able to choose – if I could have passed for white – I wonder if I would have. Would I have gone far, far away from my beginning … let my heart forget all I was reminded of today: my poor, transient childhood, my mother and sisters, my alcoholic father and what I am connected to through them […]: my homeland and my history, my roots (BL 187).
In my attempt to interpret these three women’s lives, the exploration of women’s voice seems to stem from a deep desire to tell a good story for themselves, but also for others. These autobiographers manage to construct exceptional self-portraits, including literary and cultural models which help shape women’s life stories. They successfully voice the social and historical conditions affecting their life experiences, and the family relations in which their lives develop. Most importantly, however, they include the relationship between the individual’s life story and the particular community/tribe. By giving their lived experience a voice, these authors reveal their life stories as part of a
260 project to liberate themselves as Native American women subjects. This can be done by liberating themselves from white, male history by finding authentic voices which are able to liberate their texts from silence. In order to do this, Mankiller, for example, looks at and challenges what the ‘real historians’ have been doing and what they have been failing to do with Cherokee history. All three women’s autobiographies evidently manage to represent and build subjectivities which give meaning to an American Indian woman’s voice. It appears as if these outstanding women provide an entirely different lens through which to view their life stories. Each lens makes the single lives visible from a different angle of vision. As I viewed the complexity of images arising from these multiple perspectives, I questioned what it was I was seeing. The answer came to me in that striking way in which the obvious reasserts itself into conscious thought, and with the answer came my final subchapter title: ‘Voice’. I had been drawn to Native American women’s autobiographical narratives because I knew that fundamental voices were embedded and reflected in these women’s experiences as revealed in their life stories. Nevertheless, I am not talking about a voice or the voice, because that would merely represent a reductionist approach that would have me determine the ‘voice’ of a woman’s words only in terms of their exact factual accuracy, the representativeness of her social circumstances, or the reliability of her memory when I tested it against ‘objective’ sources, such as history books. I am talking about voices, a definitely plural concept, meaning to include the multiplicity of ways in which a Native American woman’s life story reveals and reflects significant features of her conscious experience, creating from it her fundamental reality. As an interpreter I wanted to hear these voices and to understand them. I wanted them to somewhat inform my own reality, and to learn what I could from the experiences of other women, particularly Native American women. These voices are undoubtedly necessary to this work, and really to any woman’s life. These Native American women’s voices turned out to be so vital to my comprehension of the nature of what I was attempting to do: give these women’s voices an interpretive voice. Like my initial themes in this chapter, this one ‘bleeds’ into the other three in most significant ways. Nevertheless, a Native American woman’s voice reflects my conclusions about what has opened my mind in the interpretation of these women’s autobiographical accounts, even while I certainly remain conscious of the fact that any investigative
261 themes always exist in relationship with one another. Therefore, each analysis that precedes centers on these indigenous women’s personal narratives seen from my own angle of vision. Taken together, they suggest a different way of seeing, thinking, being than the one that has been imposed upon women by white, male critics for centuries.
262 8. Conclusion
This dissertation explores female self-portraits in contemporary Native American autobiographical writing. Generally, the autobiography of a writer is always in an ambiguous category because of the inevitable entanglement between his life and his work. Although it is assumed that he will approach life somewhat ‘creatively’, his life story is normally classified along with other memoirs as its own genre. Traditional autobiographical narratives are customarily written by male authors whose life story is considered true due to the autobiographical reference that happens in an identity between the author, narrator, and protagonist, not by a resemblance to the real. Defining autobiography in terms of identity rather than resemblance is what enables the reader to distinguish it on the one hand from biography and on the other from the novel. To be true to life it would have to include all facts in any remote way connected with the author and his family at least as far removed as his grandparents, and these facts would have to be reported entirely without any emphasis that might suggest a preferred interpretation to the reader. Since such documentary completeness is definitely impossible, it must be replaced by some system of selection. In traditional autobiography, therefore, this selection includes whatever seems ‘important’ to the male person writing, so events will be included on the basis of the author’s individual interest or importance. In chapter 2, “The Subject of Men’s Autobiography”, I argue that whenever traditional autobiography is discussed, the terms of discussion have been derived from men’s autobiography. This is not to say that the differences between men’s and women’s autobiography line up historically without variation, but gender as a category of self- representation does construct the self in history, in the text, and in real life. While the significance of an ‘other’ may characterize women’s autobiographical writing in general, the reader/interpreter should attend to life as a cultural space inhabited differently by women and men, and differently by women across history and ethnicity. Male autobiographers, for example, clearly locate their sense of self in their momentous position in public life and thus, link self-knowledge to a male consciousness that transcends everything. The male writer’s life is transfigured into the text, his mere existence into meaning and truth, wholeness and unity. Furthermore, male autobiography
263 charts growth through a succession of turning points, and there is a tendency in men’s autobiography to structure the text as a time line, framed rather magnificently within a supernatural struggle between good and evil. In this ‘drama’, the self functions as both the contested ground and the main actor. On the surface, I may have wished to group male autobiographers and Mankiller, Brave Bird, and Hale together and flatly assert that their lives are not really all that different. But in the study of autobiography it appears essential to attend to the differences that produce and are produced by gender, because specific representation of the self and the life are so closely tied to the available models of selfhood in a specific culture. Language shapes the model and is therefore interpreted as both the site of resistance to the model’s limits and the structure in which self-revision evolves. Male writers tend to organize the energies of self-representation differently from women due to the different channel available for those energies (the high ranking position of a politician, for example). Since women have long been excluded from public life, female autobiography is seen as not interesting and legitimate. In fact, it is reduced to the area of the private, displaying a discontinuous, fragmented, often interrupted style. This discontinuous, interrupted nature of women’s experiences is seen as a female form of autobiographical expression. For that reason, women have always had to defend their efforts at autobiography, their efforts to have a self that is worth a story because women have had no speech/voice and the self has been defined as male. Thus, my choice to examine Native American women autobiographers’ writing as the primary texts for a discussion of female self-portraits is consistent with how women’s autobiographical attempts have commonly been viewed, although that perspective has recently altered. The politics of self-representation are firmly rooted in the historically changing epistemology of the self; self-representation unavoidably reflects those shifts, but whenever such epistemic change happens, as in the historical rise in the value of the individual, the definition of that difference has been derived from looking at the lives and works of men. Especially, feminist literary critics have justly questioned the degree to which the historical and generic categories that construct this epistemology represent the specificity and complexity of how women use discourse, regard historical change, interpret philosophical issues, or create art. Because I think the answer to that problem marks only the beginning of a way to pose other questions, I have interpreted the problem
264 of self-representation in Native American women’s writing mainly as a situational one. For this reason, I have analyzed the autobiographies of three indigenous women outside the categories with which male autobiographies are usually investigated by applying the promising practices familiar with the body of women’s and in particular, of Native American women’s writing. A discussion of autobiography appears to always face in two directions simultaneously: Toward the horizon of the other’s life one wishes to study and toward the horizon that marks the limits of one’s own life. Events have a history, as do ideas and practices, but one’s own epistemology defines the critical lens through which one views the past. Thus, there is always a perceptive distance between what one looks at how one sees it due to the immersion in one’s own past. I do think women’s and men’s autobiographical writing should be kept apart because of the obvious differences between men’s and women’s lived experiences. To focus, however, especially on gender as a category of analysis entails, primarily, a focus on reading practices evolved from studying the subject of traditional men’s autobiography. So in chapter 4, “Language is Privative – Language is Present”, I present two innovative theories about male autobiography. James Olney tries to differentiate the self in the text, which is constituted linguistically by means of metaphor, from the self in history. The autobiographer literally takes on the role of God and creates, out of the language of autobiography, a metaphor of self that is able to produce a new order. Paul de Man, on the other hand, postulates that the subject cannot simply be there in the text. It is, in fact, the reader who constructs it as he reads. The self implicit in this theory of language is undoubtedly a linguistic structure which differs from the historical self, and it inhabits the text as metaphor. The historical self – that is, the real self of the signature – can be seen as a metaphor for truth. The truth of such a doubled self, that is reducible to and not compatible with reality, is both offered up and moves away into the language that seems to hold it. The desire to locate the real self in autobiography is, above all, a consequence of its rhetoric: The self and language are privative, for they generate and deny the very thing they cannot provide. Additionally, autobiography is, for de Man, prosopopeia, which he defines as an apostrophe. It is an absent, dead, or inanimate object in which there is a lot of power though. Visually one can imagine this function as follows: faces speak, so prosopopeia is the making visible and invisible of faces, and because a voice speaks from this face, prosopopeia involves
265 giving and taking away voice as well. Hence, language is deceptive; it leads the reader away from true thought, which it only represents through a language of metaphor, of prosopopeia. The language one uses is silent/privative and it cannot itself speak. And yet, humans depend on it and are therefore, perpetually deprived of a voice. While de Man uses a metaphor of death, Olney chooses a metaphor of life: An autobiography is a tribute to the self it constructs, bringing the good from the world into the text. The self can move between the text and the world, made whole by language. Nevertheless, neither Olney’s nor de Man’s concepts are pleasing for feminist autobiographical theory. What is definitely missing in both Olney’s and de Man’s theories is the engendering of the subject and the inclusion of women, preferably Native American women as well, into the canon. The self is unquestionably coded as male. Chapter 5, “The Origin of the Word”, is sensitive to the task of understanding how woman has been constructed subordinate to man by using the two quite different stories of origin as they are told in the Genesis account of creation. In this account of creation the generative power of language is asserted and offers a male alternative to giving birth by means of names that signify identity. In identifying speaking with creating there is patriarchal authority located, which informs not only Genesis, but the Bible as a whole. While the first creation story tells the believer that men and women are created equally, the second story of origin places woman in a subordinated position in relation to man because she is created from one of man’s ribs. While man’s life is given by God, is planned and divine, woman is belated, just supplementing an already perfect creation. Even though there is an entirely arbitrary and symbolic correspondence between belated bodies and belated words, female speech concurrently limps behind male speech. Therefore, it is Adam, not Eve, who has the authority to name, whereas woman is linked with wounds because she is created out of man’s rib. Since the Word is given to man, the second Genesis story of creation is written for the mere purpose to justify women’s subordinate status, to prove women have no voice, and to construct subordination that works through the separation of female and male words and bodies. Gender is constructed as the site of difference. Woman is made the ‘other’: her body is sinful; she has to suffer greatly during her lifetime, so she is flawed and transgressive. Her speech is dangerous, her words and body are deceptive. This ‘myth’ of creation, however, is so
266 powerful that it also justifies the place of woman in male narrative in which she neither owns her name nor her self. The patriarchal epistemology that presents male experience as representatively human has certainly constructed language as privative for women. Nevertheless, Mankiller, Brave Bird, and Hale, marginalized in a double way, as women and as affiliates of a minority, have successfully managed to find ways of portraying their lived experiences as discourses of remembering and self-restoration written against the language that is privative and the language that is present, which has, for centuries, guaranteed women’s absence from the canon. My own conclusion, cut off from male autobiographical discourse and interpretation and suspended before the conclusion of the final chapters of this dissertation by a dash, - for w o m e n, is in itself a valorization of and a dedication to the feminine that emerges in the autobiographies of my primary literature. The analysis of these life stories is representative of the feminist project devoted to writing this dissertation: (Native American) women’s voices erupt in a genre in which one has been accustomed to minimizing their mere presence, to not giving them a voice. My concern in chapter 6, “New Voices: Native American Women Telling their Lives”, is with a selection of Native American women’s writers and with aspects of Native American women’s autobiography. Mankiller, Brave Bird, and Hale accept the hybridization of parts of their traditional cultures with the Euro-American dominant culture. Consequently, they write their autobiographical accounts in English. In fact, Native American autobiographies are the result of a fusion of customary models of Euro- American autobiography with a traditional Native American understanding of self and history. The self is, in fact, the soul of indigenous nations. It provides the foundation for both individual and tribal identity, and with land in place, this provides a sense of security. It is the warehouse of indigenous knowledge. The Native American self is, therefore, not individual, but merely exists in relation to others. Contemporary Native American autobiographies replace self-centered monologue with a polyphonic autobiographical discourse by bringing together voices from the past, present, and the future. As Mankiller keeps on mentioning throughout her autobiography, these different voices do not establish an individual’s but a collective life history. This communal self participates within the tribe, meaning that first come family, the clan, tribal members, and
267 only then the individual. Furthermore, one’s self is placed in relation to the environment, the land, and the cosmos because every creature is part of a living whole and all parts of that whole are related to one another due to their participation in the whole being. The Native American self, however, is not only defined by community and land, but also by time and place. An indigenous concept of time means shifting back and forth between the past, the present, and the future. Time itself is connected to place, which makes the indigenous self dynamic, meaning it is in process, not fixed. Native American nations and societies have been steeped in oral traditions: ceremonies and speeches that go with it; songs; laws; histories. Because these instructions are oral, indigenous people have always been a generation or two away from losing their voices altogether. Indian women more so than Indian men. That is why it is so crucial to give Native American women the tools with which they can make themselves heard. Native American women’s autobiography proves to be an efficient apparatus to further this goal: the survival of the tribal culture, inside, outside, and along mainstream culture. The key for survival is, indeed, the continuation of traditions and ceremonies. As the oral traditions have provided their own dynamics for continuation and survival, so does Native American women’s autobiography ensure the contemporary indigenous writer a way to ensure her people a future. Native American women’s autobiography is a combination of Euro-American models of autobiography and different versions of new interpretations and cultural configurations of autobiographical writings and should be analyzed according to its process of creation rather than as an established genre. So what are the most essential characteristics of Native American women’s autobiography? First, it shares some basic characteristics with oral forms, which are stress on event, awareness of the sacredness of language, concerns with landscape, affirmation of cultural values, and tribal solidarity. Second, it is the element of individualism that makes Native American women’s autobiography innovative. Third, native women’s autobiographers focus on private relationships; they carefully examine their personal growth, while concentrating on domestic details, on family difficulties and on close friends. Next, these autobiographers include elements of historic, ceremonial and social importance in their narratives as well as episodes from everyday life, such as birthing, naming, puberty, marriage, and motherhood. Last but not least, these writers
268 display a strong sense of connectedness of all things, of an awareness of life’s flow. As a result, Native American women’s autobiography offers different answers to the question of what it means to be an American Indian woman. All of the autobiographies of my primary literature have turned out to be literary and personal efforts at exploring problems of cultural tradition, of self-identity, of historical change, and of individual achievement. They are authentic self-portraits of struggling, enduring, and life-affirming Native American women. So chapter 7, “The Lived World of Native American Women”, is dedicated to analyzing women’s lives who must deal with being marked as ‘other’ in the present United States: as religious minority, ethnic anomaly, national outsider, and as women in a deeply entrenched patriarchy. These oppositions set up a number of internal splits between individual and family, family and tribe, past and present, origin and destination, that are able to be traced in the autobiographies of my primary literature. Through the examination of four autobiographical texts by three Native American women writers, I explore the ways in which each problematizes issues of difference and identity. Both the Cherokee and the Sioux people are nations in which participation in tribal affiliation is determined through knowledge of traditional customs and language, and in which the composition of this identity is conceived of as foundational to the strength and survival of the tribe. Analyzing Mankiller’s, Brave Bird’s, and Hale’s autobiographies I use the texts to show how (auto)biographical information informs not only the structure and narrative of the autobiographies, but also language itself. I study representations of the self through language, drawing on an alteration of the Translation Model to examine issues of self- representation, tribal affiliation and subjectivity. The search for themes embedded in the autobiographical narratives of these women’s lived experiences enables me to identify what is unique to each autobiographer and what is shared among them. Wilma Mankiller’s description of herself as a Native American woman, as a Cherokee woman, as a woman, and as a person shows her to be a prized woman because both in her people’s past and in her family’s tradition women have always been highly valued. Therefore, she manages to be successful in both worlds, the white man’s and the Cherokee’s.
269 Mary Crow Dog, on the other hand, emerges as a woman who is challenged by continuous struggle and conflict. Form early childhood on, throughout her adolescent years, up to being an adult, this physically and emotionally powerful Sioux woman faces numerous hostile environments. My study of Mary seeks to articulate the points of conflict among kinds of people and circumstances that lead to continued struggle: Poverty, an alcohol-addicted father and stepfather, a working mother, racism, physical abuse, rape, a boarding school experience, and her own alcohol addiction are just a few of the hardships with which Mary has to struggle to maintain some strength of mind. By joining AIM and getting married to a Lakota traditionalist, Mary eventually devises a strategy for proclaiming her individuality while integrating herself into the fabric of the Lakota tribe and the full-bloods’ community, always from a perspective, however, that is doubly marginalized in relation to blood quantum and gender. Mary sees herself as both a woman and a Sioux, and expresses this complex identity through variants on autobiographical narrative. Later in her life, Mary’s efforts to make everything more positive earn her the distinction of constantly striving to live in harmony with herself and others. The Lakota language and becoming a member of the Native American Church, as tools for remembering her ancestry, and the knowledge of and participation in traditional ceremonies, rituals, and dances, as creative forces of collective identity, are taken up by Mary as points of entry into a full-blood consciousness, without relinquishing her specific origin. In Ohitika Woman the author does this most explicitly, self-confidently narrating the process of autobiography as memoir, explicitly in terms of her half-blood roots. I have seen that in her second autobiography deep, immersed reflections on and identification with a Lakota self contrast sharply with her movement towards the interior and away from identification with this ancestry in Lakota Woman. While the mature Mary is able to juggle a multitude of cultural Sioux traditions to define identity as a sort of pastiche, the young Mary retreats inward into seemingly perpetual alienation. In Lakota Woman her distrust of the relationship of expression to half-blood experience is evidenced in her self-portrait of childhood and adolescent development and its relation to the slippage of traditional Lakota language and ancestral memory.
270 Janet Hale’s uniqueness is her constant vigil for what is happening for and to herself and her family. Many of her autobiographical essays rely on genealogies or familial ancestry, exposing the roots of difference. If Mankiller looks to her full-blood father as a guide to the Cherokee language and a political calling, Hale concentrates on her maternal line, on how her mother, her maternal grandmother, and her aunts teach her to ‘speak’ and how they will never be able to serve as models of feminine identity and behavior. These familial patterns of behavior are then scrutinized and analyzed by the author; they do not retain any strategy for survival, therefore Hale entirely rejects these patterns of subservience and repression. Commonalities among Mankiller, Brave Bird, and Hale include spirituality, Indianness, bonding, racial discrimination, and reciprocity/inclusiveness. I am aware of the absence, in my discussion, of a full-blood Native American woman’s autobiographer’s life story. Full-bloodedness seems to be an important determinant in the construction of identity. All the autobiographers in my study are half-bloods and descendents of both white and Native American ancestry, with relatively easy access to a white man’s education and the professions, provided that they wish to pursue these paths. At the same time, the fact that they can ‘pass’ as full-bloods, but are nevertheless denied full tribal ‘citizenship’, is central to their precarious relationship to self-enunciation. Situated at the intersection of a multitude of markers of difference, they have to forcefully write themselves into the mainstream and the full-blooded Native American cultural scene. I hope that especially the analysis of these autobiographers’ commonalities has laid some groundwork for further study of Native American women’s autobiographical writings in the United States. Both Mankiller and Brave Bird have been inspired by ancient Cherokee and Lakota spirituality. The relationship of these two Native American women to their ancestral traditions and their exploration of body/spirit and representation/self/Indianness is highly suggestive. In Hale’s context, her autobiographical essays explore lost communal memory in a way that can expose therapeutic strategies from a mixed-blood’s perspective. Hale’s autobiographical voice is a disembodied I and we who represent the dilemma of a spiritually, tribally, and ancestrally dispossessed mixed-blood Native American woman. Bloodlines appears to be the frantic odyssey of an alienated woman, trying to guard the archives of the book of
271 familial and ancestral memories. While an explicit spiritual perspective characterizes the most crucial component in shaping the three authors’ philosophy, culture and identity definitely determine their understanding of Indianness. Even for Hale, who will always be estranged from her tribe and its land, Indianness remains a legacy of strength, which is deeply anchored in an ancient peoples’ history. An examination of mother-daughter bonding relationships shows that these autobiographers intensely delve into the relationship between bonding and its memories. Whereas Mankiller and Brave Bird regard bonding as a positive feature of growing-up, Hale soon gives up hope on ever having any kind of bonding relationships. Instead, she contrasts notions of painfully remembering and forgetting with poignant personal experience and expression. Hale, as the most literary of the three women, continues the enterprise begun by her Native American counterparts to explore what it means to be a Native American, a Coeur d’Alene, and a woman. Analyzing the authors’ lived experience from the angle of oppression, it becomes obvious that their definitions of racism bring about descriptions of anger, anxiety, hatred, and separateness. Their stories illustrate encounters of rejection, of being permanently reminded that their race is intolerable. It is to be hoped that this study of racial discrimination will suggest still more fruitful investigations of racism and the establishment of laws and practices that both ensure and enforce equal opportunity and fairness in both the white man’s and the Native American’s worlds. Reciprocity and inclusiveness as a commonality among the autobiographers illustrate that indigenous peoples have practiced these concepts for thousands of years, passing on their meanings of being connected to family, community, tribe, and earth in such ways that have built upon the strengths of individuals for the benefit of the whole. The shared themes among these Native American autobiographers – spirituality, Indianness, bonding, racial discrimination, and reciprocity/inclusiveness – have revealed the influence of their culture; what the autobiographical accounts have illuminated is the relationships between the women’s innermost sense of identity and the cultural alienation of their environment. Through their shared themes and accounts, “a kind of story that allows a holistic image to pervade and shape consciousness, thus providing a coherent and empowering matrix for action and relationship” (Allen 549) has been created.
272 Bridging the autobiographers’ themes to other populations of women results in themes which unite all women in some way: connection, creation, oppression, and voice. Both Mankiller and Brave Bird describe the need to uphold, to connect, and to support each other as a constructive energy; in fact, connecting is the cultural bond for their tribes’ and their own identity. Hale, on the other hand, depicts connection as harsh and destructive. Especially during her childhood and adolescence, the author does not experience any feelings of community, so writing about these years of misery appears to be a therapeutic activity, and if her autobiography does one thing for Hale – aside from the obvious benefit of exposure to the public – it is to give her a construct that allows for an increased sense of community, or connection as an adult. Hale, indeed, discovers an opportunity for growth, as well as exposure and a sense of connection. Throughout this process her own children are very supportive, encouraging and unrelenting. It is partly due to her daughter’s insistence that she tries something new that leads Hale to discovering she has another tool available – autobiography. It is one she has had all along, but somehow she has not fully appreciated the potential of the form. So revealing her life story Hale comes to realize the complete lack of any kind of connection to her mother, which transforms her thinking so thoroughly that years of suffering and abuse represent an identity with nothing left of her excruciating past. The autobiographers’ stories of creation are not uncommon: The details perhaps are, but the drive to create, to give birth, and to nurture make for much common ground in any community, in any woman’s life. There are stories of origin and creation told that keep ancestral knowledge alive, which the women carry on, and their dedication is to the act of being responsible for creation. Upon realizing the harmony in these acts of creative power, all three autobiographers accept the invitation to give birth and nurture a forthcoming generation. They understand it as an opportunity to hold the future in themselves, feeling both delighted and blessed. In a multicultural society such as the one in the United States, it is definitely important that the voices of all people are heard in order to be acknowledged as full, contributing, vital members of society. The authors are able to prove that through the white man’s societal institutions, there is a need to reshape and transform people’s consciousness so that their beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge are more inclusive. The
273 traditions and beliefs of these three Native American autobiographers represent richness and diversity that must be celebrated. One can do this by recognizing and affirming spirituality, Indianness, the bonding of mother and daughter, and the traditions of reciprocity and inclusiveness that are themes in the lives of these Native American women. In this way one can help remove the myths about culture that prevent and obstruct development of the human spirit and eradicate the racial discrimination indigenous people experience. Moreover, Native American women should not consciously or unconsciously sense they have to surrender their indigenous cultural practices in order to achieve success as defined by a white, male dominated society. Women and women’s experiences should not be invisible or marginalized. Inclusion of the perspectives of women and all minorities certainly allows for experimentation with a variety of rich viewpoints that benefit all. Moreover, the power of these women’s autobiographies verifies the value of reflecting upon one’s own individual experiences. Reflective moments seem to have endless personal implications for individuals, for their system of knowledge, and their understanding of other populations. Perhaps one of the greatest individual impacts can be the realization of alternative thinking that can result from the processes of experiencing life, reflection upon one’s experiences, and connecting those experiences to the experiences of others. It is certainly the case that an understanding of the personal life experiences of these Native American women autobiographers informs my own understanding in that one sees the ways in which their lives are unique and similar to other women. Information regarding the lives of diverse groups of women is critical in transforming interpretation which is primarily based on and directed to white middle-class women. Recognizing these implications might be the first step in creating greater support for the inclusion of the perspectives and life experiences of diverse populations of women. Each one of the autobiographers has a voice, each voice has a story, and each story has its time and its place. According to Allen, “Every element in such a story is meaningful on the deepest levels of human understanding” (552), reflecting upon Black Elk’s words, “It is from understanding that power comes” (Neidhardt 176). Thus, power in the life experiences of these women comes from understanding the meaning of their stories. The autobiographies of these three Native American women remind me that fresh
274 perspectives can help remove the blinds that obscure knowledge and understanding as well as unite women in common experiences.
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