Writing from Home: Contemporary Native American Women's Life

系學文語學國大外山中立國

，

博士論文國立中山大學外國語文學系博士論文

自「家」書寫：當代美國原住民女性的生命敘事 Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Sun Yat-sen University Doctorate Dissertation

自「家」書寫：當代美國原住民女性的生命敘事

Writing from Home: Contemporary Native American Women’s Life Narratives

研究生：張淑君

Clara Shu-Chun Chang 研究生：張淑君指導教授：黃心雅博士 Dr. Hsinya Huang

中華民國102年1月

101 January 2013 學年度

國立中山大學外國語文學系博士論文

Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Sun Yat-sen University Doctorate Dissertation

自「家」書寫：當代美國原住民女性的生命敘事

Writing from Home: Contemporary Native American Women’s Life Narratives

研究生：張淑君 Clara Shu-Chun Chang 指導教授：黃心雅博士 Dr. Hsinya Huang

中華民國 102 年 1 月 January 2013

Acknowledgements

It is with inexpressible appreciation to acknowledge the encouragement, help and suggestions received during the process of writing a dissertation and completing the Ph.D. program. I feel exceedingly fortunate in having professional guidance and generous support from my advisor, mentors, friends, and family; all of them contributed to this work. Without them, this dissertation would not have been possible.

The completion of my dissertation was aided by 2011 Doctoral Dissertation

Award from the National Science Council, Taiwan. With its generous financial assistance, I could concentrate on writing up the dissertation.

I feel really honored to express my profound gratitude and deep regards to my advisor, Dr. Hsinya Huang. I have been greatly helped by her advice and expertise. I sincerely appreciate her unfaltering perseverance through my fragmented ideas and rugged language.

I am also indebted to Dr. Joni Adamson for her hearty encouragement and stimulating suggestions. She has been a great mentor to me for years, providing invaluable comments on my works and steadfast support for my research.

Moreover, I would like to thank my oral examiners, Dr. Kai-Ling Liu, Dr. Jade

Tsui-yu Lee, Dr. Min-hsiou Rachel Hung, and Dr. Shiuh-huah Serena Chou, for their

ii expert advice to improve this dissertation. Their keen critical perceptions allow me to fortify this dissertation with more substantial arguments. I especially thank to Dr.

Min-hsiou Rachel Hung for her inspiring conversations which enable me to formulate the idea about “home writing.”

Lastly, my gratitude also goes to my fellow graduates and friends, Roy, Jeff,

Ruby, Hui Chun, Lisa, Siao-Jing, Rosa, Maggie, and Shiang-hui, whose warmhearted friendship helps me overcome the difficulties in writing this dissertation. Moreover, my parents and my husband are always great supporters during my graduate studies.

With their unconditional assistance and sacrifices, I could focus on dissertation writing while taking care of my beloved children, Yu-Cheng and I-Chen. I also want to thank to my children for their understanding of their fully occupied mother. It is with love and support I can accomplish my responsibilities as a Ph.D. student, a mother, and a wife during these years. Given the fact, I dedicate this dissertation to my professors, beloved family and cherished friends whose encouragement and companionship become a driving force to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

iii

摘要

本論文檢視當代美國原住民女性作家的生命書寫如何形塑當代美國原住民

女性對於「家園」的概念。論者王荷莎以自我、生命、與書寫切入美國原住民

自傳的閱讀，本論文計畫以王荷莎的論點為經，繼之以「家」的論述為緯，爬梳

「自我」、「生命」、「家園」與「書寫」如何在原住民女性生命敘事中相互形塑觀

照，以原民自我與女性經驗將生命書寫轉化成原鄉想像建構的場域，藉以銘刻當

代原住民女性的歸家之路。「家園」是美國原住民女性自我形塑與自我表徵最重

要的指涉位置；失落家園的殖民歷史與女性家居生命經驗形塑原住民女性對「家

園」的想念、想望與想像，因此本論文從當代美國原住民女性的「家園」經驗切

入其生命敘事文本的閱讀，探討原住民女性自我、家居日常生活與原鄉文化想像

如何巧妙交織出當代原住民女性別有興味的「家園書寫」。當代原住民女性透過

生命故事，書寫她們對「家園」的想念與想望，以文化想像成就「家園」的建構，

以文字實踐其歸鄉之旅。總結，本論文以「自家書寫」為引，探究以「家」為研

究方法切入當代美國原住民女性生命敘事文本閱讀的可行性與可能性，透過論述

與文本反覆參照，辯證「家」如何成為美國原住民女性生命與文化實踐的動機、

途徑、與願景。本論文選讀四位當代美國首屈一指的原住民女性作家的生命書寫

作品，包含琳達･荷根回憶錄《觀照世界的女人：原住民回憶錄》、黛安．葛蘭西

回憶錄《掌握呼息》、路薏絲．鄂翠曲回憶錄《藍樫鳥之舞：初為人母的一年》

與萊絲里．席爾柯回憶錄《綠松石岩層：回憶錄》。

關鍵字：美國原住民文學、生命書寫、家、原鄉、文化創傷、文化想像、群落感

Abstract

This dissertation examines how contemporary Native American women conceptualize home in their life writings. As Hertha Wong understands Native

American autobiography in terms of the tribal sense of self, life, and language, I extend her reading by shifting the focus to the sense of home as represented in Native women’s life narratives. With far-reaching implications, home constitutes a defining point of reference for Native women’s self-recognition and self-portrait. Native women’s sense of home is largely guided by their loss of and imagination for their home places. Native life writings thus convey an emotional longing for an imaginary or physical reunion with their homeland. Native women’s specific experience of home thus provides a cutting edge for this project. I argue that, in Native women’s life narrative, the sense of home implicates the awareness of a female self, the practice of everyday life in domestic sphere, and cultural attachment to their home places. I intend to demonstrate Native women’s everlasting quest for and construction of home in their life narratives and explore the possibility of using home as a critical approach.

Overall, the project explore how self, life, and home are intertwined and inscribed in

Native women’s life narratives and how each writer launches and paves her way home through the life stories. The focal texts in this project include Native American women’s life narratives composed at the turn of the century, specifically Linda

Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches over the World: A Native Memoir (2001), Diane

Glancy’s Claiming Breath (1992), Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth

Year (1995), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir (2010).

Keywords: Native American literature, life writing, home, home place, cultural

trauma, cultural imagination, sense of community

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

論文審定書 i

Acknowledgements ii

摘要 iv

Abstract v

Chapter One Introduction: Writing from Home 1

Chapter Two This I Call Home 33

Chapter Three Home Lost in Linda Hogan’s The Woman’s Who 65

Watches over the World: A Native Memoir

Chapter Four The Road Home in Diane Glancy’s Claiming Breath 109

Chapter Five Homesick at Home in Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jays’ 145

Dance: A Birth Year

Chapter Six At Home on Earth in Leslie Marmon Silko’s 185

The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir

Chapter Seven Conclusion: Writing My Way Home 225

Works Cited 243

vii

Chapter One

Writing from Home

Perhaps the World Ends Here

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been

since creation, and it will go on. (3)

--Joy Harjo, “Perhaps the World Ends Here”

Joy Harjo in her poem, “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” beautifully describes the living life around the kitchen table and elaborates on the significance of the table to a sustainable life at home. She describes how the kitchen table holds together the emotions that form the dramatic fabric of everyday life. Happiness and sorrow, hope and disappointment, remembrance and forgetting get entangled in the exact spot. The table where “the gifts of earth” are served to feed her family provides the metaphor of life. More than just the metaphor of life, the kitchen table is also a metaphor for a sustainable culture. Harjo and Gloria Bird, in the Introduction to Reinventing the

Enemy’s Language, describe how a group of native women turn a kitchen table into a desk, where intellectual thoughts are inspired and circulated: “No matter, the kitchen table is ever present in its place at the center of being. It has often been the desk after the dishes are cleared, the children put to bed” (19). The artistic ideas are stimulated

and realized in the book, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, after multiple meetings around the kitchen table. The talks among this group of women writers and critics have continued for years from their teenage years to the birth of their grandchildren.

They gather around kitchen tables, preparing food for their children and grandchildren, telling stories of their family and communities, writing notes after reading manuscripts, and circulating their inspirations for tribal survival. The kitchen table is considered to be not only the heart of a home but also the mind of a house. Harjo’s perception of the kitchen table reveals the importance of the domestic sphere to her as a Native woman writer. Home, as represented through the kitchen table in the poem, carries the ideologies both for the domestic life and for artistic writings.

This dissertation examines how contemporary Native American women conceptualize home in their life writings. As Hertha Wong understands Native

thus provides a cutting edge for this project. I argue that, in Native women’s life narrative, the sense of home implicates the awareness of a female self, the practice of everyday life in domestic sphere, and cultural attachment to their home places. I intend to demonstrate Native women’s everlasting quest for and construction of home in their life narratives and explore the possibility of using home as a critical approach.

Overall, the project explore how self, life, and home are intertwined and inscribed in

Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches over the World: A Native Memoir (2001), Diane

Glancy’s Claiming Breath (1992), Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth

Year (1995), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Turquoise Ledge (2010).

This chapter structurally comprises the motivation of using home as an approach, a historical overview of Native American life narratives, and a brief sketch of the four targeted life narratives. Using home as an approach is initially inspired by the family project of Philip Deloria, a distinguished scholar in contemporary Native

American studies. In his essay titled “Three Lives, Two Rivers: One Marriage and the

Narratives of American Colonial History,” Deloria records an American colonial history through his grandparents’ marriage story. The story of an interracial marriage

between Vine Deloria, a Sioux Indian, and Barbara Sloat Eastburn, a daughter of middle class Euroamerican parents, remains vividly entwined with the American sociocultural context. It bespeaks one of the encounters between two “distinct visions of America itself” (113). Deloria, through the family narrative of a marriage between a colonizer and a colonized, manages to represent a “new American story” (126). He also claims the family story as “an Indian story”: “Here, then, is an Indian story”

(113). His essay exemplifies how the historical Indian writing can get entangled with the personal experience of home. It becomes a practice of his proposal to “[t]hink about Self in a Family Way” (“Thinking” 25). Self, family, and Indianness work together in a complete triangle. One is nothing without the others. “Three Lives” thus represents “a family way of thinking about race, culture, and Indianness”

(“Thinking” 25).

First of all, the dissertation title comes from one of the critical essays in a special issue of American Indian Quarterly on “Working from Home in American

Indian History” (2009). The authors in the special issue work from home and bring an

Indian perspective to their professional writings. In his essay entitled “American

Indian History and Writing from Home: Constructing an Indian Perspective,” Donald

L. Fixico states that, in order to represent an Indian point of view, Indian scholars should write their histories from their home ground: “Consequently, ‘writing from

home’ is the challenge of historians who are American Indians and who write history based on their cultural perceptions and home place as Native people who have been trained in the mainstream academy” (553). Indian writing often features a combination of oral tradition, tribal mythology, the Indian notion of time, and a deep concern for natural cycles. The distinctive aspects of Indian writings can be fully attributed to an everlasting connection to home. Fixico stresses the particular importance of Indian people’s “remaining connected to home” (554): “Home is our strongest point of reference, where our people come from, our community, and it renders to us a sense of balance and identity” (554-55). To “‘understanding’

Indianness,” Native writers, with home as a reference point, narrate Indian experiences through an Indian perspective: “To be specific, this means ‘thinking’ and

‘writing’ from the inside rather than writing ‘about’ Indian people and their histories”

(555). Family stories and tribal histories are keys to writing a Native self from home as an approach. Thinking in terms of “communities” is also essential for Indian people to comprehend selves and personal existence in relation to the world. Fixico insists on the inclusion of “the intangibles”--ancestral spirits and supernatural forces--into

Indian history as a kind of “metahistory”: “This is a part of being Indian, and historians should take this into consideration in writing Indian history” (558). Fixico then concludes that not only writing American Indian histories from home is

necessary, but also “imagining a ‘cultural bridge of understanding’ in the American ethnic histories is crucial today” (559). Thus, as writing Indian histories from home significantly provides a cultural bridge, “home” consequently acts as a strong starting point for approaching Native American women’s life narratives.

As for Native American studies, individual life writings disclose the historical contexts, cultural experiences, and local knowledge. Native life stories often provide the most delicate and intimate route through which the historical, cultural, and life experiences of Native Americans can be retraced. Michael Fischer in his “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory” indicates that ethnic autobiographies serve as a precious source for readers to pick up the firsthand cultural experiences and personal stories of the specific writers (198). Kendall Johnson’s reading of Leslie Marmon

Silko’s Storyteller exemplifies how a Native life writing decently relives its historical-social-cultural contexts:

The ‘self’ of Storyteller sets up a dynamic relationship between individual

and communal perspective as first-person narrative is juxtaposed with a

more diffuse third-person storytelling [. . .]. Silko’s book operates on

multiple frequencies to redeem a profound agency of storytelling from the

nightmare of history—a power that weaves a sense of her own life through

the stories of Laguna resistance to European imperialism beginning in the

sixteen century. (380)

Native American autobiographies are almost never individual products away from their communal culture. Instead, they are often subject to “a number of cultural constraints” (Blackman xiii). The issues of self-representation and cultural significance never go without another in Native American life writings.

The notion of home has aroused considerable attention in the academic fields, such as cultural studies, literature, and geography nowadays. It is certainly not too difficult to comprehend the two compelling but different implications home often carries with it: home as a place and home as a metaphor. This relationship and the contrast between the two implications are significant to the research into writing on home in Native American women’s life narratives. In fact, it is in the intertwined and complex relationship between home as an actual place and home as an imaginary construct that a Native American woman locates her home in life writing. It is also what Andrew Gorman-Murray and Robyn Dowling term as the “relational” perspective of home (1-2): Home implicates both the “material and imaginative qualities” (2). It is somewhere and more than just somewhere. It is a fusion of the imaginative with the physical; the imaginative refers to what a person thinks of his/her home whereas the material indicates a genuine location where one accommodates and lives everyday life. In other words, the notion of home contains what Alison Blunt

and Robyn Dowling define as a “spatial imaginary”: “home is neither the dwelling nor the feeling, but the relation between the two” (22). Home is truly founded somewhere between the two; it is positioned sometimes more on the one side and sometimes more on the other. Home thus remains “conceptually informed but substantively grounded”

(Blunt 506). “In this way, home is posited as relational—the ever-changing outcome of the ongoing and mediated interaction between self, others and place”

(Gorman-Murray and Dowling 2).

The perspective of home is of critical importance to understand Native women’s life writings because home, on one hand, leads to a delicate and intimate conception of self, and on the other hand, bespeaks a personal connection with a community on which a native identity is grounded and developed. Personal experiences of home play a prominent part in the construction of a Native identity which is crucial to Native life narratives. According to Kathleen Mullen Sands, American Indian life writing is “a personal genre that examines in depth the motives, actions, attitudes, and qualities of an individual within a network of family and tribe” (“American Indian Autobiography”

56, emphasis my own). Moreover, Hertha Wong, in her book titled Sending My Heart

Back across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography, writes that “one of the fundamental activities of autobiography: reconstructing a past from the present moment and laboring to understand how our ancestors’ long-ago

stories shape and reshape our self-narrations today” (vi). She further points out a key difference between a Western understanding of “autobiography” and an Indian notion of self-narration: The word autobiography (self-life-writing) reveals Europeans’ emphasis on the importance of individual life and writing. Accordingly, Hertha Wong makes the effort to coin an explanatory designation for Native self-narrative “as commune-bio-oratory (community-life-speaking) or auto-ethnography

(self-culture-writing). The first allows for a communal identity and orality; the second for a sense of self determined by one’s cultural discourse” (6). According to Wong, cultural, gender, and historical experiences surely affect the modes of self-presentation. Native writer’s concept of self is often established in terms of its relation to community. It is thus a tribal self. This tribal sense of self is often

“inclusive”: Native Americans “tend to see themselves first as family, clan, and tribal members, and second as discrete individuals” (13). While a Western notion of self focuses on “individuality,” the Native conception of self is based more on its

“communiality” (14). In other words, a Native self is frequently a “communal self,” a participant “within the tribe” and a concern “with the environment” (14). Wong also notices that certain similarities exist between her comprehension of Native American self-narrations and the feminist reading of women’s autobiographies: “Both female and Native American autobiographical narratives focus on a communal or relational

identity and tend to be cyclical rather than linear” (7). Wong’s recognition of the tribal self in some way parallels to what Susan Friedman calls a “relational identity”

(“Women’s Autobiographical Selves” 35) and what Arnold Krupat defines as a

‘dialogic’ self” (Voice 133). In general, Native American autobiographical “I” is

“based on “belonging to and participating in a larger pattern—the cultural patterns of family and social relations and the natural cycles of menstruation and childbirth”

(Wong, Sending My Heart Back 23).

Moreover, “the sense of a relational self is connected intimately to a specific landscape” (Wong, Sending My Heart Back 14). A sense of place inspired by personal association with their homeland and community is extremely significant in many indigenous life writings. Wong stresses the importance of kinship, community, and landscape in the recognition of a Native self. Therefore, reading Native life narratives in the project focuses on the extent to which the narrators experience, envision, and construct the idea of home in their writings. Home, as a confounding of the self, life, and writing, becomes a pivotal point in this dissertation to approach the Native women’s life narratives.

Native women writers represent their personal experiences of home through their life narratives. The notion of home becomes a key to reading their autobiographical works. Private life at home remains one of the very distinctive

perspectives in their self-narratives. In fact, home stands for something far more than simply a physical locale. Native women’s writing on home involves narrating their life stories from a Native perspective. Private but political, Native women’s writing on home depicts personal life and cultural experiences in relation to home that, in turn, bespeaks a Native history, tribal sense of place, and a Native viewpoint. A Native woman’s narration of her home experience not just provides a written documentation, but works more as an act, an ongoing enactment through writing in their search for home in real life and literary career. Writing is never simply a book “as icon, but a performance, not just a pre-constituted meaning for easy consumption, but an event in which meaning is actively negotiated” (Godard 87). Under such circumstances, the self-narration of home is transformed into an “act of negotiated meaning, an event”

(Turner 111). It is consequently equipped with the power of first-hand perception and experiences of the narrator towards home within her cultural/social/geographical contexts. By writing their imagination towards home, women writers launch a literary and an emotional journey in search for home. Native women’s narration of their home offer multiple intersections of dialogues between the self and the community, the domestic and the public, the historical and the spatial, and the cultural and the natural.

Their writing on home subsequently constitutes a specific literary style in contemporary Native American literature.

The history of Native American life narratives has been traced back to the pre-European contact period. Hertha Wong organizes the development of Native

American autobiography into three periods: “the early period,” “the transitional period”

(from 19th century to early 20th century), and the “contemporary period” that begins in the twentieth century (“Native American Life Writing” 126). According to Wong,

“long before Anglo ethnographers arrived in North America, indigenous peoples were telling, creating, and enacting their personal narratives through stories, pictographs, and performances” (Sending My Heart Back 3). In fact, Lynne Woods O’Brien firstly regards the nonliterate Indian life stories as a possible form of autobiography. In

O’Brien’s Plains Indian Autobiographies (1973), Plains Indian autobiographies are taken as “oral, dramatic, and artistic expressions by native individuals about their own lives” (5). H. David Brumble, a critic, deals with the notion further in his book

American Indian Autobiography by comparing the preliterate, oral form of Native

American autobiographies to the classical oral tradition of the Greek and Roman civilization. Brumble insists on “concentrating on the Indians’ own contribution to these autobiographies” because American Indians deliver their life stories alongside with their oral tradition (22). He also lists “six fairly distinct kinds of pre-literate autobiographical narratives”: coup tales, informal but detailed autobiographical tales of warfare and hunting, self-examinations, self-vindications, educational narratives,

and stories of quests for power (22-23). Wong then extends the concept of American

Indian autobiography by including “the pre-contact nonwritten modes of personal narrative such as naming practices, coup tales, and pictographic hide and tipi paintings” in her study of Native American autobiography (Sending My Heart Back 7).

She also expands the Eurocentric definition of autobiography as a written narrative to acknowledge the native modes of expression of Indian self-narration, including pictographic narratives, artworks, and performances.

The written accounts of the Indians’ life stories develop as early as 1768 with the publication of Samson Occom’s autobiographical work. However, it is not until the second half of the twentieth century, with the rise of Native American Renaissance, that life narratives exclusively written by Native Americans gradually become common. The key changes in the development of Native American life narratives reflect multiple historical transitions in accordance with the cultural, literary, and social contexts in America. Samson Occom’s “A Short Narrative of My Life,” dated in

September 17, 1768, is recognized as the earliest life history written by a Native

American. Recovered from library archives, it was firstly published in 1982. The latest version, titled as The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan:

Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America, was published in

2006 by Oxford University Press. During the 19th and the early 20th centuries, Native

American life histories are largely collected, recorded, translated, and edited by

Euroamerican collaborators. Hence, quite a few American Indian autobiographies are created from the collaboration of the Native narrators/informants and Euroamerican anthropologists/editors. The collaborative autobiographical narratives are what

William Bloodworth names as “anthropological autobiography,” Brumble refers to as

“bicultural documents,” and Arnold Krupat defines as works constituted from the principle of an “original bicultural composite composition” (Bloodworth 69-70;

Brumble, American Indian Autobiography 11; Krupat, For Those Who Come After 33).

Among the Indian collaborative works, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison

(1823) and The Life of Black Hawk (1833) are two of the earliest examples cited as full collaborative autobiographies (K. Johnson 368). Moreover, in the 19th century also appear Native life narratives written by Indian autobiographers. William Apess’

Son of the Forest: The Experience of William Apess, a Native of the Forest, Written by

Himself (1829) is recognizably the first Native autobiography published by an Indian.

George Copway, in his Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1847) writes in a form still followed by a group of contemporary Native American writers: a mixture of personal everyday life experience, myth, history, and current incidents into his narrative. Then in the first half of the twentieth century, a bicultural collaborative work as it is, Black Elk Speaks (1932) is regarded as the most famous Native

American life writing even today. In the second half of the 20th-century, after N. Scott

Momaday’s publication of House Made of Dawn in 1969, the production of Native

American autobiographies has been booming.1 Many Native American writers, from then on, have continued an ongoing imperative of efforts to tell/write their life stories, interweaving their personal experiences with cultural myths and traumatic past.

Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain (1968) and The Names (1976), Gerald

Vizenor’s Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors (1990) and

Corssbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports (1990), Simon Ortiz’s After and

Before the Lightning (1994), Joseph Bruchac’s Bowman’s Store: A Journey to Myself

(1997), and Vine Deloria’s Singing for a Spirit: A Portrait of the Dakota Sioux (2000) are well-known examples of Native American autobiographical works published after the Native American Renaissance.

Compared to the male writers, Native American women shape a literary history exclusive to Native women’s life writing. Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’ Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) is one of the two or three

1 As a matter of fact, David Brumble’s Annotated Bibliography of American Indian and Eskimo Autobiographies (1981) lists over 500 Native autobiographical works, out of which more than 200 published after 1945. However, many are fragmentary works, short pieces collected in larger ethnographic projects or oral histories. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff’s American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography (1990) lists 22 autobiographies published after 1945. Nonetheless, according to a chronological list of American Indian autobiographies published since 1945, provided by Kendall Johnson in his “Imagining Self and Community in American Indian Autobiography,” totally 189 entries, including autobiographical book and essays, are published since 1945. The number of the work published around 1945-1949 is one. The entries published around 1950s gradually begin to grow to nine. In 1960s, there are nineteen entries while we see seventeen and nineteen entries, respectively in 1970s and 1980s. Afterwards, the number jumps to sixty-four in 1990s and the boom continues into the 21st century. Throughout 2000-2006 have been published sixty entries. 15

autobiographies written by Native American women in the 19th century. Hopkins describes the arrival of the Euroamericans and the interaction of her people with the white. Her recognition of the importance of writing is notably presented in her childhood experience with her grandfather. One day, her grandfather brought her a piece of paper as a gift: “a more wonderful thing than all the others [gifts] was a paper, which he said could talk to him” (18). With the talking paper, Hopkins makes known her people’s suffering to the Western audience. Zitkala-Ša, a Sioux writer also known as Gertrude Simoons Bonnin, writes several autobiographical essays chronicling her struggles between the dominant culture and her Indian heritage, such as “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” (1900), “School Days of an Indian Girl” (1900), “A

Warrior’s Daughter” (1902), and “Why I Am a Pagan” (1902). Lucy Thompson publishes To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman (1916).

Including oral storytelling, Biblical and literary allusions in her work, Thompson intends to relate a Native point of view in order to “counter the ‘fairy tales’ that

‘lower-class’ Yuroks have told to anthropologists” (Wong, “Native American Life

Writing” 138). In 1936, Mourning Dove, or known as Christine Quintasket, left behind several unfinished autobiographical manuscripts which have been published later as Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography with the edition of Jane Miller in

1990. According to Miller’s introduction to the work, Mourning Dove possesses

certain characteristics often established in the later autobiographical works written by

Native American women. The work draws on “female activities, seasonal activities, and incidents from recent history” (as qtd. in Wong, “Native American Life Writing”

138). Mourning Dove also consists of a concise Okanogan history and personal life experiences. Later in the second half of the 20th century appears the rise of Native

American women’s life writings. The most distinguished works include Leslie

Marmon Silko’s Storyteller (1981), Diane Glancy’s Claiming Breath (1992), Anna

Lee Walters’s Talking Indian: Reflections on Survival and Writing (1992), Janet

Campbell Hale’s Bloodlines; Odyssey of a Native Daughter (1993), Louise Erdrich’s

The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year (1995), Anita Endrezze’s Throwing Fire at the

Sun, Water at the Moon (2000), Linda Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches Over the

World: A Native Memoir (2001), and Silko’s latest memoir, The Turquoise Ledge

(2010) (Wong, “Native American Life Writing” 134-41; Bataille 87-99) .

In the late 20th century, some Indian women still transmit their life stories through their collaborators (Bataille, “Transformation of Tradition” 88). Earlier examples include Papago Woman (1936) and No Turning Back: A Hopi Indian

Woman’s Struggle to Live in Two Worlds (1964). Ruth Underhill tells the story of

Maria Chona (Tohono O’odham) in Papago Woman. Vada F. Carlson records the story of Polingaysi Qoyawayma (Hopi) in No Turning Back: A Hopi Indian Woman’s

Struggle to Live in Two Worlds. One of the best examples of collaborative works is

Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders (1990) by Julie

Cruikshank in collaboration with Angela Sidney (Tagish/Tlingit), Kitty Smith (S.

Tutchone/Tlingit) and Annie Ned (S. Tutchone/Tlingit). As the collaborator,

Cruikshank takes in her fieldwork, examines her editorial practices, and emphasizes the partnership of the collaboration. Different from other informants as represented in most collaborative autobiographies, the three elder women, as subjects, clear with the purpose of their life narration in mind—education of the younger generation in the community—initiate the whole writing project. Life Lived Like a Story effectively contains clan history, land, myth, travel, kinship, and their personal life experiences

(Wong, “Native American Life Writing 136-37).

Life writing as a genre plays a significant role in the study of Native American literature; however, the attention it has received for the past few decades is comparatively underexposed:

American Indian poetry and fiction, because they are most easily associated

with the greater body of American literature, have received considerable

attention in recent years, while oral narratives and written autobiographies

by American Indians have received almost no consideration, in part because

they are sometimes difficult to find and in large measure because critics

have directed little effort toward analysis of extant works. (Sands,

“American Indian Autobiography” 56)

Book-length study of Native American life narratives include For Those Who Come

After: A Study of Native American Autobiography (1985) by Arnold Krupat, American

Indian Autobiography (1988) by H. David Brumble III, Sending My Heart Back across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography (1992) by Hertha Wong, and Telling a Good One: The Process of Native American

Collaborative Autobiography (2000) by Theodore Rios and Kathleen Mullen Sands.

Krupat in For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American

Autobiography (1985) provides literary reading of Indian autobiographies. Krupat defines Indian autobiography as such: “Constituted as a genre of writing by the principle of original, bicultural, composite composition, Indian autobiographies are not a traditional form among Native peoples but the consequence of contact with the white invader-settler, and the product of a limited collaboration with them” (xxvii).

He surveys the insistence of author, narrator, models and narratives in Native

American autobiographies, making distinctions between “Indian autobiographies” and

“autobiographies by Indians” (30; 31). According to Krupat, “Indian autobiographies” refer to the “as-told-to” autobiographies, composed collaboratively by an Indian as the narrator offering his or her life stories as subject and a white as the interpreter, editor,

or compiler of the autobiographical work. On the other hand, “autobiographies by

Indians,” containing a “bicultural element,” are narratives written by the autobiographers (31). Krupat gauges the degree to which Native informants are able to present their life stories through the collaborative efforts. Krupat also publishes three collections of autobiographical essays contributed by numerous Native

American writers. The book, I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native

American Writers (1987), co-edited by Krupat and Brian Swann, includes eighteen autobiographical essays. Another book, Native American Autobiography: An

Anthology (1994), with Krupat as the sole editor, collects works from Reverend

Sansom Occom’s 1768 narrative to those composed by contemporary writers, such as

N. Scott Momaday and Gerald Vizenor. The other title, Here First: Autobiographical

Essays by Native American Writers (2000), edited by Krupat and Swann, is comprised of twenty-six essays.

After Krupat’s publication of For Those Who Come After in 1985, literary critics focus more on Native American autobiography and thus offer the other three book-length critical writings. In 1988, David Brumble publishes American Indian

Autobiography, comparing preliterate native autobiographies with classical Greek and

Roman oral traditions. The power of oral cultures is greatly esteemed on the historical development of Native American autobiography. Later, Hertha Wong, in Sending My

Heart Back across the Years (1992), traces both the history of Native American life writing and the origin of American literature back to the pre-contact life narratives and explores the transformation from pre-contact oral and pictographic personal narratives to contemporary life writings. Deconstructing the discrepancy between oral and written language, Wong regards the various forms of Native life stories, including writing, pictographs, woven objects, and memory system, as the textual representation of the Native communities. In a way, Wong proposes the extension of Indian autobiography as a genre to include both written and non-written forms of personal life narratives based on a “Native American concept of the self” (13). Finally, in

Telling a Good One: The Process of Native American Collaborative Autobiography

(2000), Kathleen Mullen Sands, drawing on her partnership with Theodore Rios, a

Tohono O’odham narrator, offers a self-critique of the collaborative process and her personal observation on the crucial issues often raised in the production of the collaborative autobiographical works. Sands considers a collaborative autobiography a ‘colonial relationship,’ examining the role academia and publishers have played in shaping the (re)presentation of such an autobiographical narrative.

Apart from the books, certain critics, such as William F. Smith, Hertha Wong,

Kendall Johnson, Kathleen Mullen Sands, and Hsinya Huang, conduct in-depth research on Native life writings in individual essays. William F. Smith in his

“American Indian Autobiographies” (1975) defines Native American autobiography as “verbal expressions, whether oral or written” (237). Kendall Johnson in his

“Imagining Self and Communities in American Indian Autobiography” (2006) explores the relationship between Native American autobiography and the national imposition of the “property-centered individualism” on Native communities. Johnson borrows Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined communities” (xi) to describe how print narrative leads to form a national community with a sense of belonging and how the experience of reading shapes “a broader community of readers like themselves who share a history and destiny as a distinct nation in a world composed of other nation” (358). He thus observes how “Native (il)literacy” becomes a site of colonial contestation in which “literacy” has been applied to exclude Native Americans “from full recognition in the imagined community of America” (360). He finally defines

Native autobiography as a writing “that focuses on how names work as a pact with the reader to negotiate the themes of blood, land, and nation central to the struggle for

Native identity in the twentieth century” (356). Hsinya Huang, in her essay entitled

“Writing Native Self, Writing Life—Linda Hogan and Anita Endrezze” (2009), with

Linda Hogan’s and Anita Endrezze’s life writings as pivotal texts, examines the interaction among self, memory, and history in Native American life writings. Huang

argues that the “ethnographical mode of self-representation” comes to “contest the hegemonic national discourse” (293).

It is not until 1984 that literary critics call serious attention to Native American women’s life writings. Gretchen Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands in their book,

American Indian Women, Telling Their Lives (1984), place Native women’s autobiographies within the tradition of Native American literature. Bataille and Sands trace the historical and cultural development of Native American women’s life narratives from the early oral tradition up to the 20th-century written autobiographies, emphasizing the clash between written texts and spoken words. However, Bataille and

Sands contend that contemporary women’s life narratives reveal certain characteristics of the oral tradition, such as event-oriented, language, land attachment, and tribal tradition. According to Bataille and Sands, a negotiation between the

Western “egocentric individualism” (4) and Native concerns for history, community, and the land enables Native women’s life writings to be recognized as a unique genre in both literary and cultural studies.

Furthermore, except for Bataille and Sands’ book-length work, a few research findings are published as journal/book articles. Bataille in “Transformation of

Tradition: Autobiographical Works by American Indian Women” (1983) describes how American Indian women transcribe their political observations of the colonial

experiences into their life narratives. She traces the changes in the attitude of

American Indian women and the forces that make up such a change: “The changes have resulted from the writer’s perception of the audience, the writer’s purpose in revealing her life, the role of the editor, and the economic and/or political climate of the period of recording” (87). She perceives that contemporary Indian women deny the idea of “liberation” proposed by the Western feminists because Indian women have to “devote their energies to keeping families intact, getting jobs, and fighting the political battle of their people” (94). Contemporary Native women’s autobiographical narratives often reaffirm this lifelong devotion to the family and community. Sarah E.

Turner in “‘Spider Woman’s Granddaughters:’ Autobiographical Writings by Native

American Women” (1997) addresses the issues of multiple marginalization through an othered experience under colonization in Indian women’s life narratives. Turner argues that the texts, as a kind of “colonized agenda,” are special “in the sense that it is a reaction against a politically sanctioned attempt at extermination and a denial of culture, language, and beliefs” (110; 109). The practice of multiple marginalization provides the writers with “the critical distance” necessary in writing their life stories

(111). Finally, Sands, in her essay titled “Collaboration or Colonialism: Text and

Process in Native American Women’s Autobiographies” (1997), recognizes Native

American women’s autobiographies as a discrete genre different from those written

by Indian male writers. She elucidates the relationship between the narrative and the editorial processes in collaborative publications and analyzes the development from the oral tradition to the written narration. She points out how the editor’s selection and the arrangement of the material affect the presentation of the life stories and examines the way in which the “colonial imposition” is revealed in the production of the composite autobiographies by Native American women (44).

This project focuses on the life narratives written by four contemporary Native women writers, including Linda Hogan, Diane Glancy, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie

Marmon Silko. They have been recognized as among the most accomplished and influential major writers in Native American literature. Intertwined with memories, imagination and reflections, their life writings reflect a remarkable transformation from orality to literacy, a close interrelation between the self and the community, and a deep yearning for homeland. Their works inform a communal and relational self in quest of home, addressing a wide range of issues, such as self-definition of a Native identity, the significance of women’s experiences, the embodiment of cultural trauma from a history of colonial displacement, struggle for the relocation of cultural awareness, and profound concerns over environmental issues.

Linda Hogan retrieves not only her personal life but a communal history in her memoir, The Woman Who Watches over the World: A Native Memoir. The work

consists of eleven chapters, each of which is both independent and complementary to one another. It is concerned about a family history of three generations of women, including Hogan, Hogan’s mother and two adopted daughters. Because of “the destruction of the body and land” (62), women in her family have been or are, in some way or another, voiceless of their emotional, physical, or spiritual sufferings. Hogan’s self-writing is composed of her reflection on a life within a family. Her writing on home indicates her search for the meaning of life, even though “mystery is part of each life” (15). Hogan also relates her “self-telling” to the young Chickasaw generations on reservations and thus associates her personal history with the history of the continent since “[she] can lay a human history out before [her] and hold a light to it, and in that light is the history of a continent” (14). With the power of storytelling/words, Hogan deals with her life’s chaos resulting from the experiences of colonization and displacement. Self, life, home, and writing become perfectly bonded together in this memoir.

Full of personal reflections on her role as a Native woman writer, Diane

Glancy’s Claiming Breath employs specific dates and headings as the book layout.

Writing after her divorce, Glancy finds herself walking in two cultural worlds between the white and the Indian, between Christian and the tribal: “I was born between 2 heritages & I want to explore that empty space, that

place-between-2-places, to walk-in-2-worlds” (4). Claiming Breath serves as a route

Glancy takes in her voyage of self-search for her Cherokee heritage. According to

Glancy, the route to her Indian root is almost lost and severed, yet “the beginning is still there” (59). With her self-narration, Glancy is capable of joining her ancestors along the prairies. All the natural landscapes, including rocks, weeds, rivers, and the harshness of the land, provide the means for her to find her way home. With her life stories, Glancy picks up her Indian heritage & embarks “a journey toward ani-yun-wiyu, or, translated from the Cherokee, ‘real people’” (86).

Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year sketches her experience of giving birth and the first year of mothering her baby-daughter. Woman’s experiences of pregnancy, birth, and nurturing inspire her reflection on her multiple roles as a woman and a writer, as a mother and a wife, as an Ojibwa Indian and a creature on

Earth. The memoir represents her “personal search and an extended wondering at life’s complexity” (5). Settling in New Hampshire, Erdrich describes how she is empowered by the wild creatures in nature and her Ojibwa heritage. With the narration of mundane life at home, Erdrich brilliantly expresses her happiness and depression of a mother, the split of a self into a mothering self and a writing self, her attachment to nature and her sorrow of losing her three grandparents. The depth of losing her maternal grandfather, a former tribal chairman and powwow dancer, is

compared to the loss of her sense of “time’s extension,” her “witness,” her “living memories,” and the farthest reach of herself (186). Erdrich’s one-year memoir is indeed earthbound in her household map with her emotional journey into everyday life at home.

Thirty years after the publication of her first memoir, Storyteller (1981), Leslie

Marmon Silko publishes a new memoir, The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir, in 2010.

Persisting in the Laguna practice, Silko articulates her cultural identity through her recollection of the communal stories. Her first memoir, Storyteller, features a mixture of poems, personal life stories, tribal myths, family letters, essays, anecdotes, and photographs. The tribal conception of time as cycles is depicted in the inclusion of several versions and variations of the Yellow Woman story and the muddling of past and present through the combination of myth and reality. In this newly-published memoir, The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir, Silko intends to present her “self-portrait” with memory and imagination (1). More than family history, life memories, and tribal myths, Silko depicts her interactions with nature, imagination of the tribal mythical figures, personal reflections upon earth and life, and her concerns for environmental protection. For Silko, the traditional Laguna culture has long been connected with and inscribed in the turquoise ledges. Her daily quests for the

turquoise ledges near her neighborhood represent her innermost yearning for homeland.

The dissertation is structured into seven chapters, including an introduction, an explication of theoretical framework, four chapters, each centering on one of the targeted authors, and a conclusion. Chapter One, entitled “Writing from Home” provides a general introduction to the motives for my analysis of contemporary Native

American women’s life writings with the perspective of home. Philip Deloria’s family project initiates my approach of using “home” to read Native women’s life writings.

The chapter also provides the necessary literature reviews on the study of Native women’s life narratives and the general background information about the four life narratives together with a brief sketch of the contents relevant to the analyses.

Chapter Two, entitled “This I Call Home,” includes a thorough study of the implications of home, formulating a theoretical framework to elaborate on the politics and the poetic of home in Native women’s life narratives. I extend Hertha Wong’s analysis of Native American autobiography in terms of self, life, and writing by adding “home” as a necessary and significant critical perspective to read Native women’s life narratives. The chapter explicates how self, life, and writing are intersected to shape the conception of home.

Chapter Three, entitled “Home Lost in Linda Hogan’s The Woman’s Who

Watches over the World: A Native Memoir,” discusses the interplay between personal experience of home and collective history of colonial displacement. The chapter interprets Chickasaws’ loss of homeland in terms of “cultural trauma” as defined by

Jeffrey C. Alexander and Ron Eyerman. The history of the colonial displacement is read as a collective experience shared by most Chickasaws. The experience of home loss often causes traumatic harm to the Chickasaw family life: the loss of self, the detachment from homeland, disorientation with respect to everyday life, and disaffiliation with the Chickasaw oral tradition. The chapter starts with a critique of

Hogan’s memoir by looking at how her family have suffered from the loss of homeland, and how the experience of displacement has almost defeated her desire for making a beloved home by adopting two daughters, and how she finally manages to work through cultural trauma by articulating her experience of home in her writing. .

Chapter Four, entitled “The Road Home in Diane Glancy’s Claiming Breath,” examines Glancy’s search for home on her road trips. As Keith H. Basso observes,

“places possess a marked capacity for triggering acts of self-reflection, inspiring thoughts about who one presently is, or memories of who one used to be, or musings on who one might become” (55), being at home or not surely shapes one’s recognition

of the self in transition. As the status of being away from home strengthens one’s longing for home and ruptures one’s orienting sense of home, the chapter explores the ways through which Glancy conceptualizes and contextualizes her sense of home in her life writing. Reading from Lawrence Buell’s concept of “subjective place-attachment” (72), I argue that Glancy claims her homestead in the

“midlands”—a place in her heart, spirit, and culture—by picking up stories on her road trips. I also discuss how Glancy’s description of her journeys reflects her yearning for home, and how her Cherokee heritage consolidates her imaginary connection with homeland.

Chapter Five, entitled “Homesick at Home in Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s

Dance: A Birth Year,” focuses on Erdrich’s everyday life at home through the analysis of her roles as a mother writer. I argue that human recognition of home is beyond the notions of dwellings. Erdrich’s lively description of her pregnancy, child-nursing, and everyday life provides a realistic portrayal of home; however, she suffers from severe homesickness at home. As “home is something that one constructs, not a particular place, not a location but an entity in becoming” (Nowicka 77), the chapter explores how Erdrich’s sense of self launches an everlasting quest for textual home in her life narrative and how she strives for recreating home in a place where she feels like she never belongs.

Chapter Six, entitled “At Home on Earth in Leslie Marmon Silko’s The

Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir,” makes inquiries into the indigenous attachment to homeland and Silko’s innermost concern over the environment. The chapter explores how Silko bases her life narration on her Laguna home grounds and transforms her memoir into an environmental writing, and emphasizes how her continuous searches for turquoise ledges near her house reinforce her imaginative construction of a home rooted on earth. N. Scott Momaday’s conception of how Native Americans grow attached to the land of the Americas is used to interpret Silko’s experience of home place.

Finally, Chapter Seven, entitled “Conclusion: Writing My Way Home,” recapitulates the theme of the dissertation and its import and provides a cross-textual review of the multiple analyses of home presented in the previous chapters in hope to provide a holistic view of home in Native writers’ life writings. I conclude that writing home opens the outlet for Native women to work through the agony of home loss and further provides the way through which they can return home. Writing home paves their way home.

Chapter Two

This I Call Home

The notions of “home” in Native American culture are diverse and complex.

Robert J. Conley, a Native American writer, once said in an interview, “I was thinking about home [. . .], so when I’m not home, I think about home a hundred years ago.

And I think that’s what got me started” (Teuton 116). A book, entitled Home Places:

Contemporary Native American Writing from Sun Tracks (1995), contains eighteen

Native writers’ essays in attempt to elaborate on their ideas about home places. Each contributor has his/her own way of defining the sense of home: Home is widely referred to as nature, landscapes, a center of established values, waterlines, or “a place to defend against those who would reduce it to insignificance” (Evers and Zepeda x).

In fact, long-term debates over the definition of home indicate that “[t]he concept of home, much like the concept of identity, is a fertile site of contradictions demanding constant renegotiation and reconstruction” (Wiley and Barnes xv). Natalie Edwards and Christopher Hogarth also contend that “‘home’ is now a complex web of interrelated networks that move far beyond the simple understanding of it as an emotional attachment to a space” (7). As a result, there is no one concept of home, nor can home be conceptualized as or transcribed into a fixed and universal idea. To date, the idea of home becomes ever more attractive and yet more challenging to reach.

Likewise, not merely a physical dwelling or a geographical site, but also an emotional, spiritual, and cultural space, home informs a wide range of cultural norms and historical experiences for many Native Americans.

Hertha Wong in her Sending My Heart Back across the Years explains the three roots of the word autobiography—self, life, and writing. She provides a comprehensive study of how “tribal conceptions of self” and life are and shifts the focus from writing to language in order to illustrate her idea that pre-contact non-written mode of Indian life stories should also be counted as Native American autobiography (6). According to Wong, the tribal concepts of self are defined by

“community and landscape”: It is an “inclusive,” “relational,” “communal,” and environmentally concerned self (13-14). It is also a “changing self” motivated by “the conception of motion” (15). The self as narrated in a Native American life narrative is a “self-in-process,” a self “that is continually shifting, changing, going” (16).

Moreover, narrating one’s life stories is intended to “become more fully accepted into

(a fuller participant in) his or her community” (16). Life stories are transmitted to realize or develop “one’s link to the tribe” (16).

In fact, Wong’s idea of searching for a “link to the tribe” well explicates Native woman’s life narratives and enables the change of an analytical focus from life to home—to explore a self from the perspective of home, a larger sociocultural context.

Moreover, Wong interprets the tribal life as “cultural specific,” “event oriented,” and

“fragmented” (17). Personal life is often contained in and nourished by a community, the history of which is, in turn, transcribed into the life stories of an individual. The intersections between self, life, and community enable Wong to define the term “life history” as “both one’s individual history and one’s cultural milieu, attests to this”

(18). Regarding the third root, language is gifted with the power to “actively create and shape that world” (19). Spoken language is henceforth considered the manifestation of one’s self and life: “[T]here is a sense of an individual life that is shaped by event, community, and place, and that, in turn, helps to shape tribal life; and there is a sense of language as sacred, filled with the potential to create and shape reality” (Sending My Heart Back 20).

I extend Wong’s reading of Native American autobiography by shifting her perspective of self, life, and writing to that of home. I do not intend to disregard

Wong’s definition of Native American autobiography; instead her critique helps illuminate the significance of home to Native American women’s life narrative. This project is thus geared up to approach the works through the perspective of home.

What for sure is that this is not a feminist reading of the texts, but an emphasis on

Native women’s experience of home is prevalent throughout this project. Native women often depict a female experience of home in their life writings. In Native

American context, home implicates the existence of a self, the practice of everyday life, and the sense of the homeland. They constitute and shape Native American women’s life writings. With respect to Wong’s definition of “tribal conceptions of self,” I stress a female self within home. Wong’s observes a fragmented, culturally specific, event-oriented tribal life in Native American autobiographies. I alter her focus to the importance of everyday life within home. Moreover, home is both a literally physical place where Native peoples accommodate and a metaphorical space created by imagination. It is thus significant to highlight the sense of home place in this dissertation. Finally, Native women narrate their quest for home in their life narratives. Writing serves as the media to present not only a self-in-process but also a home-in-process. The relationship between domestic experiences and life writings provides a key to understanding the meaning of home behind the literary works.

As for Native American women, the idea of home involves multiple layers of implications. The chapter focuses on the intersection of home with self, life, and writing. First of all, women’s experience of home and the traditional roles women often play in family make a profound impact on their self-recognition and self-representation in their life works. The history of displacement and forced relocation also shape the Native sense of self. The sense of self is remarkably connected with the ties of kinship--social relations and family members (Nowicka

2007). The Native self bespeaks and contains a relation, a history, a connection, a community, and the idea of a people “transmitted through the memory, blood, air, and dust of our people” (Osbey 37). Donald L. Fixico refers home to a tribal center and an

Indian perspective. Hence, cultural dislocation brings a yearning to reconnect one’s sense of self back to their home(land). Moreover, the practice of everyday life in the domestic space is a significant part in the process of home in becoming since an

“interchange between memory and environment is always at work in the home” through the practice of “the ritualized behaviors” (Krasner 210-11). Furthermore, home is referred to as a dwelling, a home place, and a homeland for Native Americans.

Away from home perhaps leads to a greater longing for home because home can be

“an imaginary space longed for, always already lost in the very formation of the idea of home” (Friedman, “Bodies on the Move” 192). The sense of longing and belonging, in this way, is derived from personal attachment to homeland. Lawrence Buell’s idea of “subjective place-attachment” explicates personal imagination for the existence of an original home base (72). Finally, if Native women lose their physical home, they are able to recreate one in their life writing. Their autobiographical writing reflects an enactment of home-in-process. They make real the literary construction of home in the life narratives. Gloria Anzaldúa says, “Language is a homeland” (55). Her use of multilingualism develops her narratives into a kind of textual home for her hybrid

identity. Native writers’ writing on home is largely inspired by their traumatic experience of home loss and cultural imagination for their home places. Native life writings thus convey an emotional longing for belonging to a place called as home.

Home Self

Home can never dismiss the existence of a self. The idiom, “home is where the heart is,” indicates that the sense of self features the most crucial constituent of home.

In other words, home is never a home without the self. In fact, the equation also works the other way around in Native context. Willaim Bevis states firmly that “[h]ome to the Indian is a society” (593). Since “the individual is completed only in relation to others” (Bevis 587), a self without relation to home is no longer complete and meaningful in Native American culture.

Native women’s life narratives represent the portrait of a home self—a self within home. It is a self in relation to a bigger community and in connection with history and place. Bevis well defines a Native self: “‘[I]dentity,’ for a Native

American, is not a matter of finding ‘one’s self,’ but of finding a ‘self’ that is transpersonal and includes a society, a past, and a place. To be separated from that transpersonal time and space is to lose identity” (585). It bespeaks a status of being within home which I refer to as a home self. The recognition of home self is remarkable for reading Native women’s autobiographies. According to Fixico, writing

from home points to a kind of writing strategy from inward, based on “a Native logic,” from a self that thinks of and represents Native issues through an Indian perspective

(“Writing from Home” 556). When this “self” is represented through “a Native perspective” in the life writing, it tends to reveal its connection with tribal history, cultural identity, and home place (Fixico, “Writing from Home” 554). Fixico’s idea of the “Native logic” echoes Wong’s definition of “tribal concepts of self” and Bevis’ idea of a tribal “being” (585). Jace Weaver shares a similar observation:

Central to a Native’s sense of self is the individual’s sense of how he or she

fits into the native community [. . . ]. Indigenous societies are synedochic

(part-to-whole) rather than the more Western conception that is metonymic

(part-to-part) [. . .]. It is an ‘enlarged sense of self.’ (“Indigenousness and

Indigeneity” 227)

Brief speaking, they all see a self within home—a self within a community and a self with cultural bonds.

Life stories provide a rich range of materials for the conception of home because human memories and lived experiences are never entirely and exclusively personal. Native American life writings, recognized as a “commune-bio-oratory

(community-life-speaking) or auto-ethnography (self-culture-writing),” abundantly deal with a wider historical, social, and cultural context (Wong, Sending My Heart

Back 6). The works inform a communal self--a self being situated within a community--which unavoidably leads to the ties of kinship. Hertha Wong notices the strength of kinship in shaping Native American communities and life writings. The construction of an indigenous home deeply relies on the continuation of the kinship ties, which in turn suggest a relation, a history, a connection, a community, and the idea of a people who share a cultural heritage, bloodline, stories, memories, and life experiences of a land.

To illustrate, in many Native communities, the idea of “indigenous kinship” involves a larger extended family and househood (Jaimes 63). Theresa Halsey, a

Dakota woman, in her personal correspondence with M. Annette Jaimes, states:

When we live in our community, it is called a tiyospaye, [meaning] a group

of tipis. This community was very important to us because that is where we

found our strength and knowledge and knowing who we are and where we

come from. We no longer live in tipis but still believe in this concept.

(Jaimes 63-64)

This “group of tipis” helps define who a person is and where he/she comes from. The self is thus complete when it is relational and communal. It only makes sense when a self is situated within home—a home self. Jaimes further points out that the sense of shared cultural concepts capably establishes “a social kinship” within a Native

community. The sense of home derived from a shared culture is as valuable as that derived from bloodline (Jaimes 64). Paula Gunn Allen explains the tribal sense of family and kinship in a similar way:

“Family” did not mean what is usually meant by that term in the modern

western world. One’s family might have defined in biological terms as

those to whom one was blood kin. More often it was defined by other

considerations; spiritual kinship was at least as important a factor as “blood.’

Membership in a certain clan related one to many people in very close ways,

though the biological connection might be so distant as to be practically

nonexistent [. . .]. In this construct, all persons who can point to common

direct-line ancestors are in some sense related. (Sacred Hoop 251)

The idea of indigenous home is thus deeply embedded in the spirit of “communalism”

(Jaimes 63). As such, Native conception of self is tightly intertwined and bound up with home and so is shown in Native life narratives.

Equally significant is women’s role in the maintenance of Native kinship ties.

The indigenous kinship requires “peacefulness and cooperation among people and of centrality of the woman’s power” (Allen, Sacred Hoop 23). In the operation of the kinship ties, women are granted with “respect and authority” in order to maintain the order of the social interactions (Jaimes 63). As a Native woman, the “female principle”

is vital to the establishment of her self (Jaimes 67). According to Allen, Indian men and women shared a complementary relationship in the maintenance of the social order before 1492. However, “genocratic cultures” gradually fell into the shade and drew to its close after 1429: “[T]he Invaders have exerted every effort to remove

Indian women from every position of authority” in tribal affairs (Allen, Sacred Hoop

3). The cultural imposition of patriarchy has demolished many indigenous communities. Hence, Allen calls for a full restoration of “womanness,” a “feminine principle of creation” (Sacred Hoop 119). Jaimes coins a term “Native Womanism” in attempt to bring back the female principle and reconstruct the tribal social order. In

Native American context, the female principle is crucial to the tribal continuum. Allen observes that “women’s rituals are traditionally centered on continuation” (Sacred

Hoop 98). To a considerable extent, the connection between women and tribal continuum seems relatively universal. In indigenous societies, the idea of female continuum has been traced back to the “feminine organic archetypes”: The archetypes can be “found in all Native creation stories and geomythology. Examples of such figures include the Corn Mother and Daughter, Spider Woman, and Changing Woman of Southwest Pueblo cultural lore” (Jaimes 66-67). The feminine organic archetypes are exactly what Allen names as “Mothers and Grandmothers” in creations stories

(“Medicine Worlds” 9).

The female sense of self is empowered by women’s inherent aptitude of creation and ability of reproduction. Corporeal continuum is the most everlasting and undeprivable privilege that Mother Earth grants women. Julia Kristeva finds that “the majority of women today see the possibility for fulfillment [. . .] in bringing a child into the world” (206). Pregnancy and childbearing become a “reunion of a woman-mother with the body of her mother. [. . .]. By giving birth, the woman enters into contact with her mother; she becomes, she is her own mother; they are the same continuity differentiating itself” (Kristeva 239). The role of mother helps achieve the sense of a female self:

From a medicine point of view, the most important event in a woman’s life

is the birth of a child, because that birth allows a woman to enter fully into

the woman’s spiritual community. Heretofore she could participate in

various ceremonies in various capacities, but she was largely excluded

from women’s secrets, most of which refer to the woman’s medicine way.

Having traversed the borderland between life and death in childbirth, she is

welcomed into the community of matrons and her true instruction in the

woman’s way begins. (Allen, “Medicine World” 11)

Women’s sense of a female self not only guarantees a promising continuum for the community but also takes a pivotal part in their life narratives.

Home Life

The practice of everyday life constitutes the notion about how home is being sustained and imagined. Home requires an ongoing maintenance through the practice of everyday life. As the place where human beings live an ordinary life, home serves as a center where human significance is embedded and daily life is brought into existence. It is in the matter of daily routine that makes home a substantial body for creativity and imagination. Everyday life helps construct the portrait and meaning of self and home in life narratives. We cannot tell what home is like unless one lives in it, recognizes every structure of the house, and knows the history of the family members. Everyday chores, such as hanging clothes, taking caring of gardens, cleaning rooms, making food, and setting the table are what make home as it is.

Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling refer these process as a “homemaking practice” and explains how home must be understood as a lived space which is ‘continually created and recreated through everyday practices’ (23).

According to James Duncan and David Lambert, home is both performative and productive. On one hand, it is performative because of its “everyday self-constituting practices, embedded in a spatial context that is constituted by social practices while it is equally constitutive of them” (Duncan and Lambert 387). On the other hand, the productivity of home empowers and continues the “living cultures” as defined by Jace

Weaver (“Indigenousness and Indigeneity” 227). It is in the accumulation of everyday life that makes “what happened” as home into human memory and explains what home is in a culture that has “always been dynamic” (Weaver, “Indigenousness and

Indigeneity” 227).

For centuries, women have been associated with the image of home and consigned to the domestic spheres. Doreen Massey points out that women in the past have lived at home where men were often “the breadwinner[s]” and women, “the homemaker[s]” (188). Women become a homely figure apportioned to the domestic spaces and obliged to offer housework services. Home is frequently categorized as women’s “special domain” (hooks, Yearning 42). Even today, a lot of women who get paid by working outside still play the role as the major keepers of their houses. Bell hooks’ impression that “[i]n our young minds houses belonged to women” is often an experience and memory for most children in the whole world even in the 21st century

(Yearning 41).

A woman performing the househood work is, in fact, participating in a kind of

“domestic ritual” that is “a constant of everyday life” (Romines 6). According to Ann

Romines, housework carries with it a ritual-like quality. The routine rhythm of everyday life corresponds to Orrin E. Klapp’s definition of rituals--“regular recurrence, symbolic value, emotional meaning and (usually) a ‘dramatic’ groupmaking quality”

(as qtd. in Romines 12). Under such circumstances, “a domestic ritual can be a large, important househood occasion, such as a family reunion or a home wedding, or it can be an ordinary task such as serving a meal or sewing a seam. All such rituals help to preserve the shelter” (Romines12). Romines further proposes that housekeeping should be recognized “as a telling, pervasive language” in order to take a step further to critical issues deeply inscribed in women’s life stories (17). Food making and eating are considered a kind of “auto/biographical practices” to examine personal, cultural and social identities (Antoniou 126).

Moreover, family stories shed light on the way through which Native people perceive the world, experience their life, and struggle for continuum. Donald Fixico points out family stories not only reveal important issues in the oral tradition but are essential to writing from home as an approach. Philip Deloria, for example, refers to his grandparents’ marriage as a “new American story” (126) since family narratives cannot stay out of the colonial American context. Under such circumstances, home contains a wide range of intersecting meanings and complex emotions Native

Americans experience in the real world:

We contend that home is always a form of coalition: between the individual

and the family or community, between belonging and exile, between home

as utopian longing and home as memory, between home as safe haven and

home as imprisonment or site of violence, and finally, between home as

place and home as metaphor. (Wiley and Barnes xv)

More often than not, the representation of domestic spaces and family life is converted into “a native research paradise illustrating the exotic in the familiar” by cultural critics or anthropologists (Cieraad 3). Reflecting a complex interplay of historical, social, and cultural forces, family stories hence help illustrate their life experience in Native women’s autobiographies.

In addition, domestic rituals, culturally specific and communally significant, are indispensable for the survival of Native peoples. Romines depicts the relationship between domestic rituals and the cultural continuity: “Thus a woman who is committed to domestic ritual is participating in an enterprise connected with the continuity of a common culture and the triumph of human values over natural process”

(12). Housework as a kind of ritual enactment links “its performer back in time to the company of female ancestors” (Rabuzzi 102).

As a matter of fact, the practice of domestic rituals not only bridges the gap between the performer and her ancestors, but also connects her to the company of women in the world. This sense of female bonding is often generated by a shared experience of everyday life and female experiences in the patriarchal context. Native

American women, through their writing on home, forge an imaginary alliance with

women in the world.

Home place

It is in the association of the land with human memories and a sense of “cultural specificity” that a land is transformed into a place as “home” (de Certeau 228). Paul

Gruchow defines what home is: “A home is the place in the present where one’s past and one’s future come together, the crossroads between history and heaven” (4).

When a person refers to a place as his/her native land, the place becomes a reference point for him/her to return to the past and extend to the future. Home serves as a place of time orientation: “Severed from the past, the present is meaningless, outcast, homeless” (Bevis 590). Here home becomes “an originary place” (Cochran 70) for the speaker to connect back in time with his/her ancestors and look forward to future generations. Eviatar Zerubavel believes that a sense of “sameness” comes from the constancy of place (41). It is, in turn, from this sense of “sameness” that a sense of belonging to a specific group of people comes into being. Fixico thus regards home as the “strongest point of reference” to the formation of Native American cultural identity: “With home as reference point, tribal and personal values as well as other cultural influences govern the way that Native people think” (“Writing from Home”

554; 555). Connection to a home place equips a Native American with his/her tribal identity.

More than home as a dwelling house or a physical place, home is simultaneously considered an imaginary space in human mind. Personal exploration into a metaphorical space in which the “self” can be and feel “at home” is apparently significant for Native writers. However, home is not intended to be a “utopia—a no place, a nowhere, [even if it could be] an imaginary space longed for, always already lost in the very formation of the idea of home” (Friedman, “Body on the Moves” 192).

Far away from home, a Native woman longs for home where she feels recognized as an insider—a home where the cultural sense of “being” is rooted. The search for reconnection fulfills what Louise Owen defines as an “indigenous motion” which stands for a physical journey back to one’s home land and/or a mental excursion into one’s cultural heritage (164). Arif Dirlik’s idea of “place-based imagination” also reinforces a subjective relationship with homeland (15). In a word, “[s]pace is [thus] socialized; landscape [becomes] a home” (Turnbull 31).

The concept of home place is crucial to one’s sense of orientation—where the sense of self is rooted. Roxann Prazniak and Arif Dirlik assert that the sense of place is always necessarily involved in the indigenous culture that, in turn, displays the place-based diversity, or say, specificity. It explains why Native Americans extol their ancestral lands. In addition, the land serves as the material base for Native Americans to strive for their survival. The land sustains all living beings in the world. Native

Americans amazingly strike a balance between human beings and animals by an ancient notion of reciprocity. Given that the land is meaningful to tribal culture, an alliance is kept between Native Americans and their tribal lands because of a “cultural specificity” rooted in and developed in accordance with the particular landscapes their ancestors inhabit for thousands of years. As Native Americans live in harmony with nature, their life experiences cannot be easily divorced from the geographical landscapes. The sense of difference is achieved in a distinguishability of a specific home place from other lands. The tribal land becomes a reference point for a Native to physically return in order to mentally identify with the tribal past.

The land is also spiritually significant in Native cultures. Sacred places associate

Native peoples with mythic events that constitute the tribal memories specific to their culture. Joseph Epes Brown thus announces that “[m]ythic events can thus be experienced repeatedly through the landmarks in each people’s immediate natural environment” (24). The land becomes the connection between the past and the present and the interface between the mundane and the spiritual. As the sense of cultural specificity originates from land specificity, the land becomes storied while the story gets landed. Tribal stories and myths can hardly be separated from a specific locale.

According to Stuart Cochran, these place-based stories help construct a culture (80).

Home place gradually shapes an indigenous culture that is represented in tribal stories

transmitted across generations. Consequently, the land is turned into a place for home.

It informs Hogan’s idea of “storied land” to which Native Americans hold “an unflagging loyalty” (Solar Storms 149). Landed stories also endow a place with a sense of spirituality significant to the tribal members. In a word, a place becomes sacred or significant because of the stories rooted in the land. With the landed stories, the land gradually becomes homeland, the place indigenous people call as home.

The conception of indigenism justly conveys an indigenous sense of homeland and the maintenance of a reciprocal relationship with the environment. Indigenism is defined in terms of an intimate and perpetual relationship to the land: “[T]o be indigenous is to be rooted in place, and attachment to the land in a very concrete sense is a prescriptive component of indigenism as concept” (Prazniak and Dirlik 8).

Indigenism also emphasizes the “reified cultural characteristic” based on the relationship between indigenous peoples and the place where they inhabit (Prazniak and Dirlik 9). The alliance between a Native people and a specific land is irreplaceable because it is in this alliance that a cultural identity is thus shaped. Michel de Certeau affirms that each Indian soil “keeps” the secret of an Indian people because the Indian way of life is closely related to and cannot be easily separated from the particular soil. This is how an Indian distinguishes his/her ancestral land from other places so as to come to “a realization of coming from a ‘different’ place” (de

Certeau 229). Therefore, a sense of “‘cultural’ specificity” fastened on a particular land makes a tribal unity distinctive since the differences in life experiences highlight the vital particularity of a people. That is to say, the acquisition of such “specificity” is largely based on the “rootedness of the Indian ethnic groups in a particular soil” (de

Certeau 228). The land where such a cultural specificity has been taking shape generates a sense of land-specificity in itself for the Indian people (de Certeau 227-29).

Hence place-rootedness is essential to the formation of an indigenous identity.

Prazmak and Dirlik’s statement elucidates the inseparable relationship between indigenism and the specific place:

Indigenism [. . .] in turn differ[s] in terms of relationship to place; even

where it appears in placeless manifestations, indigenism nevertheless

retains the ideal of place—with all its implications in terms of relation to

nature and social relations—as a mark of identity. (10)

Prazmak and Dirlik’s analysis of the substance of place in the formation of indigenism indicates that indigenous peoples are deeply tided with and rooted in their home places (8-10). The place, culturally specific, gradually becomes their Native land for an indigenous people. It is exactly the place Native American women recall as home in their life narratives.

For Native Americans, indigenism is not simply human attachment to a specific

place; “it also means ‘to live in relationship with the place where one is born,’ as in the sense of an ‘indigenous homeland’” (Jaimes 66). Native notion of home often carries an image of nature as an extension of domestic space. Native women often embrace the natural environment in their attachment to homelands, juxtaposing both a mutual enrichment of domestic enactment and natural abundance. Sylvia Bowerbank and Dolores Nawagesic Wawia explicate the Native sense of home: “The Native sense of home includes free animals, plants, reptiles, and rocks” (227). For Native

Americans, home is not merely a physical dwelling but a native place within nature.

Therefore, both attachment to land and awareness of “interdependence” among all beings are essential to the indigenous sense of homeland. In many Native American traditions, the land, regarded as Mother Earth, with its natural elements, is interdependently connected to all the species. It is also alive in Native spirituality in which all beings share a relationship of reciprocity with one another. James Weaver in his Introduction to Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture analyzes the idea of reciprocity: “If anything is most vital, essential, and absolutely important in Native cultural philosophy, it is this concept of interdependence: the fact that without land there is no life, and without a responsible social and cultural outlook by humans, no life-sustaining land is possible” (xii). As such, Native recognition of home conveys “the necessity of reconstructing life from below in its very

connectedness with nature” (Dirlik 41). As Philip Sheldrake suggests, “[a]lthough place is a human construct, it is equally vital not to lose sight of the fact that the natural features are part of the interrelationships that go to make up place” (5).

Undoubtedly, the concern about biodiversity is central to the foundation of an indigenous homeland.

Moreover, feeling at home on earth involves an ecological concern about the environment near the habitat. “Nature is ‘home’” (Bevis 602). According to Bevis, nature is home in extension: Nature is “the tipi walls expanded, with more and more people chatting around the fire. Nature is filled with events, gods, spirits, chickadees, and deer acting as men. Nature is ‘house’” (Bevis 620). N. Scott Momaday expresses a similar belief in his definition of home: “[H]ome is the earth. All things are alive in this profound unity in which are all elements, all animals, all things” (House 157).

Native women’s sense of home reflects their respect and affection for Mother Earth.

Home and nature, as intertwined, can never separate one from another. Eder Anker suggests that understanding one’s house also requires “understanding the household of nature” (131). Judith Plant defines the notion of home in relation to the ecology:

In considering the notion of home, bioregionalists turn towards ecology.

The word itself comes from the Greek oikos, for home—an indication that

home is much broader than simply the nuclear family. As it is in the natural

world, where all life is connected and inter-related, seemingly with

diversity and complexities, so it is with human domestic life. (“Revaluing

Home: Feminism and Bioregionalism” 21)

For the reason, the notion of home should always go hand in hand with the environmental issues in nature. Plant explains a harmonious relationship between human and the Earth as a kind of “homing in” experience because home is “the theater of our human ecology” and “the place where we can learn the values of caring for and nurturing each other and environments” (“Searching for Common Ground”

82). It is in this practice of ecological balance that Native women’s life writings have contributed to the sense of home place and the environmental ethic.

Home Writing

“Writing from home” and quest for home, as a matter of fact, help achieve a unique identity as a Native woman writer and show the particularity of home writing in American Indian studies. Home, in a way, serves as an imaginary space which

Native women yearn forever to return: “[M]ost people spend their lives in search of home, at the gap between the natural home [. . .] and the particular ideal home where they would fully fulfilled” (Tucker 184). Native women’s experience of home abundantly nourishes Native life writings today: “There is collective experience to speak from. The Peoples’ experience is particular, has relations to particular histories

and places, and no matter what language that experience issues forth in, there is a material reality if we touch fire” (Million 315). Craig Womack proposes to writing from a distinctive American Indian experience and recognizes the importance of imagination in shaping Indian experience: An “imaginative vision provides one of the best means for accessing and understanding this vast field we call experience. This is both a rational and spiritual exercise” (369). This combination of the rational and the spiritual makes Native women’s home writing culturally specific. More than a quest for home, a Native life writing “creates its home through tangential locations [and] may thus serve also as a site for resistance to dominant ideologies” (Rubenstein 5).

The theme of domestic practices or relatively “feminine subject” has been widely marginalized and trivialized in American literature for a long time (Romines 9).

Yet it is from this marginalization and undervaluation of family matters in women’s writings that Ann Romines intends to survey American women texts since the Civil

War. She observes that domestic sphere has been disregarded by many male writers and literary critics. She argues that American women after the time of the Civil War

“began to write about housekeeping in a new way, not as the unarticulated denouement of every female story but as subject and ongoing substance, in itself” (9).

As an example of how female writers who draw their subject on family matter can be accordingly underread, Romines quotes from Joyce Carol Oates’s review of Eudora

Welty’s fiction entitled Losing Battles: The fiction is a “bizarre combination of a seemingly boundless admiration for feminine nonsense—family life, food, relatives, conversations, eccentric old people—and a sharp, penetrating eye for the seams of the world, through which a murderous light shines” (54, as qtd. in Romines 8-9).

However, Romines also recognizes there has been a tendency of scholars from different fields—literature, history, anthropology, cultural studies, psychology, sociology—striving for “the tools we need to read women’s writings about housekeeping not as safely minor diversions but as central, powerful, and potentially explosive documents of women’s culture” (9).

Hence, this intimate relationship with home becomes an important motif in women’s texts. More often than men’s, women’s narratives are attractively framed by their particular experience of home. Home serves “both a livable space and a creative state of possibility for the woman writer” (Wiley and Barnes xx). In the past two decades, the significance of home in women’s writing has been gradually recognized as one of the most valuable critical issues to approach women’s texts (Mohanty and

Martin 1986; Romines 1992; Wiley and Barnes 1996; Mezei and Briganti 2002;

Miller 2008). Ann Romines further argues that some best American fictions composed by women are shaped by the “complex of domestic-literary concerns [they] ha[ve] called the home plot” (9). In Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and

Poetics of Home (1996), Catherine Wiley and Fiona R. Barnes also observe a change of focus in the study of women’s texts from a “outsiderhood” and otherness to the construction of “selfhood”: “We contend that the recent emphasis on outsiderhood and otherness in women’s lives and women’s writing must ultimately give way to a renewed focus on selfhood and homemaking” (xvi). In 2002, Kathy Mezei and Chiara

Briganti in their essay, “Reading the House: A Literary Perspective,” develop a theoretical framework for “the significance of dwelling places in the evolution of the literary imagination” through their study of English domestic novels. They notice that novels and houses “furnish a dwelling place—a spatial construct” for women writers to articulate their longing for and locate their selves to a private domain (839). As such, “the encoding and decoding of house and domesticity as the sphere of women are integral to an understanding of this symbiosis” (Mezei and Briganti 844).

Nowadays, women writers capably associate domesticity with female creativity in their writings. Despite of its troubling routineness, they consider domestic sphere a source of “liberating capacities to generate play, invention, and art” (Romines 13).

Housework becomes “not only the unspoken, unvalued routine [but] also the center and vehicle of a culture invented by women, a complex and continuing process of female, domestic art (Romines 13–14). Jeannette Cooperman has a similar view towards the spirituality of domestic tasks: “[I]t is precisely the physicality of domestic

acts and objects that leads us toward pure spirit” and the woman who keeps house in order to restore daily life back to its normal track “builds a bridge between experience and its sacred meaning. As cook, cleaner, hostess and healer, she plays roles of mythic, even cosmic import” (183). Mezei and Briganti make a note of women’s creative aptitude for reconsidering the significance of domestic service:

In writing from a domestic space of house, househood, and family, women

writers can create a position in the field of cultural production from which

to value ordinary women’s lives, the quotidian, the minute. By writing

about and through domestic ritual and the domestic sphere, and by their

attentiveness to the minute, women writer across cultures bestow literary

value on domesticity and domestic space. (843)

The domestic sphere, traditionally assigned to women, is essentially full of private rituals of artistic work and potentials for literary imagination for women writers.

Writing home serves as “a powerful example of ongoing womanly creativity and strength” (Levy 7). Homemaking, as “the search for a new place to call home,” constitutes what a writer depicts about her sense of self (Brown 50).

As a matter of fact, after Euroamerican settlement, Native Americans are regarded as “strangers” in the Americas. As strangers, Native Americans, in the eyes of the colonizers, are “undecidables,” “unclassifiable,” and uncomprehendable (Sarup

101):

A stranger is someone who refuses to remain confined to the ‘far away’

land or go away from our own. S/he is physically close while remaining

culturally remote. Strangers often seem to be suspended in the empty space

between a tradition which they have already left and the mode of life which

stubbornly denies them the right of entry. The stranger blurs a boundary

line. The stranger is an anomaly, standing between the inside and the

outside, order and chaos, friend and enemy. (101-2)

Native Americans are, of course, not newcomers to the continent. In fact, they have been rooted into their home place. However, after 1492, the “‘placeable’ bonding” is in great danger (Sarup 97). Native people become “eternal wanderer[s], homeless always and everywhere” in the land they have lived for thousands of years (Sarup

102). Nonetheless, home persists even in a rather unhomely manner. Home is not “an endpoint, but a constant movement towards or reconfiguration of the self in a place”

(Wiley and Barnes xvi). Exile, journey, or away from home often results in the impulse of imagination and creativity in Native life narratives. Native writers are empowered by writing from home; writing home, they move towards home. Being

“strangers” in their homeland, Native women employ their self-narration as a metaphorical journey in search of home, a geography to which they are emotionally

and culturally attached. The quest for home through writing helps define what “home” means to Native women.

Furthermore, mixed-blood women writers are always searching for home in their life narratives. Louise Owens describes his mixed blood identity as “the product of liminal space”:

I am the product of liminal space, the result of union between desperate

individuals on the edges of dispossessed cultures and the marginalized

spawn of invaders. A liminal existence and a tension in the blood and heart

must be the inevitable result of such crossing. (176)

Descending from the colonizers and the colonized, mixed-blood Native Americans are never fully acknowledged by people from either side. They are permanently travelling across the borderline between two worlds: “The borderline is always ambivalent; sometimes it is seen as an inherent part of the inside, at other times it is seen as part of the chaotic wilderness outside” (Sarup 99). Mixed-blood Indians restlessly and desperately continue their long quest for cultural home since “to be what is called a mixedblood is never to rest” (Owens 197). As mixed bloods, they are at home in neither the mainstream society nor in American Indian community. For mixed blood writers, “the idea of ‘home’ has, by definition, multilayered, multitextul and contradictory meanings” (Ifekwunigwe xiv-xv). Therefore, mixed-blood Native

women, as “strangers,” struggle on in their search of home in life narratives.

As such, life writings shape a route through which Native women root and re-root their “home” in the cultural heritage. Trinh T. Minh-ha, in her article, “Other than Myself/My Other Self,” writes that “[f]or a number of writers in exile, the true home is to be found not in houses, but in writing” (16). Writers’ imaginative construction of home bespeaks an intimate relationship between home and writing in

Native women’s life narratives. On one hand, writing home leads to the practice of homecoming and homebuilding. On the other hand, everyday life in the domestic sphere is invested with a sense of urgency in their life narratives. The narration of home becomes an act of homemaking for a writer because writing home helps contextualize her Native self into her texts and connect her to the community. By writing home, the narrators return home. In order to appropriate “the Euroamerican notion of a fixed, known ‘territory’ imagined to contain Indians” (Owens 35), Native writers represent stories about home in a history of displacement and relocation. The stories they tell of themselves reveal personal experiences of home and their place-based identity as Indian women. They employ life writings “as a means of rewriting an oppressive history into an enabling narrative,” creating autobiographical home writings as family stories aimed to be transmitted across generations and thus continue American Indian culture (de Hernandez, “On Home Ground” 22).

Conclusion

To conclude, the theoretical framework is formulated to elaborate on the significance of home in the Native women’s life narratives. It makes sense to broaden

Wong’s reading of Native American autobiography by bringing in a new perspective—using home as a critical approach. The notion of home is illuminated in the multi-layered intersection of self, life, and writing in Native women’s life narratives. The theoretical framework functions as the critical agenda in our research into textual analyses of the four targeted texts.

Chapter Three

Home Lost in Linda Hogan’s The Woman’s Who Watches over the World: A Native

Memoir

The traumatic sense of home loss resulting from Chickasaw people’s experience of forced removal from their ancestral land has constantly been one of the primary issues Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw Indian writer, explores in her writing. Hogan’s life writing, The Woman Who Watches over the World: A Native Memoir, is a first-hand narrative of a family history in relation to the experience of displacement commonly shared by many Native Americans. In this chapter, personal experience of home loss is the focal point of analysis. I generally expound on the implication of Chickasaws’ history of displacement and relocation. I interpret their experience of home loss as a

“cultural trauma” defined by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Ron Eyerman in order to elucidate how such an experience leads to the fracture of a family. I also decipher how

Chickasaw’s loss of homeland affects Hogan’s sense of home and explore how

Hogan’s life writing presents a memorial sketch of the cultural trauma resulting from and correlated with the experience of home loss. I justify how the collective memory of colonial displacement is embodied in and intertwined with Hogan’s life in terms of broken mother-daughter knots, and demonstrate how Hogan is empowered to work through cultural trauma by restoring broken family ties and her writing. Hogan’s life

narrative serves as a healing in her enduring quest for home.

Linda Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches over the World: A Native Memoir is her personal memoir in search of the meaning of home. Throughout the memoir,

Hogan relates her “self-telling” to “the history of a continent” (14), using a “clay woman” as a metaphor to represent the brokenness of her self, family, and land. The memoir relates a history of three generations of women in Hogan’s family, including herself, her mother, and her two adopted daughters, who, because “the destruction of the body and land have coincided in history” (62-63), have been or are, in one way or another, speechless of their emotional, physical, and spiritual sufferings. With her life stories, Hogan explores how Indian history of displacement is entangled with and rebound upon her experience of home. Her experience of home is closely embedded in the European colonization of the Americans. It is through an exploration into her haunted past and tribal hardships that she is empowered to find the meaning out of her existence and her pain. In spite of the “phantoms of generations past in our bodies,”

Hogan presents a “geography of the human spirit, common to all peoples” in order to restore the stories back to the land (16).

Hogan provides a narrative not only “about love” (16), but about “healing, history, and survival” (16). This memoir is loosely structured into eleven chapters, each of which is independent yet complementary. The chapters cannot be separated

into certain kinds of categories since all the subjects are intertwined together like the structure of the spider web. Overall, the sense of history dominates the whole writing.

The work relates Hogan’s experience of home with Chickasaws’ loss of homeland.

With the memoir, she retrieves not only her personal history but a wider Indian history.

For Hogan, as a Chickasaw writer, history is always present in geography. The

“space-time” relationship becomes a unifying force to organize every chapter, presenting “a geography of the human spirit [that is] common to all peoples” (16).

The memoir starts with Hogan’s “self-telling” to the young people on reservations, connecting her personal history with the history of the continent since “[she] can lay a human history out before [her] and hold a light to it, and in that light is the history of a continent” (14). Hogan then identifies herself and the world with the clay woman,

“the Woman who Watch Over the World,” since she, the clay woman, and the land are all together broken. Historical traumas are recognized and embodied in human bodies and in the land per se. By retrieving painful childhood memory, Hogan recalls the traumatic history of her people on this continent. By exploring personal agony and tribal trauma, she displays a map/path of healing for young generations to pursue after her. After years of experiences with pain, Hogan finds cure for her suffering from

“earth, water, light and air” (16). It is hence significant that elements of nature are used to entitle six out of the eleven chapters. What unifies all these separate but

complementary treads into a spider-web like structure is the power of tribal survival through which a heightened sense of self-awareness gradually develops.

Different from great admiration for her poetry and fictions, Hogan’s memoir receives two apparently conflicting critical opinions. On one hand, critics praise highly the poetic language, the cathartic power, the rich texture of her life experience as a Chickasaw woman and the overwhelming connection between personal life and a wider American history. For example, Sue Samson writes that it is “a very good book that goes a long way toward explaining Native Americans today” (1). Recognizing

Hogan’s power of words, Frederic Brussat and Mary Ann Brussat consider this memoir “riveting”: “These beautiful and discerning words point to the riches that unfold in Hogan’s recounting of her pain-wracked life” (1). Book review from PW:

Publishers Weekly pays attention to the connection between personal affairs and “a whole history,” recommending readers to appreciate its “wise and compassionate offering” (1). Edna M. Boardman considers the writing “complex, and sensitive” since “Hogan alternates the stories of family with meditations on themes such as yearning for healing and wholeness, family, traditions, connectedness, [and] love” (1).

Finally, Sandy Bartel comments that “Hogan shows us that for all of the sufferings, we can live in a center of compassionate understanding” (3).

On the other hand, there are critics who are uneasy about Hogan’s connection

between personal agony of life and the impact of American colonization. Robert L.

Berner, for instance, considers Hogan’s memoir pessimistic and even fatalistic: “This tension seems in her book of autobiographical essays to dissipate into didactic assertion and indeed often into despair” (2). What’s worse, Berner finds troubles with

Hogan’s inference that her pain has to be traced back or even attributed to

Chickasaw’s experience of displacement. He uses Hogan’s early alcoholic addiction as an example, saying that it should have come from the “alcoholism in her family” and “a deliberate effort of self-destruction” (2). As such, Berner accuses Hogan of an

“askew” vision in her explanation of her personal agony and a “provocative” generalization of a personal history with a larger American colonial history (2; 3).

With three examples, Berner reminds readers of Hogan’s “muddling” of American

Indian history because he cannot find the specific historical evidence for her usage in the memoir. In the end, Berner admits that it is a “moving” work, but he charges that

Hogan’s “strategy of defining personal history in the light of its larger background will only blur private reality if public ‘fact’ are at best misinterpreted and at worst merely invented” (3).

Berner’s idea that one should be fully responsible for his/her wrongs seems reasonable and fair. However, Hogan is not unwise in her connection between the personal and the collective. As a matter of fact, Hogan’s writing is derived from and

empowered by the experience of home loss. Her family history well illustrates one of the resulting outcomes of the shared loss of homes and firmly explicates how personal experiences of home have long been contained in a wider social and cultural context.

As a descendent of the Colbert family, whom the Chickasaw people esteem highly for their efforts to retain tribal lands, Hogan is also a descendent of the Chickasaw’s land thief. As a mixed-blood Chickasaw, Hogan feels situated somewhere in between and suffering a woeful identity crisis: “When I think of these parallel worlds, it’s with the realization that I contain blood of both victim and victimizer”(The Woman 119-120).

On one hand, her great-grandfathers have been councilors, tribal leaders, chiefs, and governors in the Chickasaw history. Levi Colbert, for example, was the major opponent against Indian Removal in the 1830s. On the other hand, her great grandfather, Graville Walker Young, a politician of French-Indian ancestry, took advantage of the intermarriage with a Chickasaw woman to “possess” a right to the tribal land. Young, “like many of the white men who married Indian women in the

Territory,” got himself a land and a legislature as a Chickasaw through intermarriage

(Red Clay 60). He unjustly made use of his position as a commissioner of lands and earned a great profit “from the tribal holdings” (Hogan, “The Two Lives”236-37).

Oddly, Young “has always been upheld by history as a good man, held up just enough to throw us into doubt” (The Woman 119). Hogan throws doubt on the truth of the

historical record: “the good man written about in history books, or the man who had a cold streak” (The Woman 119). Apart from an uncertain sense of identity, Hogan describes how her family suffers home loss resulting from the Depression, a phase of land deprivation. Bankers took back their loans when Indians could not return the money. Hogan’s family thus became “landless” (Red Clay 59). Consequently, the wrestling for homeland becomes her everlasting limbo in which she has to struggle over her identities.

Agony over home loss is a shared experience for many Native Americans. The stories of home loss are often represented in the literary works written by many

Native American writers alike. It is of course one of the critical issues often raised in

Native women’s narratives. As a matter of fact, writing home is political per se:

“What all this indicates is that homes are not neutral places. Imagining a home is as political an act is imagining a nation” (Rubenstein 6).The history of displacement as described in Native women’s writings serves as a mournful accusation of and a powerful resistance to Euroamerican colonization: “Home comes to its being most powerfully when it is gone, lost, left behind, desired and imagined” (Friedman,

“Bodies on the Move” 202). Writing home loss articulates a political stance against colonization: “A poetics of dislocation may begin for some in recognizing ‘home’ as no place they want to be, as a place where the heart may be, but a place that must be

left, as a place whose leaving is the source of speech and writing” (Friedman, “Bodies on the Move” 205). It becomes imperative for Native writers to narrate their traumatic memory of home loss and construct an autobiographical home in their life narratives:

“Native people have not only resisted historic dispossession, they have also [. . .] remapped a continuing native presence, reminding observers that the settler-city not only was, but still is, native land” (Blomley 131).

Strategically, the story of home loss as represented in Native American writings can be read as a mirror for Euroamericans who settle in a new land at the cost of others. Susan Stanford Friedman in her essay, “Bodies on the Move: A Poetics of

Home and Diaspora,” indicates that “the story of home making is often the history of home razing—that is, the razing of someone else’s home to clear the way for one’s own settlement. The end of one people’s wandering can be the beginning of another’s diaspora” (202). For more than two centuries, the “legal” and “official” impositions reinforced to steal land from Native Americans involve treaties-making, the relocation to the “Indian Territory,” the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Railroad Act, the

Homestead Act, the Indian Allotment Act of 1887, the establishment of Indian reservations, and the Relocation Act of 1950s. The focal tension arising from the interactions between the colonizers and the colonized is Euroamericans’ deprivation of the indigenous land: “North American history is just as much the story of

displacement of Indian peoples as it is that of non-Indian expansion (Waldman 189).

Euroamerican history of settlement in the Americas parallels to American Indian loss of ancestral places. As such, Native recounts of their home loss are truly political; the writers aim to write back and write anew the “unrecorded history” of colonization from an Indian perspective (Hogan, The Woman 65). The representation of home loss in fact provides a map for Native women to write their way home.

The history of the Chickasaw people throughout the colonization is, simply put, one of the loss of homeland—displacement and relocation. The first official land cessions for the Chickasaw started in the beginning of the 19th century. According to

Duane K. Hale, Arrell M. Gibson, and Frank W. Porter, the coauthors of The

Chickasaw, the Chickasaw lost nearly 20 million acres of the tribal land out of the four treaties they made with the U.S. government (42-44). The Doctrine of Discovery in due course simply anticipates that the Indian tribes are “subject to the bloodless process of territorial diminishment through repeated remapping of their aboriginal estate” (Nabokov 247).

In the nineteenth century, with the development of the “Indian Territory” and the Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed by President Andrew Jackson, the federal government initiated a close watch on ways to remove Southeastern Indians, including Chickasaw, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, to the Indian

Territory in Oklahoma. The removal is later called the “Trail of Tears,” one of the most tragic experiences of home loss in human history. The Cherokee migration of

1838-39 becomes representative of the “Trail of Tears” that “now stands for the forced removals and suffering of the various Southeast tribes” (Waldman 207-9).

Likewise, the Chickasaw’s “Trail of Tears” is as tragic as that of the Cherokee people.

Chickasaw’s Removal began in 1837 and completed in 1838. Suffering from sickness, bad weather, piercing coldness, threat from military attack, thousands of the

Chickasaws died on the way. Hogan recollects the event as such:

My ancestors had no notion of what they faced, how soon they would be

hungry and pushed along by soldiers with bayonets [. . .]. How soon there

would be unbearable heaviness, soldiers tense, trying to keep the hungry

men from hunting for deer to feed their people, elders, and children [. . .].

We stopped, several times, unable to continue [. . .]. We didn’t even make it

to what was to be our own land, but stopped in despair on Choctaw land,

which was closer than our own. And for this breaking we had lost or been

forced to sell our land, homes, horses, and world. We ended up owing the

federal government $720,000 for the journey. (The Woman 55-56)

On the trail during the removal, the Chickasaw people changed forever: “No longer did the men dash about. The horses were gone. The women wept. There were deadly

epidemics” (The Woman 55). Then in the second half of the 19th century, the legislations of the Railroad Act, the Homestead Act, and the Indian Allotment Act further “[spell] the death of the Indian Territory” (Allen, Spider Woman’s

Granddaughters 12). Moreover, what’s forever a shame in American history is that

Euroamerican thefts of Indian lands bring forth several genocidal massacres in

American Indian history. To name only those Hogan mentions in her memoir: the forced migration of Trail of Tears, the Sand Cree Massacre, and the Wounded Knee

Massacre. Hogan’s description of the “live human exhibition” of six living Eskimos in the Museum of Natural History, New York, is as traumatic an experience humans can bear as ever (The Woman 181-83).

Even in the 20th century, Chickasaws’ experience of home loss does not draw an end. By the 1920s, many Indians “in the allotted tribes [have] lost not only their cultural and tribal identity but also their potential economic base—their land”

(Waldman 219). Nearly two-third of the total land held in 1887 is dispossessed from the Indian tribes. In forty years, “individual allottees lost many more parcels.

Unscrupulous land speculators used a variety of means to separate Indians from their lands” (Waldman 219). Further land loss occurred in the 1930s when most

Chickasaws suddenly found themselves landless. Later in the 1950s, the Relocation

Act took effect, expelling Indians from their reservations or allotment lands into “the

farthest cities from their homes in an attempt to break up reservation life and assimilate the people into the other America” (Hogan, The Woman 65). Hale, Gibson, and Porter make trenchant comment on this policy: “the physical relocation of Indian peoples from reservations to urban areas [. . .] hasten[s] the termination, or extinction, of tribes” (11). They also make an incisive and biting conclusion about the current situation of the Native Americans in their struggle for lands against the federal government as follows:

As long as American Indians retain power, land, and resources that are

coveted by the states and the federal government, there will continue to be a

‘clash of cultures,’ and the issues will be contested in the courts, Congress,

the White House, and even in the international human rights community.

(11)

As a result, the tragic memories of home loss are commonly shared by many

Chickasaws. According to Kai Erikson, a traumatic event often serves as a cultural marker to estrange and differentiate a community from other societies or gather the afflicted into a definite group. The communal body functions as the supporting system that unites and organizes the whole social structure: “It is the community that offers a cushion for pain, the community that offers a context for intimacy, the community that serves as the repository for binding traditions” (Erikson 188). However, when

“traumatic wounds inflicted on individual [are] combine[d] to create a group culture,” the social organism of the community collapses and thus remains dysfunctional

(Erikson 185). Endowed with a sense of estrangement, a traumatic event not only dissolves a community into fragments but also assembles people into particular groups in terms of a shared experience.

I regard the commonly shared experiences of home loss as a “cultural trauma” for many Native Americans today. “Cultural Trauma” as a sociological term is developed by a group of scholars who coauthor a book entitled Cultural Trauma and

Collective Identity (2004). Different from psychological trauma, cultural trauma is characterized with its elements of the historical, the cultural, and the communal.

Cultural trauma theorists, Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, and Neil J. Smelser, suggest that cultural trauma has something to do with the historical event “that is believed to undermine or overwhelm one or several essential ingredients of a culture or the culture as a whole” (Smelser 38). As such, cultural trauma occurs “when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways”

(Alexander, “Toward a Theory” 1).

However, what is culturally traumatic is not the event per se, but the re-memory

of the event and its representation. In other words, the sense of cultural trauma does not originate from the actual occurrence of the tragic event, but “an imaginative process of representation” resulting from the reflection and the recollection of such an event (Alexander, “Toward a Theory” 9). Ron Eyerman explicates how representation is essential to the recognition of cultural trauma:

It is in time-delayed and negotiated recollection that cultural trauma is

experienced, a process that places representation in a key role [. . .]. Here

the means and media of representation are crucial, for they bridge the gaps

between individuals and between occurrence and its recollection. (71)

Jeffrey C. Alexander further uses the “trauma process” to bridge “the gap between event and representation.” First, the practice of such a trauma process is mediated by the speakers or the narrators, as the “carrier groups,” with their “symbolic representations—characterizations—of ongoing events, past, present, and future”

(Alexander, “Toward a Theory” 11). The carrier groups then make certain “claims” in order to expose “some fundamental injury, an exclamation of the terrifying profanation of some sacred value, a narrative about a horribly destruction social process” (Alexander, “Toward a Theory” 11). Moreover, the cultural trauma process also requires the participation of the listeners, who are originally targeted within the members of the carrier groups but later broadened to the larger public (Alexander,

“Toward a Theory” 11-12).

Furthermore, collective memory and collective identity are crucial to the notion of cultural trauma. Cultural trauma, as “a cultural process,” is linked to “the formation of collective identity and the construction of collective memory” (Eyerman 60).

According to Cathy Caruth, personal trauma is bound up with other people’s trauma through listening to each other’s story (8). The interchanges of traumatic feelings between human beings shape up a communal memory from which the recognition of the identity, both personally and collectively, is thus derived. Ron Eyerman states that

“[c]ollective memory is conceived as the outcome of interaction, a conversational process within which individuals locate themselves, where identities are described as the different ways individuals and collectives are positioned by, and position themselves, within narratives” (66-67). Since the notion of self-identity is established and defined in relation to a past that is shared by a group of people, this sense of a shared past guarantees the collective memory that is essential to the development of a collective identity.

The colonial experience of home loss serves as a cultural trauma for Chickasaws and Hogan’s memoir in fact validates the “representational process” for the cultural trauma.2 Hogan, with her search of “a sense of meaning and relationship,” represents

2 Neil Smelser, one of the cultural trauma theorists, hesitates over the recognition of the Native American experience of the loss of their home place as a cultural trauma. According to Smelser, a historical event qualified as a cultural trauma should be “remembered, or made to be remembered. 79

the Chickasaw’s loss of homeland as a cultural trauma which in turn results in multiple “wounds” in her identity, family, and tribal community in general (15).

Eyerman’s statement explicates how Hogan’s writing on her experience of home loss exemplifies Chickasaws’ cultural trauma:

Resolving cultural trauma can involve the articulation of collective identity

and collective memory, as individual stories meld into collective history

through forms and processes of collective representation. Collective

identity refers to a process of ‘we’ formation, a process both historically

rooted and rooted in history. While this common history may have its

origins in direct experience, its memory is mediated through narratives that

are modified with the passage of time and filtered through cultural artifacts

and other materializations that represents the past in the present. (74)

The colonial experience of home loss shapes Chickasaws’ collective memory on

Furthermore, the memory must be made culturally relevant, that is, represented as obliterating, damaging, or rendering problematic something sacred-usually a value or outlook felt to be essential for the integrity of the affected society. Finally, the memory must be associated with a strong negative affect, usually disgust, shame, or guilt” (36). He considers the memory of the slavery serves best a cultural trauma in American history since it meets the three conditions. He then states that “[t]he seizure of Native Americans’ lands and the partial extermination of their population is another example, but at the present time its status as trauma is not as secured as is slavery” (36). Unfortunately, he does not provide a detailed explanation for his hesitation about the comparatively less insecure status of Native American home loss as a cultural trauma in American history. For me, I cannot agree with Smelser on his judgment for the instability of the native people’s history of the displacement as the cultural trauma. Instead I think both the institution of slavery and the deprivation of Indian land are cultural traumas. Brief speaking, regarding Smelser’s three conditions, Native American loss of their homeland are “made to be remembered” in Native American writings today. The loss is “culturally relevant” as the land is sacred to the indigenous peoples and they are facing cultural fracture resulting from the loss of their home place. Lastly, the memory of home loss indeed is often “associated with a strong negative affect” which can be partly demonstrated in the high rate of poverty and alcoholism, resulting from a sense of despair, hopelessness, and rage, in Indian communities nowadays. 80

which a group identity is grounded. The shared memory of home loss paradoxically becomes a constituent of the Chickasaw identity today. The collective memory of home loss is mediated through Hogan’s imaginative representation of cultural trauma in her writing. Jace Weaver in “In Other’s Words” states that “American Indian writers help Native readers imagine and reimagine themselves as Indian from the inside rather than as defined by the dominant society” (5-6). Hogan’s writing substantiates the process through which Native “listeners” can identify with the narrator, leading to the process of “we” formation--a transformation from an individual “I” to the plural “we.” As a literature that tends to “hold the society together” (Allen, Sacred Hoop 79), Hogan’s memoir is no longer just personally concerned but tribally and communally significant. Understanding Hogan’s representation of the re-memory of colonial displacement in terms of cultural trauma,

I explore how multiple experiences of land loss shatter the sociocultural infrastructure of tribal communities and thus affect personal experiences of home. It is also meaningful to examine how Hogan later turns the cultural trauma into “a weapon in the struggle for racial recognition and acceptance” (Eyerman 92).

Writing about the loss of home enables the Chickasaw people to establish a tribal identity by connecting the individual to the communal. Kalí Tal avers that

“[l]iterature of trauma is written from the need to tell and retell the story of the

traumatic experience, to make it real both to the victim and to the community” (137).

Furthermore, “[i]f the members of a persecuted group define themselves as a community, bonded by their common misfortune, and see their individual sufferings as a part of a common plight, then (and only then) will the urge to bear witness be present” (Tal 124). This urge for the intersection between the personal and the collective is obviously strong in Hogan’s memoir: “Personal history and belief [. . .] are not so far away from the histories of land, time and space, water, and exploitation”

(49). By delving into a profound research into the reason of bodily illness and human suffering, Hogan states that “our stories do not begin with us as individuals” (The

Woman 78). After heavily losing herself to alcohol addiction, one day, she realizes that her “problems [are] not confined to [herself]” and decides to listen to “the painful stories of other Indian people” (58). Hogan represents not only a personal story but a racial history that are “recent and remembered” (79), activating the wounds not only from an individual but a communal perspective.

Moreover, as the sense of self has to be materialized into a body and localized into a space, our sense of self and home are “mutually and ongoingly co-constituted”

(Gorman-Murray and Dowling 2). The sense of home loss indeed brings forth the loss of self in the memoir. Catherine Wiley and Fiona R. Barnes emphasize there exists

“an interactive and changing” relationship between self and home place (xvii). Anne

Winning in “Homesickness” writes that “[t]o be at home, to dwell authentically, is to

[have the self] incorporated into the landscape of home, which is the place from which we have our sense of who we are” (257). Blunt and Dowling also explicate the mutually constitutive relationship between self and home: “[H]ome as a place and an imaginary constitutes identities—people’s sense of themselves are related to and produced through lived and imaginative experiences of home” (24). Our notion of home continuously shapes our sense of self and vice versa. As such, our notions of self and home are constantly being produced out of the consequence of the interaction between self and home. Unsurprisingly, Iris Marion Young regards home as a site “for the construction and reconstruction of one’s self” (153). From this perspective, the sense of self within home--the home self--is never fixed, essential, and unchanging.

As home and self mutually and constantly shape each other, the experience of home loss also leads to one’s loss of self, or say, soul loss, as described in Hogan’s writing. Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Biddy Martin elaborate on the interrelationship between the loss of home and its subsequent loss of sense of self:

“To the extent that identity is [. . .] based on homogeneity and comfort, on skin, blood, and heart, the giving up of home will necessarily mean the giving up of self and vice versa” (209). Furthermore, J. Douglas Porteous and Sandra E. Smith in their book,

Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home, write that “home is central to our lives

[and] the forcible destruction of it by powerful authorities will result in suffering on the part of the home dweller” (4). Porteous and Smith critically coin a term “domicide” to refer to the forced loss of home. The neologism, “domicide,” is defined as such:

The deliberate destruction of home by human agency in pursuit of specified

goals, which causes suffering to the victims. In addition, we specify that the

human agency is usually external to the home area, that some form of

planning is often involved, and that the rhetoric of public interest or

common good is frequently used by the perpetrators. It allows that home

destruction perpetrated by or welcomed by the home dweller cannot be

domicide; the notion of suffering is crucial. (12)

Porteous and Smith also recognize that even if a new home is founded after domicide, home, the origin, the center, can never be the same one. The experience of domicide, as such, often results in a serious undoing of one’s life—a world turned upside down.

Under such circumstances, the experience of domicide metaphorically turns home into “a place of loss, of being lost” for Indian people who grieve over the loss of homeland (Friedman, “Bodies on the Move” 203). Being homeless, many Natives suffer from “being lost,” and afterwards, soul loss, the disorientation of self within home or without home—loss of connection with history, community, and place.

Because home is where human beings physically, psychologically, and emotionally

anchor the sense of self, the homeless are deprived of the emotional bonds with communities and native places. A home divided becomes dysfunctional; No longer is home place of security, pleasure, being and belonging. A home that is lost, even if rebuilt later, possibly becomes the source of alienation, rejection, fear, rage, guilt, and violence. Porteous and Smith describes how people suffer from domicide:

[People suffer from] the destruction of a place of attachment and refuge;

loss of security and ownership; restrictions on freedom; partial loss of

identity; and a radical de-centering from place, family, and community.

There may be a loss of historical connection; a weakness of roots; and

partial erasure of the sources of memory, dreams, nostalgia, and ideals. If

home has multiple, complex meanings that are interwoven, then so does

domicide. (63)

The dysfunctional family relationship, including absent fathers, ineffectual motherhood, unattached children, is often found in certain Native American communities today. The relocation of American Indians to cities also severely severs the mutually supportive relationships among community members. Furthermore, the boarding school experience uproots Indian children from home and Native heritage.

They then lose their way home for the rest of their lives. They are never fully home anywhere and everywhere. The relocated become “homeless” in both Indian

communities and mainstream societies. Walking in-between worlds, they are

“culturally in a double bind, with new and precarious beginnings” (Porteous and

Smith 65). They are in one way or another traumatized by the feeling of alienation and the experience of domicide. All in all, many indigenous communities are left more or less dispersed and incapacitated even today.

Through her life writing, Hogan explores how the suffering from communal domicide has been transcribed onto an individual body. She observes that “history lives cell-deep” within a Native body (20). As a Chickasaw woman, Hogan understands how a personal life becomes a “meeting place of [historical] forces” and a native body contains “the commingling of [other persons’] lives and spirits in all their randomness” (115). Hogan describes that Indian men cut and stabbed their bodies in order for “taking pain into the body” after visualizing the murder of their women and children in the Sand Cree Massacre (59). The loss of home/kinship is too strong to bear in language and the unspeakable sorrow has to be inscribed into human bodies:

[T]hey were in such dismay and despair that they stabbed and cut

themselves [. . .]. There was no way to send it away from the self, soul, or

mind. There would always be that memory of terror [. . .]. There was not a

language, even then, for such a pain. That was the reason they hurt

themselves. And the distance of this history still reverberate, entering into

this and every day. We are never not Indians. We have never forgotten this

history. (59)

However, this overwhelming impact of history upon Native bodies still remains unresolved even today: “Large numbers of native women had been forcibly

‘sterilized,’ especially in Oklahoma and South Dakota, and children were lost from communities” (116). Hogan’s description of how the Cree and Inuit people lose their home because of the development of a hydroelectric project in James Bay, Quebec, is aching: “Many lost their homes, the rivers were rerouted, their land covered and torn, their fishing camps and traplines gone. Not long after the invasion, many of the children became so self-destructive that their families had to tie their hands to keep them from committing suicide” (64). The traumatic experience of domicide still harms many Indian youths today: suicide, self-injury, drinking, drug addiction, unemployment and poverty. These wrongs bear all the “way[s] of not remembering.

[They are ways of] escape from the pain of American history” (54). Hogan’s representation of the wounded Indian bodies further explains the serious damage domicide has caused to the integrity of the traditional indigenous family and tribal community.

As a result, being lost to a bottle becomes a common story in many Native

American communities today. Being a Chickasaw Indian, Hogan lives “with all those

whose blood or lives we share, inheriting their histories” (114). Hogan later realizes the reason why herself, her father, her grandfather stay in the same bottle-contained world. This “geography of drunkenness” even reminds Hogan of her connection with her ancestors on the Trail of Tears: “When I think back to the absolute pain of our histories, I understand the relief alcohol must have been on the trail where my own people cried” (64). Old family photos remind Hogan that her grandfather, who she knows only “in his poverty,” has once been a man “looking like [he] had a good handle on the world” (114). However, after the Great Depression of the 1930s, her grandfather, like “most of the Chickasaws, who during the 1930s, if not earlier,” becomes landless (52). Losing everything, he finally gives up his hope, “[falls] into poverty,” and turns into a heavy drinker (52). Never again is her grandfather the vital man in the old photos. Nonetheless, the loss of home is never simply a personal story but a more or less pan-Indian experience: “There is a great sadness in the loss of a man to a bottle. Yet it is not an uncommon story in Native America, where there were even greater losses than his, the loss of lives and an entire land, its languages, its theologies and their beauty” (52). Unfortunately, both her father and Hogan carry on pursuing the geography of drunkenness. She drinks in order to “escape from the pain of an American history” (54). Saving herself from drunkenness, she later attends a

Native AA group and discovers that her problems are not particularly and solely her

own. Realizing the connection between history and native bodies helps Hogan relieve her pain:

That was when I first began to know, really know, that history, like

geography, lives in the body and it is marrow-deep. History is our illness. It

is recorded there, laid down along the tracks and pathways and synapses. I

was only one of the fallen in a lineage of fallen worlds and people. Those of

us who walked out of genocide by some cast of fortune still struggle with

the brokenness of our bodies and hearts. Terror, even now, for many of us,

is remembered inside us, history present in our cells that came from our

ancestor’s cells, form bodies hated, removed, starved, and killed. (59)

This knowledge evokes her real sympathy for her grandfather who has suffered from loss of home and her mother who loses the ability to love.

With the understanding, Hogan turns to explore the mystery of self in her perpetual search of home. Kinship bespeaks her way of homemaking. Born into a family without love and speech, Hogan, as a twelve-year-old girl, hungers desperately after a baby in order to recreate a home with affection. Hogan’s urgent desire for making a home can be seen in her immature relationship with Robert, an American soldier. At age of twelve, Hogan keeps a love affair with the American soldier who is twice her age. The relationship stands for a marriage to Hogan: The “agreement was

unspoken and didn’t exist on paper. But it was understood and it was everything marriage means” (36). She recounts her longing for making a home: “While most of the other twelve-year olds were playing, I feel into life as something of an adult, doing housework, taking care of other people’s children, and myself trying to become pregnant, to make a family” (41). Her goal is to “have a baby” in order to make a family of her own (42). Home here provides “an escape [from her birth family] into

[her] own home with [the man] and marriage” (42). As a child, she senses that “a baby was the most I could hope for” (42). Hogan’s lover strangely brings a homelike atmosphere for Hogan’s family: “In the evenings, in a previously quiet family, we now worked puzzles together, or we played cards” (41). Being a “child untouched by mother’s hands,” Hogan is starving for a home for belonging and love (44). Robert, to a girl of twelve, signifies a hope for a beloved home that never comes true in Hogan’s childhood.

Moreover, Hogan’s description of the dysfunctional mother-daughter knots vividly represents the impact of home loss on many Native communities. Paula Gunn

Allen in The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Tradition explicates the feminine tradition in Native American culture with the image of Old

Spider Woman, “the universal feminine principle of creation” (119). Allen states that traditional Indian women struggle by all means for the “physical survival and cultural

survival” of the Indian people (191). With a belief that mother’s identity is the key to that of her daughter, Allen avers that one’s tribal position originates from his/her

“matrilineal descent” (209). In order to fully establish a self-knowledge and self-identity, it is essential for young women to recognize their mothers within the community. Allen observes that “mother is not only that woman whose womb formed and released you—the term refers in every individual case to an entire generation of women whose psychic, and consequently physical, ‘shape’ made the psychic existence of the following generation possible” (209). Native mothers include not only a birth mother but also the women older than the young ones in the tribal community. I refer to the older women who are capable of mothering as the

“communal mothers” in order to differentiate them from birth mother. In fact, the idea of a communal mother refers to what Hertha Wong calls as “an extended mother”

(“Adoptive Mothers 190). According to Wong, “amid the strains of contemporary reservation and/or town life, family and clan relationship no longer are clearly defined”

(“Adoptive Mothers” 190). Birth mothers’ incapability of mothering indicates that a

Native community is somewhat “threatened by cultural extinction”:

[The sense of cultural extinction] is accentuated by those mothers who flee

to the white towns or to the Catholic God, leaving behind their culture and

their children. It remains for those left behind, the adoptive mothers and

thrown-away youngsters, to reweave the broken strands of family, totem,

and community into a harmonious wholeness. (Wong, “Adoptive Mothers”

191)

As such, the operation of communal mothering addresses a traditional sharing of mothering responsibility that is necessary to sustain a tribal body. Hogan indeed takes on “the traditional female role of insuring cultural continuity [by] adopting those who are left behind and helping them find a place within the family and community”

(Wong, “Adoptive Mothers” 183).

In addition, Hogan’s adoption of two daughters from Lakota tribe embodies her dream home. Hogan regards home as love, shelter, and connection. Out of love for

Indian children, Hogan decides to make a family through an interracial adoption of two Lakota girls. In the 1970s, many Indian children were left out from their family in the foster cares waiting in line for adoption:

The Indian Child Welfare Act went into effect that year, 1978, allowing

Indian families to adopt children of the same tribe, or, if no family in a

child’s tribe was available, another tribe. At the same time, in our region

alone, there were six hundred American Indian children in foster care

homes, needing Indian families. Suddenly, in a turn of the law, we were

considered a first choice for the placement of children from our own

communities. (75)

As a matter of fact, Hogan’s strong quest for a beloved home is shown in her adoration for nests. She believes that natural world serves as a nest sheltering all of the animate in the world and she likewise builds a shelter for two girls. She once picks up a nest fallen from a tree and, to her amazement, she recognizes that the abandoned nest is made of her daughter’s hair and her skirt’s thread:

I like it, that a thread of my life was in an abandoned nest, one that had held

eggs and new life. I took the nest home. At home, I held it to the light and

looked more closely. There, to my surprise, nestled into the gray-green sage,

was a gnarl of black hair. It was also unmistakable. It was my daughter’s

hair, cleaned from a brush. (Dwellings 124)

She is joyful to know that a remnant of her life has been turned into a shelter for birds unknown to her at all. Thus, “[t]he whole world was a nest on its humble tilt, in the maze of the universe, holding us” (Dwellings 124). Through adoption, Hogan extends her kinship and relation into the lives of the two girls; she is able to shelter two girls within her nest. As a young girl, Hogan longs for making a home by having her own baby. Now, she manages to make home for two girls originally unknown to her.

Hogan observes that “there is the deepest sense of being at home here in this intimate kinship” (Dwellings 41). For Hogan, kinship is her way of homemaking. Her idea of

home contains something larger than a bloodline as normally recognized in Western society. For her, relations are what make sense in her recognition of home. Thus, she is willing to weave an intimate connection with and make a sheltering home for two helpless girls.

Kinship, bespeaking connection and interrelation, also launches Hogan’s search for home place deeply intertwined with the Chickasaw history. About the time she adopts two daughters, she returns with her father to Oklahoma in search of their

“homeland” (115). The physical return serves as their quest for reconnection with tribal kinship: ‘We wanted to visit with some of the Chickasaw elders. As individuals, and as tribal people, my father and I were searching for ourselves.” (115). Hogan recognizes the power of “returning” in the continuation of Native culture. Therefore, they go “on a journey to Oklahoma”:

It was not my birthplace, but it was my home, the place of my heart, my

inner world, the place where I lived before I was born. Oklahoma was the

place that shaped me with its loving people, beauty, and heat. It was where,

always, I encountered kindness. (116)

Going back to Oklahoma, she feels deeply attached to the land and intimately connected with her people. Meeting tribal members, her kinship, she is able to “rest in

[their] pasts, to look toward them as something most significant” (116). It explicates

the reason why she has a sense of “Belonging” by being surrounded by her people in a

Stomp Dance (66). This homing journey is indeed an exploration into her family history and her acquisition of home. Revisiting her grandmother’s house, Hogan feels being at home again. Her grandmother offers her the most homelike feeling in her childhood:

My grandmother had been the light of all our lives. She was a quiet, tender

woman. I loved and was loved by her. I admired her and longed to become

like her, wanting all my life to become a grandmother. It was my goal. Even

as a young girl I thought ahead to my later years when I would cook for

grandchildren, create stacks of toast and platters of eggs like the ones she

had served up to all of us cousins, uncles, and aunts, in the mornings. (121)

Even though her grandmother’s house have been burnt down, her love for grandmother enables her to carry away “mementos” for the memory and connection

(123). Being so much attached to her grandmother, Hogan recognizes the significance of the connection between herself and her grandmother: “I am one of the children who lived inside my grandmother, and was carried, cell, gene, and spirit, within mourners along the Trail of Tears” (123). Through the reconnection with her grandmother,

Hogan attains a kind of metaphorical homecoming to her tribal community.

However, Hogan’s experience with her adopted daughters enables her to realize

that the spider web no longer sustains the affection traditionally shared between mothers and daughters. Her experience of having an unattached mother explains the reason why she comes up with the determination that “I’d one day become that kind of mother, nurturing, friendly, with a daughter, maybe two” (74). Two daughters’ birth mother leads a miserable life: “two daughters born to the same birth mother and with different fathers, one father murdered in front of the older girl, one whose whereabouts were unknown, as was his paternity uncertain” (73). What’s worse, two little girls have not just been traumatized by “child abuse or the lack of love. Along with the girls, history came to live with [them], the undeniable, unforgotten aspect of every American Indian life” (77). Hogan’s adoption of two girls implies the existence of an incompetent birth mother: “The girls had been abandoned in Denver by their birth mother. Until a neighbor noticed them, the oldest had gone through trash in the alley to find food for herself and her infant sister” (80). This “strained mothering” often results from and leads to “the breakdown of tribal social structure (such as family and clan relationship)” (Wong, “Adoptive Mothers” 176). Hogan recognizes the birth mother once at a traditional dance. With her drunken voice, the woman tells a sad story of her drunkenness and the many children she has lost. Hogan observes that the sorrow of the birth mother results from an illness mistakenly imposed by

European colonization. Such a troubling motherhood surely brings forth and results

from broken families and fractured communities. According to Hertha Wong,

“mothering is not merely an activity but an orientation to the world—a recognition of and responsibility to the interrelated ness of all beings” (“Adoptive Mothers” 190).

Wong further distinguishes the differences in face of the dysfunctional mothering between on/off the reservation. On the reservation, if a mother is culturally alienated and emotionally incompetent, communal mothers usually take over and “weave the individual back into the web of community;” however, off the reservation, “only alienation from both family and community, a central loss of identity for a Native

American” is thus provoked (Wong, “Adoptive Mothers” 190). As a result, a disturbing mother-daughter relationship sometimes estranges the daughter from the

Native culture and reflects a fractured community of all relations.

Hogan’s childhood experience of her mother and her early alienation from her birth family illustrate a troubling mother-daughter relationship in a family off the reservation. From her childhood, Hogan feels “a need to know [her] mother, and her story”: “I hid beneath tables and watched her. I concealed myself in corners and looked out, trying to know her ( 94). Growing up “in a house without words,” Hogan becomes “wordless outside of home” (92). This is how she remembers her childhood house:

It was a house of four small quiet rooms. Two were bedrooms. The house

itself had not interior doors, so there were no physical boundaries between

my mother, my sister, and myself. There was nothing that could be opened

or closed. Yet there were walls of silence between us, and silences within

those that dated back how many generations I can’t imagine. Silence didn’t

figure richly into our lives, but poorly. (92)

Silence and quietness are words Hogan continues to use throughout the description of her childhood life at home. The speechless inhabitants seem to become embodied in the silent house itself. Hogan’s mother, perhaps having been physically abused and emotionally hurt in childhood, is psychologically wounded in marriage.

Alone in a house where her husband is far away from home, she is too exhausted to love her daughters. In order to earn more money, Hogan’s mother irons clothes day and night. Until now, “the smell of burned wax” brings back Hogan’s memory of her childhood life at a soundless house in which Hogan and her sister have to remain quiet lest her mother scorches a shirt (100). Hogan’s father’s extramarital relationship with a girlfriend in Japan makes the situation even worse: “After my father’s return from

Japan [. . .], there was never an argument. This was a hurt and anger that lasted nearly forty years. She would bring it all up again if we listened too much to our father and his stories” (93). It is still difficult for Hogan to know her mother who never lays any claim to herself and shares stories: “Even now, I must create her story from pieces”

(95). This is really a home without love, affection, and warmth.

However, the psychological barriers always remain in the house lacking of physical boundaries. Living in a house where “even the closets had curtains,” Hogan’s mother always stays “behind the closed emotional doors of the bodily house” (94;

105). Inheriting her mother’s fears, pain, and silence, Hogan becomes a nervous and lonely child who is “disturbed, crying uncontrollably, being sent home from school in hysterics” (102). She is finally lost, deeply depressed and conspicuously absent from her own life. Her mother’s traumatized family history embodied in “the scar of a large oval burn on her leg” passes on to Hogan who then turns the pain and fear “inward”

(101). Unlike her two adopted daughters, she has a family but never feels at home. Yet, like her two daughters, she has no history as a child: “My mother had no memory of my birth, offered no stories about me as a child” (105).

However, the desire for the knowledge of her history is strong. To forgive and love, Hogan needs a story to explain what happened between herself and her mother:

I still asked questions, even at the age of fifty, because I wanted, needed, a

history, a story, if only one, about my childhood. I was, in some ways, as

without history as my daughters were, and like my daughters I hoped to

find some filament of attachment with my mother that was never there. She

was too sensitive, too unable to talk. She was filled with an unspoken pain I

would never know or understood. (105)

She believes that her early bitter experience of home comes from and contains something much larger than herself and her family. She can possibly feel beloved and attached if she can piece together her mother’s story of misery: “I try to assemble it, to tell a story of a disturbed daughter and a mother” who has been wronged by something unknown even to herself in the past (105). Her mother, as a white woman from a Pennsylvania Dutch background, is also from an unattached family. She suffers wounds and burns in her childhood. As a young mother left alone with two daughters,

Hogan’s mother becomes silent, betrayed, unhappy, lonely, fearful, and angry. All the bitterness seems to show up in the life of a young woman, yet she has to be a mother doing all the caretaking jobs for her daughters and the house. However, she is lack of the ability to love. The open space inside the doorless house turns to symbolize a highly influential relation between her mother’s story and Hogan’s own life: “I seemed permeable, as if in that first house there was no wall between me and others, me and history, me and earth, so that even as I grew, the pain of others would hurt me”

(110). Hogan’s mother, like the birth mother of her adopted daughters, is deeply troubled by a turbulent inside world and her agony finds expression in the life of her unloved children.

What’s even worse, Hogan’s father remains an absent father while Hogan is left

100

alone with her mother. As an Indian man, he cannot face the sadness of “watching his family dwindle down to only a few” (107). Growing up with a father who has almost been defeated by the fact of home loss, Hogan’s father does not possess the emotional courage to deal with the alienation inside his house. Under such circumstances, Hogan lives with an alienated mother and an absent father in a house off the reservation.

Lack of communal mothering system to keep her inside the track of the Native heritage, Hogan grows up as a young woman lost for a while to the world of bottles.

Hogan describes the lack of communal supporting system for the troubling mothers:

“At the time, there were so many loveless women alone with their children, carrying the dead weight of nuclear families, with no one to guard them or protect or teach”

(110). Out of her assembly of her mother’s life stories, Hogan then pursues the reason of her mother’s lack of power to love and speech: “My mother was silent, not from malice but from the simple fact she was exhausted” (97). This bitter sense of exhaustion, shared by many women whose husband are far away in wars in other lands, often denies the kind of nurturing mother-and-daughter relationship and fails

Hogan’s yearning for dear attachment for her mother. Trying to piece together her mother’s and her own stories, Hogan learns to tell her mother’s story from all the clues to her mother’s life:

The stories come only from out of [herself] the way a spider creates the

101

strongest of webs from its own abdomen. The web is at once a sheltering

place, a trap, and a place of beginning journeys. Something shakes it and

the spider works its way toward it. Only its feet know which lines are safe

to walk. (95)

In search of her mother’s story, Hogan feels the touch of home in a way.

In addition, Hogan’s portrait of experiences with two terribly abused daughters further illustrates the shattered mother-daughter relation which in turn informs a fractured communal and cultural body. Smelser avers that “[a] cultural trauma refers to an invasive and overwhelming event that is believed to undermine or overwhelm one or several essential ingredients of a culture or the culture as a whole” (38). Hogan depicts that cultural trauma makes flesh on the native body of the birth mother. Being lost to drunkenness, the birth mother is herself unable to mother her children. The ineffectual motherhood often originates from an “illness that has been given over to us by our history as Indian people” (77). Hogan wonders why a mother could hurt her own children: “I try to think about what it means, the bodily hatred that would loose itself on a child in the form of torture, so purposefully cold and with intent to harm. It is a coldness that has its origin in events, not people” (78). She suggests that the story of her daughters does not begin at the moment of their births, not even the birth of their mother, but a hundred year ago, with the Wounded Knee Massacre. Hogan traces

102

back to the event of the Wounded Massacre in order to “see what forces led to the twisted violence, to the hatred of a mother’s self and the beautiful children born of her body” (78). The infamous massacre was committed on December 29, 1890, near

Wounded Knee creek on the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation where the two girls come from. Lakota men, women, and children are all together killed and wounded seriously in the massacre. Hogan wonders about the effects of the massacre on the survivors who have experienced and “witnessed firsthand the massacres, dismemberment, and mutilation of the people” (79). Doubting if outsiders can comprehend the depth of the pain, anger, and despair of Native Americans in face of such a tragic holocaust, Hogan states that the agony over genocide, for the birth mother as one of the later generations of the Pine Ridge Reservation, can be “recent and remembered” as ever (79).

Moreover, Hogan describes that the Indian children are stolen away from their home in order to cut down their bond with their tribal heritage and separate them from their family. The federal government separates Native kids from their home by forcibly sending the kids to the Indian boarding schools. “The bond [is] purposely broken in order for the children to be assimilated into American way of being” (87).

Their feeling of attachment to home is impaired and thus lost forever. When the children return home from school, “their family often did not recognize or know them”

(87). The children, feeling alienated from their native language and way of life, are

103

unable to “go back home, to wholly go tack, so it becomes a tragedy in many parts, some of it still with us today” (87). Hogan then doubts: “who of [the stolen children] learned how to be a mother or father? All of this is passed on to ourselves and to my daughters, in a chain of history, the links of which we are now trying to break apart”

(88). The tribal way of life is thus discontinued; the family has fallen apart. The stolen children lose their original bonding with home.

Under such circumstances, the adoption of two daughters forces Hogan to “face the Native history that had been at work in their lives and past” and enter a war with

“American violence” (80; 77). It is indeed a war against the suffering caused by the troubling motherhood and fractured family, both of which receive their legacy from

American colonial history. Marie, the elder daughter, whose body contains all the violence of American colonization, is abused terribly in her childhood:

She had been abused, even as an infant, burned by cigarettes and hot wires,

and raped. She was a girl who was once dropped off by her mother and her

mother’s boyfriend on a dark country road in their attempt to lose her.

Somehow she survived. That night, pushed out of the car, she found her

way back. But she never found her way back to herself as a child, the one

that existed before the violence, the child that might have been. (76)

Hogan’s love and efforts made in search for medical sources remain fruitless. Marie

104

tends to turn all her anger outward, abuses others, and eventually grows up an abusive mother herself: “Because when the unattached become mothers, all hell—even if you don’t believe in it—breaks loose. It lets go its hold in the underworld and comes to the surface” (89). The inability to mother reflects a “personal and cultural alienation” and a resultant inability to relate herself with the communal body (Wong, “Adoptive

Mothers” 183). Marie’s story bespeaks a self whose loss of bonding with home further causes her alienation from peoples and cultural heritage. Marie, as “a tangle of threads and war-torn American Indian history” (77), loses control over her contained body and eventually loses all her children to the adoptive families. Marie’s lack of self-recognition is expressed in her rejection of her daughter, saying: “This isn’t my daughter. My child died.” Hogan recollects that “[w]ith [her] oldest adopted daughter, it was a dream of love, hope, and family that was lost by something already wronged, already beyond [her] knowing, a history that had injured her before [her] knowledge”

(131).

However, hard as it is, Hogan never gives up her dream for home made through connection with two girls. In face of the difficulties, all of the other families in

Hogan’s adoption support group end up in a year with the adoptive children removed again and the parents feel “inadequate” for the rest of their lives (89). However,

Hogan insists on a family bonding with two daughters, even though she needs to deal

105

with all kinds of troubles and problems. For Hogan, adoption, one way of homemaking, is “an irrevocable act” and “a thing of potential, for both heartbreak and love. There would be no return, ever, to what we had been before, as people, alone and together” (76). Fortunately, unlike Marie, Jeanette, the younger daughter, who is less tortured than her older sister, wins over the war against the destructive colonial history. In her early age, Jeanette is used to express her pain inward. Speechless and sleepless, she hurts herself. After adoption, she is given special treatments in order to

“restore the filaments of relationship to [her], the bonding that should have taken place in the early years of a child’s development” (85-86).

Fortunately, Jeanette terminates her long silence on the second day of the special therapy. Hogan recognizes the significance of words in the awakening of her daughter from the world of silence since the ability to articulate also releases Hogan from “a house without words” (92). Hogan’s love enables Jeanette to develop a connection with others and an ability to love, transforming Jeanette from an unbonded girl to a woman with a capability to make home for herself and her children. Hogan describes how she presents Jeanette in their traditional Lakota and Chickasaw clothing to a man who does not drink and will treat her kindly. Truly, love, the mighty force, grows with time at home: “I believed I could help fill young hearts with love and so transform them [. . .]. I watch my younger daughter now. Years later, she is a kind of

106

patient mother” (76).

To conclude, Hogan’s memoir reveals how personal experiences of home have been shaped by the shared experience of the domicide in American Indian history.

Being psychologically traumatized as a child, Hogan traces back to the American history in order to discover the roots of the agony of her life. Growing up unattached in a family without love, Hogan thus hungers for making a home through an extension of kinship. Her immature and early relationship with a soldier twice her age indicates her strong desire for a baby to love. As a woman, Hogan then makes home through the adoption of two Lakota girls. The autobiographical home writing presents her exploration into her past in search for healing and understanding. The chapter indicates that Chickasaw’s history of home loss as a “cultural trauma” disintegrates the communal body and Hogan’s personal experiences of home are related to the colonial history. The collective memory of colonial displacement brings forth the broken mother-daughter relations at home; however, Hogan repairs the broken familial bond by her sheltering two helpless girls from their traumatic loss of home.

107

108

Chapter 4

The Road Home in Diane Glancy’s Claiming Breath

The chapter examines Diane Glancy’s yearning for home lost during the Trail of

Tears and explores how road trips help her contextualize home in her life writing,

Claiming Breath. As a Cherokee writer, Glancy invests life writing in her ongoing quest for belonging. She describes childhood life in multiple dwellings with no sense of belonging and finally contextualizes her home in her texts. I argue that her experience of home is related to her in-between identity, childhood memory, and marriage experience. I insist that road trips help her recreate home within her words.

She narrates her experience of driving along the prairies in order to reconnect with

Cherokee heritage. In her life writing, she builds the road home that is to makes up the physical one she has never really belonged. In addition to Claiming Breath as the pivotal text, I also employ her two nonfictions, entitled The Cold-and-Hunger Dance

(1998) and The Dream of a Broken Field (2011), as supplementary readings to consolidate my exploration into Glancy’s sense of home. Moreover, Lawrence Buell’s concept of “subjective place-attachment” is used as theoretical approach to analyze how road trips inspire Glancy to claim her homestead in the “Midlands”—a place in her heart, spirit, and culture (Buell 72). The Midlands indeed serves not only as a geographical site, but leads to a spiritual and psychological home. In other words, I

109

am to decode how Claiming Breath can be regarded as home writing by exploring

Glancy’s lifelong yearning for home, demonstrating that her sense of home lies on her writings inspired by road trips in the Midwest prairies. I will look into the relationship between Glancy’s in-between identities and experiences of home, and then move on to the ways through which she recreates home within her self and in her writing: “I had to find a homestead within myself, or invent one” (86). Writing leads her way home which is not only deeply rooted in the Midwest prairie but also intimately positioned in the middle of heart.

Claiming Breath represents Glancy’s yearn for a beloved home throughout her life and her suffering from lack of belonging. In the back cover of the book, Glancy indicates that the memoir is written when she has to support her family by driving through Oklahoma and Arkansan in order to teach poetry in different schools.

Claiming Breath provides an account of one of those years. In fact, Glancy reflects at the back over that the book is about “a year that covers more than a year.” Claim

Breath represents Glancy’s ambivalent feelings about home: her helplessness, anguish, alienation, and longing for belonging. Life is never easy for Glancy; it is really full of self-hatred, anger, and silence. As a girl, she wants to run away from home, yet there is no place for a child to go. She later marries with a “wrong man,” “a hard drinking

Irishman” whose “neglect” and “disregard” have traumatized Glancy within nineteen

110

years of her marriage (1). After divorce from her husband, she is left with full responsibility for two teen-age children. Struggling for the survival of her family,

Glancy launches her career as a Native writer and continues her study at a graduate school. Her books get published only until later. During the time when she writes the memoir, Glancy has already been financially independent. It is about time for her to make an announcement: “[M]y life is not defined by my family; it’s defined by what I do and teach” (Andrews 655). Finally, she has a full control of herself and her life:

“Now I’m finally on my own” (52).

Claiming Breath is a one-year journal writing which comprises seventy-two entries in total. It concerns narratives on her marriage, her relationship with Cherokee heritage, and her new sense of self. The nonfiction work is structured mainly around the journal entries titled with dates from December 23rd to Dec 1st of another year, with quite a few exceptional entries organized around specific issues and topics. In the memoir, Glancy blurs the classification of literary genres traditionally recognized in

Western literature, intending to expand the literary boundaries in order to better express her ideas. Therefore, Claiming Breath contains diverse genres in a work: traditional poems, prose poems, prose, essays, notes, historical accounts, diary writing, journal keeping, travel narratives, reflection essays on certain subjects, and her literary experiment with language. The memoir also covers a wide range of issues,

111

from self-narration of everyday life, recollection of family history, search for a cultural belonging, recognition of a tribal heritage, guideline for poetry writing, medication on her identity as a Native woman writer, and records of personal growth through autobiographical reflections.

Claiming Breath receives the 1991 North American Indian Prose Award; however, considerable attention has not been paid to the memoir. Glancy indicates in the back cover of the book that the memoir is “a winter count of sorts, a calendar, a diary of personal matters [. . .] and a final acceptance of the broken past.” Jessica

Grim focuses on the image of “wanderings” prevailing throughout the work, recognizing Glancy’s struggle “to find her place in the world” (1). Classifying the work as woman’s journal writing, Kirkus Reviews focuses on Glancy’s in-between identity, her loss of connection and establishment of reconnection with Cherokee heritage. Kirkus Reviews reviewer states that Glancy explores the empty space

“between-2-places” through writing and traveling. However, the reviewer disapproves of the inclusion of certain topics into the memoir: “But too much of the book is devoted to warmed-off feminism, a justification of Glancy’s Christian beliefs, along with sometimes lame comparisons of Christianity and Native American religion, and advice to writers that’s so basic one wonders whether parody was intended (1). The reviewer concludes that it is a “worthwhile model” for reader who advocates women’s

112

journal writing or who seeks to “reconnect with a lost culture;” otherwise, ordinary readers may not find the book always useful or entertaining (1). Ron Welburn notices

Glancy’s repetitive reference to the road trips she takes in order to make a living and her later comfort in “the freedom to be what her mother never achieved” (140).

Welburn highly recommends Glancy’s “combined sense of focus with the will to survive the emotional weight of her creativity” (140). Lastly, Tim Thompson provides the most comprehensive review of the book. Thompson observes that cross-cultural tensions are vividly found in the memoir: “Glancy’s between-two-worlds struggle is central content in Claiming Breath” (2). Thompson considers the work “the rough-and-tumble construction of a self-made consciousness” (2). However, he is uneasy about the “stereotyping” of “Pan-Indianism” in Glancy’s use of a body of

Native American imagery, such as coyote, vision quest, sacred hoop, and Wovoka (2).

As one of the major voices in contemporary Native American literature, Glancy has to struggle hard for the public recognition of her identity as a Native writer. Some critics and Native writers raise doubt about her identification as a Cherokee woman or writing on the Cherokee heritage. In the Introduction to The Salt Companion to Diane

Glancy (2010), James Mackay raises this doubt on her identity as a Cherokee writer:

This marginal identity has been the source of some controversy. At least one

Native playwright has been happy to imply in print that she does not have

113

the right to call herself Indian, and it is possible to distinguish the same

accusation, more politely veiled, in other critiques and reviews of her

work.3 (1-2)

In fact, this interrogation results from her seemingly lack of sufficient Indian

“credentials” and her mixture of Indian heritage with Christian belief in her writing.

Nonetheless, J. Mackay observes that Glancy feels much empowered by her marginal identity: “Glancy takes it upon herself to question and self-question, to represent the marginal of the marginal, those whose uncertain trace of Native heritage [. . .], nonetheless marks their understanding of the world” (2). Reading her life stories, we come to understand that her marginal identity leads to a life that yearns for long-lost connections, strives for belongingness, and looks for ways in order to be at home in the Midwest prairies.

First of all, Glancy’s sense of home goes beyond the meaning of dwelling houses. Her depiction of houses reveals her feeling towards home throughout her life.

She describes that her house has been broken into twice when she is away on road trips. When she returns to her house, she feels that the house “is waiting like a child who’s been hurt [. . .]. But this is just a house” (33). Nevertheless, she is deeply annoyed by the loss of her great-grandfather’s leather pouch of buckshot because it is

3 According to J. Mackay, Elvira Pulitano and Arnold Krupat are representatives of a group of critics/writers who cast doubt about Glancy’s identification as Cherokee and the legitimacy of her writing on Native heritage. 114

“the only thing [she] can’t replace” (33). The rest of her belongings, including the residence, can be supplanted. In the entry under the title of “29th Street,” the description of the houses reveals her pain resulting from marriage and family experience. There appears a house full of bitterness, agony, and fault: “a house in which you used to live, the fir tree grown it all, up over the roof [. . .]. Inside, a rug

[. . .] is a contour map of anger & the rising area of blame” (82). Glancy then guesses if it is the house where woman lives after marriage: “Or is it a more recent house in which you tried to live with your husband & children? But the same bumps emerged, pushing the inheritance of rupture into them which they will carry to their children”

(82). Inside the house, no one remains unhurt. The house is finally damaged; so is home she builds together with the wrong man. Similar to the children carrying the rupture inherited from their parents, Glancy’s daughter also expresses great anger about broken family after Glancy’s divorce.

Glancy’s lifelong search for a place of belonging starts with her early experience of home. She lives her childhood life in houses located in different cities in the

Midwest. As such, without fixed abode, she loses her sense of home, suffering from a sense of not belonging. This sense of disorientation partly results from repeated migration of her parents: “My father finished grade school. When his father died, he migrated north from Viola, Arkansas, to Kansas City & worked in the stockyards. My

115

mother got farther in school before she went to Kansas city to live with an uncle” (19).

He father, a mixed-blood Cherokee, has been transferred several times to different cities for his work in the stockyards. Lack of belonging, Glancy regards her childhood neighborhoods as a “war zone”:

A war zone in the old neighborhood where I grew up in Kansas City. Some

of the houses boarded & no one goes out at night. Once in a while we drive

by the house when I am back in Kansas City. My mother holds to her side

of the seat, saying, they shoot you here [. . .]. Out across the plains, the

round, irrigated fields from a plane would look like burners on a stone.

Maybe that’s why I’m always looking for a place. My one buffalo dress,

one string of hides.” (18)

The district is not a playground for Glancy as a little girl but a strange war zone where she lives like an outsider. The description truly reveals the little girl’s yearning for a place of belonging—a place to which she can attach with a strong sense of belonging.

Moreover, her past experiences of home bespeak a life in a suppressed family and a world of silence. In her nonfiction entitled The Dream of a Broken Field (2011), she compares her feeling about the childhood house to Native children’s adverse reactions from Indian boarding schools:

It was a black hole of a house. A compressed atmosphere that pressed us

116

flat. Our clothes hooked over our shoulders. We could not walk. But moved

forward with hops, as if our feet were tied together. We were cardboard

dolls in a black house, a boarding school, our mouths could not open, our

lips could not part, our teeth could not show. (Dream 8)

The major “outlet” for her as a child is “leaving of the house for an afternoon”

(Dream 9). Short as the afternoon leaves are, the excursions made away from home serve as “outlets” from a black house in her imagination. As James Krasner writes that a house “allows for the easy motion between past and present one experience in thought” (209-10), the description shows that the childhood house stands for a place of confinement in her memory. In her re-memory, she has been trapped inside an obscure cave that permanently fits into numerous dark nights: “Those dark nights closed in the bungalow on Fiftieth Terrace \ a cave with a living room drawn on the wall large trees, & a west sun like a searchlight from the front porch” (19). It is a rather gloomy and horrific description of a house.

Later in her life, when her mother is fatally sick, Glancy returns to the old house where her mother stays. The key role her mother plays in Glancy’s life is recognized in the considerable number of the entries dedicated to her mother. Fourteen out of the seventy-two entries are intended to express Glancy’s feeling about her mother on deathbed. Her returns to the old house bring up her old memory of a bitter relationship

117

with Mother: “I trying to get to her, trying for some connection to the past when we were not bothered by plane delays, nor death, never thinking of the dangers we escaped in the world” (45). The layout and furniture inside the house reveals Glancy’s uncomfortable feeling in her mother’s residence: “The house with its difficult furniture & border at the ceiling [. . .], gaudy glasses that plague the memory. Radio, garish bric-a-brac. The blade of her complaining whittled the flowers on the wall”

(40). Returning “home” seems to bring back the memory of her lonely childhood in this house. It seems “as though [her father’d] knock [at the door] again one evening”

(46). However, the touch of an “ending” and the aura of “the void” so occupy the space within the house (46). In her imagination of Mother’s death, her mother becomes a “housewife” walking “between the scattered houses” in the neighborhood

(48). After her mother’s death, Glancy takes a cedar chest home, together with her childhood memory: “The cedar chest now in the rain with the design of 1933 when they married [. . .]. My memory of the farm tucked in the chest with albums of the family now dead and gone” (50). Glancy’s narration of her family deteriorating into irreparable pieces reveals her suffering from parental alienation in a broken home.

As a matter of fact, Glancy’s difficult relationship with her mother demonstrates that she grows up othered and even traumatized at home. It bespeaks complex feelings ranging among longing, bitterness, and betrayal. Anger thus becomes the language

118

between mother and daughter: “There is anger still between us” (41). Her harsh experience with mother in fact exemplifies the “domestic violence” as designated by

Andrew Gorman-Murray and Robyn Dowling: the feeling of alienation, isolation, and rejection at home (1). Over the years, mother and daughter “[are] separated by distance & old arguments” (41). As a “homebound” person, Glancy’s mother

“endure[s] her isolation with complaint” throughout her life and suffers from dreams unrealized (51). Checking on the photo albums left by her mother, Glancy recognizes that her mother’s camera is “her war against the nondocumentation from which she came” (Cold-and-Hunger 35). Pain and rage leave a sore gap in the mother-daughter relationship: “I’m impatient with her weakness & feel the bitterness I carry for her.

For every step I took, it seemed she pushed me down” (41). In The Dream of a Broken

Field, Glancy provides a description of her heartbroken feeling toward her mother:

My mother was the other in the house. She was something of which I was

not part. I was left alone with her in the house [. . .]. She swept with a

broom that was her tongue [. . .]. It is a longing for a connective, but it is

separation that first row across the sea. I am here. You are there. It is the

first realization of (m)otherness. (6)

She is overwhelmed by a sense of alienation and a feeling of unwantedness: “I know fear was a part of my childhood. I was in a family that didn’t seem to want to be

119

together. If one member were voted out of the family, it would have been me. It seems a regiment of terror, of wounding” (Dream 19). There are no attachment, intimacy, and tenderness intrinsic to the mother-daughter bond: “You spend your life next to her, yet find air pockets & holes” (46). As an Other in the family, Glancy carries with her a sense of longing for connection. Unfortunately, difference and indifference shape the first language this Anglo mother shares with her Indian daughter: “We are scarred as the strip mines I pass, different as Queen Anne’s lace & cornflowers. She is Anglo & I have the Indian blood buried in my father’s heritage” (41). The conflict over different heritages widens the gap between mother and daughter: The “will & order & persistence of the anglo culture [are] [a]ll things which I resent in my mother” (22).

Glancy’s marriage experience further deteriorates her dream for a beloved home.

Her marriage life is full of agony, fight, loneliness, and regret. In the memoir, the first entry talks about “the wrong man” she marries and unmarries, even though “there is nothing [she] miss[es] about him” (1; 2). She continues asking herself why she marries at all. Growing up as a child starving for emotional nourishment, Glancy fairly detects her desperate will to build a home as make-up of her unloved childhood:

“Because I could curl up again as a girl, say to my husband what I said to my father?

Why was it oppressive? A yoke for which I was not fit. Why didn’t I know what it would be like? I had seen my mother hurt, but it wouldn’t happen to me” (6). Her

120

pessimistic hunger for family love leads to a seemingly daring deed of home-making through marriage. She becomes bound into the yoke of marriage. However, keeping a family together proves to be a desperate effort: “It was painful. My husband traveled and drank a great deal. I received no comfort from him. I had the responsibility of keeping the house and family together and I did it for 19 years, most of which I wanted to leave” (52). Married life becomes as difficult as a struggle between life and death:

He took a walk \ instead of loving me / knowing later he’d drink himself to

oblivion or worse \ & the next day after keeping him quiet when he’d wake

with a thunderstorm \ coaxing him [. . .] \ I sat alone claiming breath after

his harping in the night (70).

Her efforts do not make their marital relationship work. She thus decides to terminate the marriage after nineteen years of marriage life.

Her mixed-blood identity also leads to her lack of belonging and her role as “a marginal voice in several worlds” (Cold-and-Hunger 1). Lack of sufficient cultural upbringing from either parent worsens the crisis of belonging. Roaming in-between worlds indicates her life-long struggle against a sense of confusion, a position of marginality, and a wrestling between either/or and neither/nor: “I was born long ago, to parents of different heritages. I’ve lived several places and none of them is where

121

I’m from. I felt marginalization from both my white and Indian heritages. I was neither of both. Both of neither (Cold-and-Hunger 29). As a mixed-blood Cherokee travelling across different cities, Glancy writes in the epigraph that she is “not fully a part of either”:

My inheritance is the Arkansas backhill culture mixed with Cherokee

heritage. That’s only my father’s side. My mother’s people were Kansas

farmers of German & English descent. So the slow, backwoods illiteracy I

inherited received the will & order & persistence of the Anglo culture. (22)

Nonetheless, Glancy prepares herself “to communicate with the 2 parts of

[herself]” (59). She launches her writing “from a middle ground” (59). The middle ground turns out to be the “empty space” where she aims to explore and “the breakdown of boundaries” which she tries to cross in her writing (4). Glancy intends to obtain a new life in a home without marriage. She has to raise two children, finish education, and earn a meager living by writing, traveling, and teaching: “That’s what’s frightening about the prairie at first \ its barrenness & lack of shelter” (86). Finally, she learns to establish a “new territory” after her divorce: “I picked up my Indian heritage & began a journey toward ani-yun-wiyu, or, translated form the Cherokee,

‘real people’” (86). She manages to claim the prairie as her land and feels at home in her numerous journeys across the prairie: “I found that I weathered the prairie storms

122

& the limitations that come with the territory. I found acceptance of myself \ the strength to travel prairie roads [. . .]. I relieved the struggle to claim the land \ establish a sod house” (87). After divorce, Glancy embarks on her “journey to the any-yun-wiyu” (87). For her, it embodies a woman’s journey home.

The idea of journey is strongly correlated to the notion of home. The notions of home and journey are mutually implicated and embodied. Yi-Fu Tuan makes a note of the differences between “home” and “journey,” contending for the idea that journey

(“travail”) defines “home”: “[A]n argument in favor of travel is that it increases awareness, not of exotic places, but of home as a place” (235). The relationship between journey and home is also emphasized by bell hooks in her Yearning: Race,

Gender, and Cultural Politics:

It was a movement away from the segregated blackness of our community

into a poor white neighborhood. I remember the fear, being scared to walk

to Baba’s (our grandmother’s house) because we would have to pass that

terrifying whiteness—those white faces on the porches staring us down

with hate. Even when empty or vacant, those porches seemed to say

“danger,” “you do not belong here,” “you are not safe.”

Oh! that feeling of safety, of arrival, of homecoming when we finally

reached the edges of her yard [. . .]. Such a contrast, that feeling of arrival,

123

of homecoming, this sweetness and the bitterness of that journey, that

constant reminder of white power and control. (41)

Thus, the implication of home bespeaking the feeling of inside and inclusiveness is bizarrely intensified by the movement toward outside, such as journey, migration, motion, and away from home. Position of transition and feeling of in-between worlds indeed strengthen human yearning for home. Movement, migration, and travels also increase the risk of loss of connectivity with cultural heritage or communal groups. In that sense, travel or journey embodies a “constitutive of cultural meaning” (Clifford 3).

Writing about the loss of home or away from home is subtly transformed into a narrative of home. Glancy’s writing on road trips fulfills her bodily practice of home-making through physical journey. Life writing, as “a fieldbook of textual migration,” paves her road home (Cold-and-Hunger 100).

Place attachment and mobility are equally imperative to American Indians. On one hand, a sense of place is an all-important matter to Native writers. Brenda Marie

Osbey observes that “[p]lace make sense to us to the extent that they are or seem to be familiar. To be from someplace is not merely to have lived there for some time. Home is memory and blood, dust and air. It is also to be from and of that particular people.

To be possessed by that history” (41). This perception indicates that the sense of home comprises personal experiences of life in a specific land, the sense of belonging to a

124

group of people, and the recognition of possession with history of the place and the people. On the other hand, migration is necessary for the survival of Native

Americans. In times of need, Native Americans, with stories of the old land, migrate to a new place and learn to identify with the new place after a certain amount of time.

Robert J. Conley, in an interview with Sean Teuton, describes how Cherokees have been getting attached to Oklahoma, the new home place, after forced removal:

There are different migration stories, yet there’s a Cherokee origin story

that describes how the Smoky Mountains were made. So if the Cherokees

migrated into that region from some place else after a certain amount of

time, they became so attached to it that they told stories about originating

right there. So we develop that sense of identification with land, and I think

most of us here in northeast Oklahoma have that sense of identification with

this land even though Cherokees were forced here for the most part. (118)

Glancy’s writing about home, a place for belonging, is simultaneously inspired by this yearning for home and a need for movement. The intersections between longing and request are later transcribed into her life writing through which she finds her way home and initiates a distinctive home narrative on her road trips. Through movement, her stories get rooted in the Midlands for her survival.

Suffering from “the lack of words, the lack of identity, the lack of place,”

125

Glancy draws on her road trip experience in Claiming Breath (J. Mackay, “That

Awkwardness” 170). She capably recognizes the importance of journey, migration, and movement in tribal stories: “For the Native American, stories were embedded in journeys. The journey or migration usually was followed by teepee-drawings depicting experiences during the journey. Now a journal replaces the drawing”

(Dream 36). As Polina Mackay argues that “travel is a central thread that runs through

Glancy’s oeuvre” (31), Glancy combines all three elements, including words, identity, and place, in her life writing, weaving all the fragments into a whole: “Out of the brokenness I found my voice, fractured, moving too quickly form one place to another, forcing meaning form the broken shapes” (In-Between Places 83). Bell hooks also explains how away from home intensifies her feeling of home: “Ironically, it was during my time away from home [. . .] that I begin to rediscover and reclaim many of the alternative ways of thinking and being [of the old ways]” (Belonging 209). A life narrative inspired by her road trips is metaphorically transformed into a home narrative—her loss of home, her search for home, and her claim of a place as home.

The self in motion, reflecting her longing for home, becomes textualized in her life writing.

As an unattached woman, Glancy struggles to find a sense of belonging within

Cherokee heritage since “[t]ribal means belonging” to her (7). “The direct line to her

126

Indian heritage [has] been lost,” it is yet possible for her to pick up her Cherokee heritage as long as “the beginning is still there” (59). Glancy traces her native heritage back to her great grandfather, Wood Lewis, a full-blood Cherokee who flees away from Indian Territory because of unknown troubles. Lewis’ granddaughter later marries a white man and gives birth to Glancy’s father. In face of disillusion with marriage and fear of poverty, Glancy’s father fails to pass on his Cherokee heritage to his daughter. Growing up in several Midwestern cities, Glancy is unfortunately cut off from her Native heritage: “Sometimes I think of my father who left his rural Cherokee heritage to be a real American—a boy scout leader—a provider for his family. I remember the hollowness and anger in him because he had a blank place where heritage should have been” (Dream 11). Yet she delves into her cultural heritage through an imaginary connection with her Indian grandmother:

I cannot remember anything my Indian grandmother said to me, yet her

heritage stands before me like a stone iceberg, a huge presence, all the more

terrible for its silence. The artist makes a land between 2 places. I wasn’t

Indian having been raised separate from the culture. I wasn’t white either.

There was always a gulf between the parts of myself, & a gulf between

others. I had to create a place from which to create a place. (59-60)

Being tribal bespeaks the sense of being possessed by a community and kept inside a

127

web of connection. Therefore, Glancy’s quest for tribal heritage provides the means through which she develops her sense of belonging.

Her sense of belonging is stimulated less by the dwelling than by her trips undertaken on the roads across the states in the Great Plains. Feeling suffocated from her mother at home, Glancy inherits the adoration for travel from her father: “Like my father, I want to be on the roads” (Cold-and-Hunger 10). The long-distance travel serves as both the outlet for her imagination and an indispensable means for living:

I am Artist-in-Residence for both State Arts Councils of Oklahoma &

Arkansas. Across the top of the adjoining states, there are 849 miles. I travel

up & down & back & forth. On this particular trip, I am returning to Tulsa

from Arkadelphia, some 250 miles. The largest part of my work seems the

travel. (11)

Under such circumstance, road trips redefine what constitutes her sense of identity. Her self-identity is embodied in her road trip experiences which, in turn, are transcribed into her narratives in hope to search of home. Lawrence Buell mentions that “[m]ore and more of the world’s population strive to take their places with them as they migrate abroad entrepreneurially or languish involuntary exiles for the right of return. Story and song are often vital to the retention of place-sense under such condition” (64). Like those who build home in a new place, Glancy undertakes a

128

lifelong journey to get connected with Cherokee heritage. She makes a living for survival by making and collecting stories during her road trips. Traveling on road is as imaginary and real as ever. She also emphasizes the relationship between travel and the land in her interview with J. Mackay: “In a sense of travel, in a sense of migration, in a sense of movement over the land, is where there is a solid place” (175). Glancy’s idea of homeland connotes both stability and mobility. The land, laden with tribal myths, is transformed into a place for home and journey: “I pulled up some mud, put it on a turtle’s back, as the creation myth says. It grew into land. A solid place to stay, yet capable of movement. The dream of it traveling” (Claiming Breath 59). The solid land serves as the original base for Glancy to move around and always return. Her sense of place remains closely related to and embodied in her movement: “My sense of place is in the moving” (In-Between Places 33). The sense of place is deeply rooted in her frequent travels on roads. She describes how her identity is shaped by her road trips in The Cold-and-Hunger Dance: After trips on roads for days, her sense of identity “is tied to place [. . .] in transit” (11).

Imagination thus blurs the lines between home and migration. People get attached to a place partly because of human imagination. Glancy’s sense of homeland can be understood through Lawrence Buell’s idea of “environmental imagination.”

Environmental imagination bespeaks a kind of subjective attachment to a place and

129

explains how imagination can possibly blur the boundary between home and migration which bespeaks a home away from home. Buell recognizes the relationship between environmental imagination and “subjective place-attachment,” defining how environmental imagination functions to enhance one’s subjective attachment to a specific home place (72). First, place-attachment bespeaks a traditional and original home base. The home base “spreads out to look more like an archipelago than concentric circles” (72). Afterwards, people become attached to places “by the power of imagining alone [. . . ]. [T]he places that haunt one’s dreams and to some extent define one’s character can range from versions of actual places to the utterly fictitious”

(72-73). According to Buell, human imagination is of foremost importance in face of subjective place-attachment:

But the fact that the imaginer hasn’t been there and maybe never will hardly

lessen the intensity of such storied or imagined places to induce longing and

loyalty, and in some cases even to influence national behavior and the

course of world affairs. It’s entirely possible to care more about places

you’ve never been [. . .] than the ones you know first hand. (Buell 73)

Next, subjective place-attachment requires personal sense of place experiences in order to generate the sense of loyalty. Finally, imagining a place requires a sense of familiarity with a history of the place (74). As a result, Cherokee’s past experience of

130

relocation shapes Glancy’s recognition of the Indian Territory as her “traditional and original home base” for the development of subjective place-attachment.

As a matter of fact, Glancy’s cherished relationship with road trips can be understood in terms of Cherokee’s experience of domicide and forced march on the trail to a new land in the Indian Territory. There develops a painful but subtle connection between the concept of movement and the notion of home--traveling on roads and the experience of displacement/relocation. Ever since the nineteenth century,

Cherokee’s experience of homeland is drastically linked with the expansion of the

Indian Territory in Oklahoma. The step-by-step development of the “Indian Territory” parallels with the colonial history of the Americas. The Indian Territory is designated around 1825 and called as such in the 1830s. After the signature of the Indian

Removal Act of 1830, the imposition of the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834 endows the federal government with the right to “quarantine Indians for the purpose of

‘civilizing’ them” (Waldman 206). Motivated by rapacious desire to acquire more

Indian land, the federal government initiates development of the Indian Territory, one of the early racial segregation projects in the United States. In the 1830s, the federal troops lawfully remove southeastern Indians to the Indian Territory. The forced march results in one of the most tragic and traumatic colonial experiences later called as

“Trail of Tears” in American Indian history. Before 1854, the Indian Territory covers

131

the area from Red River to the Missouri, from the state lines of Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa to the 100th meridian. In the 1850s, the zone is gradually reduced due to the construction of the transcontinental railroad. After the civil war, the terms of

Reconstruction further bestow legal right on the government to relocate those tribes from Kansas. In the 1880s occurs further shrinkage of the Indian Territory. The Indian lands are opened to the settlers in the General Allotment Act of 1887 in which tribal lands are divided into small tracts and allotted to individual Indians. By 1889, non-Indian settlers, with ridiculously low prices, by threat or trick, buy two million acres of land from the Native Americans. The Indian Territory finally takes shape in

1890 as it is now today (Waldman 205-7).

“Trail of Tears,” as a dark piece of history telling Cherokee’s forced removal from ancestral land into the Indian Territory, serves as cultural metaphor with which many Cherokees identify. The heartbreaking experience of displacement shapes traumatic memory shared by many Cherokees today. Cherokees’ removal routes include a nine-hundred-mile journey from Carolina/Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky,

Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, to Fort Gibson in the Indian Territory. Because of malnutrition, disease, hardship, and harsh weather, the Cherokee removal results in deaths of about one fourth of the Cherokee population. It is thus called “Trail of Tears” in the colonial history of America. The Cherokee’s Trail of Tears, one of the most

132

representative removal and relocation projects, occurs along with the development of the “Indian Territory” in Oklahoma (Waldman 197-202). The Trail of Tears,

Cherokees’ experience of displacement and relocation, becomes a cultural indicator recognized by Cherokees today. Depicting a forced march Cherokees experience from

October 1838 to February 1839, Glancy represents this traumatic history in her masterpiece, Pushing the Bear. With subjective imagination, she recreates the places her ancestors have traveled in literary texts. Tribal histories and sense of homeland reinforce her imagination to (re)map the migration routes. The Indian Territory, their destination, becomes a new homeland to which Cherokees learn to attach as their future habitat.

Like longing for an imaginative outlet from an afternoon leave, Glancy’s experiences of road trips provide routes for her to get connected to Cherokee heritage with her free imagination; physical movements encourage her to initiate a series of literary migrations as exemplified by her prolific output of books. Her attachment to the place enriches her imagination and writing. She observes that the ancient voices she hears during her road trips speak through the stories in her scripts:

In my writing I deal with ghosts.

But they’re REAL ghosts.

The-moving-of-them-in-trees.

133

The invisible ones struggling to become visible.

To themselves as much as others.

The tension between.

Until the holes be made whole.

& until the wholes be made hole

To see the other world. (61)

Hence, travel provides her with some time alone on roads, enabling her to pick up the stories and voices rooted in the place long time ago. Glancy writes, “The land carries memories of what happened on it. I pick them up in travel. Sometimes when I read stories from oral tradition in the original language, the land looks different when seen from those old geographies of language” (Dream 107). As such, her experience alongside the roads becomes the material for her to draw on in her writing: “I always collect rocks & weeds & found objects from my travels, as well as images to write with” (29).

Glancy’s road trips in the Midwest prairies indeed achieve the “place-mapping” as defined by Buell (74). Her connection with the Midwest depends on Cherokee’s past experience and the Native heritage rooted in the place: “But my sense of place in the Midwest is defined by that land that was—the vast prairie & our migration over them. It is also defined by a sense of language which is lost” (106). Glancy believes

134

that art is accomplished between an inner self and the “impersonal mind” (60). As an artistic form, writing bespeaks her “desperate holding on to that which is slipping away daily, & in [her] case already lost” (61). She draws on her inner self in her texts.

She rewrites Euroamerican way of defining a place as generally accepted by the mainstream American society. The homeland she claims is not called as Midwest or

Southwest, but “the Midlands”: “where is this place from which I write? Not Midwest nor Southwest. The Great Plains. Possibly the Midlands. What else could it be called?

& what am I doing here?” (66). Here the Midlands from which she writes does not refer to a specific city or town. Glancy’s “Midlands” contains the broad flat land in the middle of America: “I was born in the middle of America. Some of my ancestors migrated by choice, some came during the forced march of the Cherokees to Indian

Territory” (66). This recognition originates from her Native sense of place and permits her to connect with ancestors who have lived in the specific flat land. Her regular travels in the Midlands are considered a realization of “the act of migration” (28). The

Midlands becomes her “territory” as she drives across the prairie (28). This sense of territory in fact bespeaks the sense of place, the sense of belonging, and the sense of home. Finally, she claims the place she longs for.

Her subjective attachment to the Midlands not only nourishes her writing but also supports her with a living necessary for survival—“the ideas I write about often

135

come from the hardness of prairie life” (29). According to Buell, the sense of

“subjective horizon” refers to the “significance [of the place] for lived experience, and for artistic renditions of such” (74). Her lived experience on the roads, her sense of

Cherokee identity, and her translation of the road trips into her writing fulfill “a critical grasp of place as subjective horizon” as defined by Buell (74). Glancy’s artistic imagination, personal experience, and sense of cultural belonging thus attach much significance to the prairies she travels and help complete a kind of home-mapping in/with her writing.

Glancy’s autobiographical home writing assumes a kind of sociocultural significance. Buell indicates that “place must also be thought of more extrinsically, as an artifact socially produced by the channeling effects of social position as well as by canonical mappings of space” (74). Glancy really transforms her subjective attachment to the Midwest prairie to “a socially produced imprint” (Buell 75). Her subjective mapping of the place is drawn in accordance with wider American socio-cultural context, such as Cherokee’s loss of homeland, Removal to the Indian

Territory, loss of connection to Native heritage, marital problems, and the force of capitalism and globalism. “To that end, it can’t just be ‘my’ memory place, but also

‘ours’; shareable: an alchemical transformation of spaces all over the map into places of lived experience worthy of care” (Buell 76).

136

Glancy’s movements in the prairies piece together the long course of the historical time: “This is not what was but moves between the was & will & is the always, the line moving through the medicine of stars, planets, the holes for eyes”

(64). Travel helps her get acquainted and connected with Cherokee history and stories rooted in the land: “I am thru gathering images. The prairie is chuck-full of them. I fill my notebooks on the seat beside me. Even after dark sometimes, things come—old visions my Indian ancestors left along the road” (14). Glancy’s retrieval of ancestral heritage and her attachment to the land demonstrate J. E. Malpas’ argument: “To have a sense of one’s own past,” one needs to possess “a grasp of one’s own present and future in relation to the ‘story’ of one’s embodied activity within particular spaces and with respect to particular objects and persons” (180). Road trips are considered equivalent to the ancient migrations of the Cherokee people in the Midwest; their migration stories provides an original home ground the Cherokee can revisit. Her life narratives work as “thread, that invisible twine like words that somehow hold us all together” (16). Writing “about the loss of land,” Glancy states that art is “pacification

& purification of old grievances” (62). Writing serves as “healing for those left behind”

(62). By writing about loss of their home place, Glancy becomes part of Cherokee: “I have a part of it now & it’s worth the struggle it took to get it” (64). By writing her road trips, she maps and builds home for herself in her words.

137

Driving into the land where her stories are localized gradually becomes a crucial step in her writing process because “the land carries the voices of those who have walked upon it” (Andrews 651). Starting a career as an Artist-in-Residence for both

State Arts Councils of Oklahoma and Arkansas, Glancy makes uncountable trips on roads across the states. Even now, with a tenure job offer, she still moves a lot. In the movement, she feels attached to the stories rooted in the land: “The earth seems to me a book of roads. Maybe because of all the moving I have done. It seems to me the road holds voices. It holds meaning. Memory. Story. Discovery [. . .]. I like the migratory aspect of travel, the spational positioning” (Dream 35). She also drives to the specific locations for her book projects. She spends eighteen years finishing her major work, Pushing the Bear, a story about a forced march Cherokee took from

October 1838 to February 1839. It actually takes years for her to travel alongside the

Trail in order to retrieve the voices through creative imagination: “Over the years, the many voices in the novel came to my imagination during research or travel”

(Cold-and-Hunger 6). With tribal voices caught in her imagination, Glancy remaps a tribally storied landscape with a“spatialized memory” (Krasner 210). Through an imaginative recounting of Cherokee ancestors’ experiences in specific geographical sites, landscapes are storied, historicized and contextualized in her writing. Alongside her writing, she is reconnected to her people suffering from the Trail of Tears.

138

Physical road trips enable spiritual return to Cherokee heritage. Philip Sheldrak explains the interdependence between stories and landscapes: “If place lends structure, context and vividness to narratives, it is stories, whether fictional or biographical, which give shape to place” (17). Glancy in Claiming Breath relates a night drive to her creative writing. Driving on the roads is like “finding broken pieces of my father along the road. Part Cherokee” (11). Both writing and driving are able to guide her

“home”: “Soon you’ll be home safe as long as a trucker’s ahead of you & moving about the speed you want to go” (13). Soon the truckers she follows metaphorically

“become the ancient herds of buffalo the tribes followed” and lead the route home

(15). Writing about her road trip experience seems to realize “the migration of a paper”

(59). Alone in her car, she is not really unaccompanied but actually surrounded by the voices remaining there on the prairies. She thinks of a mysterious experience in which she hears Cherokee language speaking with her when she visits her father’s family.

Out of the prairies on the road, “things come—old visions my Indian ancestors left along the road” (14). The truckers become her guides in “the process of poem—pursuing the organization, the form & energy of it”:

& following them, the struggle of migration across the prairie is a little

easier. Then the trucks become the ancient herds of buffalo the tribes

followed—returned just as the fathers prayed they would—thick & fat--&

139

the buffalo-burger is over the fire, so to speak. & the lights of oncoming

cars thru the median grasses flicker, then dance again like a ghost tribe &

you hear the words—‘Hey hey hey hey—coming from your mouth &

finally, FINALLY, the miles go by. (15)

Following after truckers indicates “a sense of belonging & yet a sense of individuality within the tribe. Somehow they go together” (63). Writing, as driving, embodies a

“discovery of connecting threads” over times. She feels at home in writing on her road trips. This place-based writing connects the present her to the ancient ancestors and conducts her sense of belonging to tribal heritage. This intersection with something larger than ordinary life, the transcendence into somewhere that is out of the reach of a normal hand, and the connection to sometime ago that shapes who we are today make possible Glancy’s subjective attachment to the prairie land.

Moreover, what Glancy gathers alongside her road trip is not simply tribal stories rooted in the land, but also language/words that enable her to claim her homestead in the Midlands—a place metaphorically transformed into a space in her heart, spirit, and culture. The Midlands serves not only as a geographical site, but leads to a spiritual and psychological home. Glancy collects stories rooted in the

Midlands and recreates narratives from the Midlands in her self. Her sense of home lies on writings inspired by road trips in the Midwest prairies. She recreates home

140

within her self in her writing: “I had to find a homestead within myself, or invent one”

(86). It is a homestead constructed with her Cherokee language and heritage which she picks up always on her road trips. As her father speaks nothing of “his upbringing,”

Glancy fails to acquire Cherokee language (67). Madan Sarup suggests “that the concept of home seemed to be tied in some way with the notion of identity—the story we tell of ourselves and which is also the story others tell of us” (95). It is thus urgent for Glancy to draw strength from the Cherokee language. Glancy regards “[w]ords as house & shed & outbuilding s on the land” (87). Except for the open prairie she esteems as migrating routes, the Cherokee language also defines her sense of place and her sense of identity as a Cherokee writer: “The word is not a mirror of object, is not the object, but a making of the object into the shape of the tribe” (107). Native heritage is embodied in words, either told within the oral tradition or represented in the written form. It is words that make a people who they are. Language provides a means through which a ‘sense of being’ is loaded (103). She also refers the

“intermediary” state “between petroglyph & written language” as “[her] kitchen under the House” (20). Written language, Glancy believes, is the “nail-down of oral tradition”: “With written language came the task of learning how to hammer the voice onto the page with these little nails called ‘alphabet.’ For many Native Americans it’s only been a matter now of two generations” (103-4). “Writing from the past” connects

141

her to the cultural heritage that she feels belonged. Glancy states that word and world remain equally important to each other and rely on each other:4 “The word is important in Native American Tradition. You speak the path on which you walk. Your words make the trail. You have to be careful with words. They can shape the future”

(4). Words enable her to explore the hollow space resulting from loss of connection to cultural heritage: “I want to explore that empty space, that place-between-2-places, that walk-in-2 worlds. I want to do it in a new way” (4). Words enable a self-search for connections and guarantee a way for claiming breath.

Overall, the senses of loss, fragment, and grief prevail throughout the memoir.

However, Glancy provides a generally optimistic picture representing her search of home. The memoir concerns her investment in her life after divorce, her struggle for recognition in writing, and her everlasting quest for home from her uncountable journeys in the Midlands. In her search for cultural belonging, Glancy manages to claim her homeland through road trips in the Midwest prairies. Traveling in the prairie is her way of mapping cultural, psychological, and physical territories in which she feels at home—her way of home-making. Unlike her mother who “endured her

4 As a matter of fact, the ability of words to speak objects into beings is an essential constituent to Glancy’s philosophical thinking and spiritual life. As a Cherokee, she is also a faithful believer in Christ and the Bible. She tries hard to keep a balance between two seemingly different and even opposite ethos. For her, a similarity between Christianity and Cherokee worldview is found in their belief in the power of words to “speak our world into being with what we have” (109). Thus this reliance on the words is important both to her identity as a Cherokee writer and a philosophical harmony kept between Christianity and Cherokee worldview. Other analogues Glancy’s made between Bible and Cherokee heritage include: power of stories, animal transformation narratives, traditional myths, etc (Andrews 647-48; J. Mackay, “The Awakwardness” 177-81; Cold-and-Hunger 23; Claiming Breath 93-98; Dream 17-29). 142

isolation with complaint,” she enjoys the time of being totally on her own. Writing on the Cherokee heritage that she gathers on her road trips reflects a life of belonging and individuality: “It’s a sense of belonging & yet a sense of individuality within the tribe.

Somehow they go together” (63). It is how Glancy finds herself situated in a new in-between space: Feeling both the sense of belonging and a sense of individuality on her journey to the ani-yun-wiyu indicates Glancy’s transformation from an unattached person to a real people as a Cherokee. The sense of belonging to Cherokee is capable of healing her breach with her mother: “I feel sympathy for the first time & she, for once, is glad I am there. I wipe her as she did me when I was small. I hold the crossed trails of white settlers & Indians, endure two heritages, & in these trips, the healing of our tribes” (42). Cherokee heritage becomes her homestead, the Midlands, from which she writes and about which she tells. Writing from home paves her way home.

143

144

Chapter Five

Homesick at Home in Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jays’ Dance: A Birth Year

Writing in her small cabin, Louise Erdrich suddenly spots a male goldfinch busy making a nest outside her window. Later she finds its wife, a female goldfinch of olive-green, settling herself into the nest made by the male goldfinch. An idea suddenly jumps into Erdrich’s mind: “that’s what I’ve done, moving to this, my husband’s farm” (87). Comparing herself to the female goldfinch, Erdrich recognizes that the place she lives now is beautiful but “it is not where I belong” (Blue 87).

Erdrich’s feeling of not belonging to the place/house where she nurses her children implies that her recognition of “home” contains something far more intricate and complex than a dwelling. As such, with Erdrich’s memoir, The Blue Jay’s Dance: A

Birth Year as the focal text, the chapter explores how women’s experience of home can be intertwined with their life narratives. My reading of Erdrich’s notion of home is roughly based on Andrew Gorman-Murray and Robyn Dowling’s definition of home as both a physical locale and an imaginary space. I contend that human recognition of home is beyond the notions of dwelling. In other words, home can never be solely and fully contained in dwelling houses. I also argue that Erdrich’s notion of home heavily depends on her sense of community. The Ojibwe tradition and attachment to nature shape and bring forth her sense of community and an imaginary

145

home in her life writing. The chapter analyzes how Erdrich writes her home stories through the representation of everyday life during a year with her newborn daughter.

It indicates the impact of a mother’s role on her identity as a Native writer and divulges the relationship between home and writing in her memoir. I also refer to

Erdrich’s non-fiction, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003) in order to enhance an understanding of Erdrich’s notions of home. In this chapter, I focus on

Erdrich’s feeling of homesickness and decipher the relationship between female experience of everyday life and her writing.

As one of the most distinguished Native American writers, Erdrich presents her one-year experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and baby nursing in her memoir, The

Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year. Published in 1995, the memoir chronicles Erdrich’s pregnancy and the birth year of her baby daughter. It is constructed with the cycle of four seasons—from pregnancy in cold winter, the birth in spring, first few month of mothering her baby in summer, and a shift of life proportion in fall. The memoir contains Erdrich’s description of everyday life at home, self-narration of birth experience, recollection of her Ojibwe family, struggles for a work-family balance, and reflection on women’s role at home. According to Erdrich, the memoir represents a combination of her experiences with three birth daughters. In the work, Erdrich describes the intimate bond between mother and daughter, showing how the feelings

146

of attachment and division complexly enhance and wrestle with each other in mother-daughter knot. She successfully expresses a diverse range of emotions in the description of her everyday life at home: rage, frustration, depression, loss, confusion, hope, nostalgia, homesickness, pleasure, and joy. The memoir contains her conscious reflections on her multiple roles as mother, writer, wife, and Ojibwe Indian. It represents her bodily practices at home, including pregnancy, childbirth, baby nursing, housework, gardening, and writing. Everyday life routine reveals Erdrich’s notion of home and indicates how self, home, and writing mutually shape one another in her life.

Compared to her popular fictions, Erdrich’s life writing, The Blue Jay’s Dance, attracts scant attention from literary critics. Generally speaking, reviewers recognize the strength in her language to present the maternal bond. Lee Schweninger, in her essay entitled “‘She Gives Me a Metaphor:’ Survival and Louise Erdrich’s The Blue

Jay’s Dance,” indicates the narrator’s “overt struggle to survive through writing” (98).

With a holistic approach to the work, Schweninger explores the importance of nature and elaborates on the dominance of the idea of survival in the memoir (110).

According to Kirkus Reviews, the memoir is mainly about “astute, poetic reflections on the powerful mother-daughter relationship from conception through the baby’s first year” (1). However, the contributor of Kirkus Reviews disapproves of Erdrich’s

147

overemphasis on her role as a writer in the memoir: “Occasionally too self-conscious about the importance of Erdrich’s role as Writer” (1). Powell’s Books praises for the

“exquisitely lyrical prose” in her fresh illumination of “the large and small events that mothers—parents—everywhere will recognize and appreciate” (1). Sue Halpern in the

New York Time admires Erdrich for her “realistic portrayal of early motherhood,” considering that “she is the kind of mother whose story should be told” (19). Halpern also notes that Erdrich makes a major breakthrough in the literary treatment of women’s subjects, such as pregnancy and motherhood: “What makes The Blue Jay’s

Dance worth reading is that it quietly places a mother’s love and nurturance amid her love for the natural world and suggests [. . . ] how right that placement is” (19). Some reviews also categorize the memoir as a kind of “nature writing” and pay attention to the significance of landscapes. Rochelle Johnson reads the memoir as “nature writing essays” (646). David Stirrup notices in the memoir the “very personal connection to land, and family, that Erdrich describes” (29). Susan Castillo, in her review, “A

Woman Constantly Surprised: The Construction of Self in Louise Erdrich’s The Blue

Jay’s Dance,” points out the importance of landscape in Erdrich’s “autobiographical construction of selfhood” (40).

However, Trudelle Thomas, a critic, tends to misread the memoir. Thomas in her essay, “Motherhood as Spiritual Crisis,” interprets the memoir as following:

148

Erdrich is “American, Caucasian, and heterosexual” even though she is a “mixed blood, Caucasian and Chippewa” with “a Christian worldview” (275). In fact, throughout the memoir, Erdrich’s identification with her Ojibwa (Chippewa) heritage can be easily sketched. She is skeptical about the idea of Christianity as she has

“acquired and reshuffled [her] beliefs and doubts about whether we live on after death—in any shape or form, that is, besides the molecular level” (Blue 170). She is not a firm churchgoer as baby bathing is better than “baptism” held in the church: “I bathe our babies every day. It’s much better than going to church” (134). Moreover, her belief in the interconnectedness among all beings, affection for nature, and appeal to the feminine power indicate that she is more on the side with an Indian perspective than a Christian one. As a matter of fact, she lacks of steady belief in any religion, but she feels closest to the Ojibwa worldview: “I sort quickly through my beliefs, but I don’t have a sound set of reassuring answers. Every organized religion seems to me as much political as spiritual, even my grandfather’s caretaking Ojibwa worldview, which is closest to my heart” (26). She confesses that she has “failed to solve [her] own religious questions.” In hope to help answer her daughters’ argument over the whereabouts of God, Erdrich piles up all the concerned books. She finally gives up this religious exploration and “find[s] the seed catalogue most comforting” to her (27).

Her preference for seed catalogue shows her strong appeal for her Ojibwe

149

grandmother’s teaching.

Erdrich’s notion of home bespeaks two contrary but relational implications of home: home as a physical place and home as an imaginary space. Home implicates both the “material and imaginative qualities” (Gorman-Murray and Dowling 2). My reading of Erdrich’s notion of home relies on this “relational” perspective of home

(Gorman-Murray and Dowling 1-2). Home thus becomes the combination of the material with the imaginative. The imaginative refers to an imaginary home where one feels belonging whereas the physical home is the place where one inhabits. Under such circumstances, home is located and constructed somewhere within the two implications. Home becomes “the spational imaginary” as defined by Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling: “Home is neither the dwelling nor the feeling, but the relation between the two” (22). Gertrude Stein’s idea of two implications of home, one imaginary and the other real, existing side by side for a writer, also illuminates

Erdrich’s notions of home: “[W]riters have to have two counties, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there” (2). Erdrich’s presentation of the imaginary home is heart-touching but sometimes painful. Her writing on home is reassuring but also political.

Erdrich’s memoir challenges one of the research methodologies often employed

150

by cultural critics. According to Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, understanding the biography of a house, “the lives of its past and present inhabitants,” is capable of transforming a habitation from dwelling into home (Home 37). A house, once endowed with human stories, is thereafter historicized with a kind of homely feel.

Interestingly, Erdrich demonstrates that this will not always be the case. It may be the other way round. Familiarity with the history of a house and its previous inhabitants do not necessarily cause the conversion of a house into home. Growing up in a small town in North Dakota, Erdrich, after marriage with her husband, settles down in a farmhouse located in New Hampshire. However, she keeps saying, “I am homesick”

(88). Erdrich feels homesick in the farmhouse where she inhabits and nurses her babies. Yet, her husband keeps persuading her into belief that she is already home in

New Hampshire: “This is home” (88). Erdrich writes in the memoir, “Each of us is absolutely right” (88). Her response bespeaks that the notion of home shall not simply depend on that of dwelling; home involves far more complex implications in her memoir.

The history of Erdrich’s farmhouse simply reveals her feeling of not belonging to New Hampshire. As a daughter of an Ojibwe mother and a German-American father, Erdrich was born in Minnesota and has grown up in a small town in North

Dakota where houses seldom outlive people. After marriage, she lives in a farmhouse

151

in New Hampshire. Erdrich notices that many houses are apparently older than their inhabitants in New Hampshire, feeling worried about the old age of the farmhouse.

With an old photograph of the house taken in 1891 and the coins placed beneath the corner beam of the house, Erdrich traces the history of the house back to

1782 and compares it with the Ojibwe history. She lists the parallel histories of two formerly unrelated groups in specific timespans from 1782 up to 1992 and makes

1992 as a momentary crossover of two originally disparate historical lines in her representation of the history of the farmhouse. The historical events indicate no intersections between the house history and her family stories until 1992 when she rescues a wild kitten from the foundation of the house. In 1782, the house was constructed with a foundation and building materials that were meant to last for a long time. Coins were placed beneath the corner of the house in hope that the inhabitants have money. A well that went dry in the late 20th century was also dug. On the other hand, the Ojibwe history of 1782 includes what follows:

All land west of the Appalachians was still Indian territory and the people

from whom I am descended on my mother’s side, the Ojibwa or Anishinabe,

lived lightly upon it, leaving few traces of their complicated passage other

than their own teeth and bones. They levered no stones from the earth.

Their house, made of sapling frames and birchbark rolls, were no meant to

152

last. (98)

Later in 1882, the man who built the house had great grandchildren whereas the “last of the Indian treaties were signed, opening up the West. Most of the Anishinabe were concentrated on small holdings of land in the territory west of the Great Lakes” (99).

The Turtle Mountain people spoke their own language but also attended church. The

Erdrich family, from her father’s side, settled in Pforzheim, near the Black Forest.

Finally, because of Erdrich’s rescue of a wild cat from the foundation of house, the two separate but parallel story lines intersect in 1992, a year that has tremendous symbolic importance to Native Americans in their five hundred years of colonization.

The histories of the house and those of Ojibwe people exist side by side but seldom get crossed to each other’s tracks until 1992, five hundred years after Christopher

Columbus’ discovery of America in 1492. 1992 is also the time when the two-hundred-year history of the house has its intersection with Erdrich’s life (98-99).

The age of the farmhouse reminds Erdrich of the many deaths inside the house, especially those of women. Even though the memoir is about the birth year, the allusion to the existence of death or risk of suicide is always there throughout the texts and the houses. Erdrich rents a gray house as writing chamber; however, it is a house with a dark history of suicide. Writing in the house with suicide history, Erdrich is haunted by the thought of death and suicide in the house: “Perhaps it is odd to

153

contemplate a subject grim as suicide while anticipating a child so new [. . .], but beginnings suggest endings and I can’t help thinking about the continuum, the span, the afters, and the befores” (8). Moreover, the two-hundred-year history of the farmhouse keeps reminding Erdrich of the women lived and died before her in the house. The house’s spatial layouts strengthen the image of the house as something that suppresses and contains women. She once goes down to the foundation looking for a newborn kitten caught between the loose rocks of the foundation. It is difficult for her to kneel down, climb, move, and even breathe in this narrow space. She doubts,

“If I moved a rock would the whole house fall on me?” (101). Right after pulling the kitten from under the house, she falls into a heavy sleep. In her sleep, she dreams that the basement is the most terrifying of the house: “the awful place filled with water, the place of both comfort and death” (102). Like human bodies, the house contains life and death: “Earlier that afternoon, from underneath, I had heard the house all around me like an old familiar body” (103). Pipes in the house feel like “dead, or unborn.” She even identifies herself with “an empty double” that is “still buried against the east wall” (103). She conceives of herself as the embodiment of a house god sacrificed for the welfare of the household, like the women suppressed in the patriarchal society. In the basement, she wonders how many women actually die in the house: “How many women are buried under beneath their houses? How many

154

startling minds, how many writers? This house is over two hundred years old. How many women lie stunned within its walls?” (103). In this sense, the house is not merely a concrete building but endowed with symbolic implications. To Erdrich, the farmhouse represents the patriarchal ideology from which women have been suffering for centuries.

Understanding that her stories do not belong to the farmhouse further estranges

Erdrich from feeling at home in this building. Erdrich firmly believes that a woman

“needs to tell her own story, to tell the bloody version of the fairy tale,” yet the stories she tells do not belong to the house:

I never could contain myself, never could step back. And yet, the writing

that ate me up, that saved my life, [. . .], will not be my story in this house.

Writing that choked me, writing that gave me everything and took away my

peace of mean. Writing, too, that I did with my husband. NO, that will not

the story told here. (104)

Her writings that are meant to be the “emotional and intellectual survival” to her has nothing to with this farmhouse (5). For Erdrich, stories are bounded by love. However, even love cannot combine the history of the house and her family’s stories into one:

“even love is not the story here, not what will survive us, or me” (107). Understanding the stories of house further alienates Erdrich from the house. Longing for home,

155

Erdrich, in a way, is not at home in the house.

Different from the farmhouse in New Hampshire, the house Erdrich stays with her daughters in Minnesota as depicted in her later published non-fiction, Books and

Islands (2003) is regarded as “Home” (7). The house in Minnesota, as described, is a

103-year-old construction surrounded by great trees, each of which she has given a name. The house is originally built as a wedding gift by a loving father to his “much adored daughter.” Erdrich describes the house as such: “Our house even looks a bit like a wedding cake [. . .]. Perhaps one day we’ll attach a cheesy fifteen-foot plastic bride and groom to the roof” (8). Erdrich’s sketch of the house as “a wedding cake” shows her affection for her beloved home. The old age of the abode in Minnesota cannot remind Erdrich of the deaths in this house. She describes her daughters hear a ghost walking on the top floor once in a while. They call the ghost “The Confused

Man” (8), not “the ghost of the house.” The nickname for the ghost indicates that he has never owned this house; the ghost is simply too confused to leave the house. Not belonging to the house, the ghost simply stops by their house. He is not supposed to

“take up residence” there, so Erdrich and her baby sleep in the room when one of her older daughters stays outside overnight. The book ends up with the last chapter titled

“Home.” The chapter focuses on Erdrich’s homecoming from a long journey.

“[B]ack in the web of connection,” she is home (130).

156

The narrow horizon of New Hampshire landscapes also deepens Erdrich’s feeling of not belonging. She addresses her longing for the vast landscape in the North

Dakota as “horizon sickness” (88). Erdrich compares the American Northeastern landscape to “the inside of a house to me”: “The sky is a small ceiling and oddly lit, as if by an electric bulb [. . .]. I am suspicious of Eastern land” (88). She feels that New

Hampshire landscape is of too much human touch. The woods show “part of

Northeaster civilization--more an inside than an outside, more like a friendly garden—reveals itself as forceful and complex” (90). She is sick for the vastness, distance, and the open sky of the North Dakota: “I fall sick with longing for the horizon. I want the clean line, the simple line, the clouds marching over it in feathered masses. I suffer from horizon sickness” (91). Later she learns to relieve her longing by visiting the woods; “[n]evertheless, no amount of reality changes the fact that [she] still think[s] of eastern North Dakota as wild” (90). From time to time, she is still caught by emotional unattachment in the woods: “And yet, even though I finally grow closer to these words, on some days I still want to tear them from before my eyes”

(90-91).

Erdrich’s yearning for home truly bespeaks a family tradition. In very old age,

Erdrich’s great grandmother always wants to walk home: “I remembered my great-grandmother Virginia Grandbois. When she had aged past the reach of her own

157

mind, she wanted to walk home” (70). Her grandmother, in order to take good care of the old woman, needs to tie the great-grandmother “into her chair to keep her from walking off into the fields and sloughs.” Erdrich’s desire for homing is as strong as her great grandmother’s: “I, too, tied myself into my chair to get home the only way I could, through writing” (70). Indeed, the memoir points to a way home through the delineation of everyday life within home. It is home not only for her as a mother but also for her daughters: “After all, these words will one day add to our daughters’ memories, which are really theirs alone” (ix). The memoir concerns more than an account of the life of an Ojibwe woman; it’s also a guidebook in which the writer constructs an imaginary home. Erdrich shows her daughters where they are from, how to live on, what to do in face of agony and depression, and how to live as Indian women.

The sense of community becomes her home ground on which she recreates an imaginary home in her life writing. This sense of community results from her connection to the Ojibwe heritage, female experience of home, and attachment to nature. Once in an interview with Bill Moyers, Edrich explicates that her sense of home refers to the feeling of belongingness to Native community. She feels at home in this sense of community:

I think it has to do with the belongingness and the sense of peace that I feel

158

among other native people, this sense of community, you're in the comfort

of a very funny, grounded people, who are related to everything that's

around them, who don't feel this estrangement that people feel so often.

(Moyers 7)

Being surrounded by the Ojibwe people, she is possessed by the sense of belonging, peace, and community that are crucial to one’s sense of home. However, she feels estranged in her contact with non-Native groups. It well explains the differences in

Erdrich’s attitudes toward the farmhouse in New Hampshire and the old house in

Minnesota. The sense of community has great significance to Erdrich’s notion of home.

Feeling belonging to her Ojibwe heritage, Erdrich misses her mother’s house in

North Dakota where she grows up. She defines horizon sickness as “the great longing that seems [. . .] pragmatically Ojibwe in origin” (91). She misses “the clean line, the simple line, the clouds marching over it in feathered masses” in her North Dakota hometown (91). Her longing for vast horizon originates from her cultural experiences and family heritage. When she depicts her mother’s wedding photo, she says, “She is leaving the Turtle Mountain Reservation to live with a high school teacher. Ralph

Erdrich. She is leaving her mother’s house. Home country” (139). It is what happens to Erdrich as well; she leaves her home country to live with her husband in New

159

Hampshire. However, her desire to return to her home country never drops away. She is not happy with the thought of being buried with the Yankee ghosts in New

Hampshire:

Knowing that I will one day join the ranks of Yankee ghosts, I am uneasy,

unmoored. I’d rather die in the familiar landscape where the grave markers

of my recent ancestors stand crooked in the deep mold of oak leaves, or

where they are part of the landscape itself, as Ojibwe once buried their dead

high in the bones of tress. (96)

Lack of sense of community, Erdrich feels alienated from the community in New

Hampshire where she is away from her people. She cannot stand the idea of a burial in

New Hampshire because it is not the place for her to stay even after her death:

“Otherwise you will go to the Christian heaven, which doesn't seem like much fun”

(Moyers 7).

Since she cannot feel at home in New Hampshire, she strives for converting the farmhouse into home by extending connection with her Ojibwe family tradition through the practice of everyday life. Food is, of course, a far more important issue in daily life and is, in fact, a motif repeatedly recounted in Erdrich’s writings. Kari J.

Winter, a critic, recognizes that “[h]er work also suggests that people are defined by where, what, how, and why they eat” (45). In the memoir, food serves as a cultural

160

icon through which she gets connected to the Ojibwe heritage. Fighting against depression or simply out of a longing for home, she often feels hungry at “the sight of its [the pileated woodpecker] licorice black feather” (124). As her grandfather is a great lover for licorice, she is cheerful when Michael, her husband, decides to make her an all-licorice dinner. She also compares her baby to “fifty pounds of licorice”

(22). To stop smoking, she employs her “old family remedy, passed down from my

Ojibwe grandfather, Pat Gournea—black licorice” (22-23). Several licorice recipes, especially the recipe made with the traditional Ojibwe food—wild rice, are provided in the memoir and intended to pass down on her daughters (125-32).

In her quest for home, Erdrich strive to remain connected with the Ojibwe language. Growing up in a small town in North Dakota, she only hears the traditional

Ojibwe language from her grandfather’s prayer. She has mistakenly recognized the

Ojibwe language as one used exclusively for prayers. Later, she comes to know that

“most Ojibwe people on reserves in Canada, and many in Minnesota and Wisconsin, still spoke English as a second language, Ojibwemowin as their first,” in her visit to

Ontario (Books and Islands 81). She becomes “hooked” by the awareness that the

Ojibwe language is still lifelike, inventive, and creative. She recounts that at the time when she lives in New Hampshire, she acquires the language with a set of language tapes made by Basil Johnson, who later becomes her friend. She practices the

161

language in her conversations with Johnson inside her car in New Hampshire.

Because she can only speak the language with Johnson on the tapes, she “longed for real community”: “At last, when I moved to Minnesota, I met fellow Ojibwe people who were embarked on what seems at times a quixotic enterprise—learning one of the toughest languages ever invented” (Books and Islands 82). She contends that “as the words are everything around us, and all that we are, learning Ojibwemowin is a lifetime pursuit that might be described as living a religion” (Books and Islands 87).

As a matter of fact, she even considers it crucial for all American writers to “know at least a passing familiarity with the language, which is adapted to the land as no other language can possibly be” (Books and Islands 85). Speaking the ancestral language in everyday life really enables Erdrich to develop the sense of community.

Teaching the Ojibwe language to her daughters explains Erdrich’s yearning for home. The bonding between mother and daughter is embodied in her daily conversations with daughters in the Ojibwe language. Adrienne Rich asserts that mothers and daughters share “a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other” (220). Looking at her baby, Erdrich “experience[s] an uncanny body confusion—I feel my expression continually slipping into [her] baby’s” (Blue 135).

Ojibwemow, one of the few still surviving language used by Ojibwe people, is her

162

mother’s tongue; however, it is not her first language. Having tried to acquire the language for years, Erdrich decides to “go back to a language [she] never had”: “I think, there is an urgency about attempting to speak the language” (Books and Islands

84; 87). “Going back” is a vivid image for returning to an original base which she has failed to obtain but attempts to get reconnected with now. She helps her daughters acquire the language in everyday life. Once Bill Moyers asks for what reason Erdrich asks her children to learn Ojibwe, Erdrich answers as follows:

That sense of community, peace, comfort and because this language, it

speaks to our background. I'd love to meet my ancestors. I'd love to be able

to speak to them. There's a story that—a teaching that you're going to be

asked after you die what your name is in Ojibwe. That's a teaching. You're

going to have to give your name. You're going to have to speak to the spirit

if you want to go to that place. (Moyers 7)

Therefore, the Ojibwe language serves as a distinguishing constituent in her sense of community and her recognition of home. She writes in her other non-fiction, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, that she keeps at home a bag of baby’s books: “many of which [she’s] laboriously blotted with Wite-Out, removing the English, and replaced with Ojibwe words written in Magic Marker” (10). Thus, her baby expresses the feeling of hunger by saying, “Do-dush-abo, meaning ‘breast-water,’ the Ojibwe

163

word for milk” (213). The revitalization of the Ojibwe language is as everyday-life and urgent as eating is to her daughters.

Erdrich’s fascination with nests represents not only her yearning for home but also her construction of home in her writing. Nests refer to a place made by birds to lay eggs in and nurse their newborns. The word implies the idea of sustainability, endurance, and continuum. Over the years, Erdrich has collected quite a few nests.

She likes best “the nest constructed of my daughters’ hair” (67). Inspired by her

Ojibwe mother, Erdrich collects her daughters’ hair with which birds can make their nests:

All last winter, just before breakfast each morning, I brushed the dark

brown, the golden, the medium brown hair of our daughters smooth, and all

winter I saved the cleanings from the brush in a small paper bag that I

emptied by the stump in the yard last spring.

It was not until the leaves fell off and the small trees bent nakedly beside

the road that I saw it [. . .].

Now, as I am setting the nest on a shelf in the light of an eastern window,

our middle daughter’s blond hair gleams, then the roan highlights in the

rich brown of the eldest’s and perhaps a bit of our baby’s fine grass-pale

floss. (68)

164

The nest made of her daughters’ hair is not simply a creation of nature; it also suggests a harmonious bonding between human and all beings in the world. The specific nest made of human hair exemplifies “the sense of community” in the Ojibwe culture since the Ojibwe people are “related to everything that’s around them”

(Moyers 7).

The nest, as home for birds, also signifies “the importance of continuity with one’s cultural origin” (Allen, Sacred Hoop 210). As a nursing home for newborn baby birds, the nest made of human hair carries with it profound implications. This nest constantly reminds the narrator of her mother and her daughters—a family heritage she counts on and the bond between mother and daughter. With a craving for her mother, Erdrich seems to be home again by watching the birds sitting “alone in the nest woven from the hair of her daughter”:

It is almost too painful to hold the nest, too rich, as life often is with

children [. . .], and I cannot hold the nest because longing seizes me. Not

only do I feel how quickly they are growing from the curved shape of my

arms when holding them, but I want to sit in the presence of my own

mother so badly I feel my heart will crack. (68-69)

Erdrich’s mother indeed plays an important role in her mothering experience. Her mother makes decision for Erdrich “whether to breast-feed, whether [she] could get

165

through labor, whether [she] could trust [her] own instinct to mother a child” (36). As a knitter, her mother is gifted with the kind of patience Erdrich admires but does not recognize in herself. However, nursing a baby requires infinite patience that can “tie the scarf invisibly around the two of us [Erdrich and her baby] in dazzling knots” (70).

One day she almost collapses under her baby’s endless crying. Yet, to her surprise, when she hugs her crying baby again, the tension she feels is gone. She suddenly recognizes the gift her mother has lain in her: “This [patience] is a gift she has given to me from far away [. . .]. The hours she soothed me and the deep quiet [. . .] have passed invisibly into me” (71-72).

Moreover, in contrast to the old photo of the farmhouse, Erdrich explains family stories with three old photos from her mother’s side: her grandmother, her mother’s, and herself. With the three photos, Erdrich tells the stories of her life and presents her experience of home: “[N]aming your own mother (or her equivalent) enables people to place you precisely within the universal web of your life, in each of its dimensions: cultural, spiritual, personal, and historical” (Allen, Sacred Hoop 209). Through mothers’ stories, Erdrich establishes a connection with her home in North Dakota.

Those photos are intended not only to represent her mothers’ life but also serve as a counter-narrative against the patriarchal ideology generally accepted in the Western culture. What is in common in the three photos is the veils women wear. The first

166

picture is about Mary Lefavor, her grandmother, wearing a veil in a Christian ceremony in the age of ten years old or so. The second photo is about her young mother wearing a veil on her wedding day. The third one shows herself wearing a veil made from her mother’s wedding veil on her first confession. Looking back at the old images shown in the photos, Erdrich observes a simultaneous presence of the past and the now and a connection to the future. Her daughters, with the stories of their grandmothers, are able to extend the family heritage into the future.

The three old photos serve as counter-narratives against patriarchal ideology in mainstream society. With the photos, Erdrich teaches her daughters the values of NO:

“To teach the no to our daughters. [. . .] To love the no, to cherish the no, which is so often our first word. No—the means of transformation.” (140). All three generations of the Ojibwe women wear veils respectively in the three photos. However, Erdrich regards the veil as “the symbol of our long histories, as women, of emotional and intellectual incarceration” (141):

The veil is the symbol of the female hymen [. . .]. The veil is the mist

before the woman’s face that allows her to limit her vision to the here, the

now, the inch beyond her nose. It is an illusion of safety, a flimsy skin of

privacy that encourages violation. The message behind the veil is touch me,

I’m yours. The purity is fictional, coy. The veil is the invitation to tear it

167

away. (137-38)

The image of a woman covering her face with a veil indicates the existence of the

patriarchal ideology. As a result, Erdrich encourages her daughters to bravely let out a

no to things they would not like and get rid of the role as the “Victorian Angel of the

House” (65).

What’s more, through female bonding, Erdrich proposes to overcome the restriction imposed on women as symbolized by the veils on women’s faces:

We are all the face we’re not allowed to touch. We are all in need of the

ancient nourishment. And if we walk slowly without losing our connections

to one another, if we wait, holding firm to the rock while our daughters

approach hand over hand, if we can catch our mothers, if we hold our

grandmothers, if we remember that the veil can also be the durable love

between women. (Blue 141)

Erdrich suggests that women should cooperate with one another in maternal work because mothers share similar life experiences at home: “How glad I am to know that

I am not the only one [. . . ]. I come to know that we are all struggling, with more or less grace, to hold on to the tiger tail of children’s” (161). Women’s issues resulting from experiences of home constitute a common ground on which Erdrich draws women’s companions all other world. Women can help one another to become better

168

and experienced mothers: “Mothering is a subtle art whose rhythm we collect and learn, as much from one another as by instinct [. . .] until we’re slowly made up of one another and yet wholly ourselves” (161). Erdrich further proposes establishing the practice of shared and communal mothering responsibility in tribal communities: As such, “[a] child is fortunate who feels witnessed as a person, outside relationships with parents, by another adult” (162). Even childless women can become the best of mothers since they “have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family” (162). The sense of female bonding helps establish a community of “other mothers” to ensure the welfare of children.

Erdrich’s narrative on her birth experience makes clear the interrelationship of her divided selves as mother and writer in her narration of life stories. Erdrich feels strongly motivated by her aspiration of narrating birth experiences because “[w]riting is reflective and living is active—the two collide in the tumultuous business of caring for babies” for her (Blue 6). As a mother, Erdrich states the impact of pregnancy and birth experience on her writing: “I suppose one could say, pulling in the obvious metaphors, that my work is hormone driven, inscribed in mother’s milk, pregnant with itself” (24-25). Thus, writing as a mother is equipped with a “mother’s vision” that

“includes tough nurturance, survival love, a demanding state of grace. It is a vision slowly forming from the body of work created by women” (145). It is often the

169

experience of birth that leads to Native women’s transition into maturity: “Usually, a woman who has borne a child becomes an initiate into the mysteries of womanhood”

(Allen, Sacred Hoop 254). On one hand, “[m]other’s love for children enables her “to look at social reality with an unflinching mother’s eye, while at the same time guarding a helpless life, give the best of women’s work a savage coherence” (Blue

147). On the other hand, “the childbirth metaphor validates women’s artistic potential by unifying their mental and physical labor into (pro)creativity” (Friedman,

“Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor”49). Writing from mother’s experience surely “establishes a matrix of creativities based on woman’s double birthing potential”

(Friedman, “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor” 58). Under such circumstances,

Susan Stanford Friedman makes an interesting analog in explicating women’s authority over the self-narration of birth experiences: “God the Father is no longer the implicit model of creativity. Instead, the Goddess as Mother provides the paradigm for the (re)production of woman’s speech” (59).

Erdrich’s writing on home is empowered by the sense of female bonding. She asserts that female writers normally have their literary mentors who help her writing in one way or another: “Every female writer starts out with a list of other female writers in her head. Mine includes, quite pointedly, a mother list” (144). Erdrich’s mother list includes British and American women writers in the eighteenth, nineteenth,

170

and twentieth centuries, such as Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Emily Dickinson,

Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, and Linda Hogan. It also includes women writers other than British or American nationality, for example,

Sigrid Undset from Norwegian, Kay Boyle from Danish, George Sand from France,

Jean Rhys from Dominica, and so on. This list reveals that Erdrich’s writings are affected by literary mentors of different cultures. The cultural diversity shows that

Erdrich shares a female bonding with women writers as women’s experiences of home often constitutes a common ground for women’s companionship: “The challenges shape us, approvals refine, the wear and tear of small abrasions transform until we’re slowly made up of one another and yet wholly ourselves” (161).

Women’s shared experience of home paves one unique way for Erdrich to connect herself with the farmhouse. An old written note left by a woman enables

Erdrich to psychologically get hooked to the history of the house. In order to understand the history of the farmhouse, Erdrich acquires an old portrait of this house and its inhabitants taken in 1891. Knowing nothing about the burial places of those deceased inhabitants, Erdrich does sense the fact that she and the deceased inhabitants share the same space—the farmhouse. Watching the old photo, Erdrich cannot “help but think of [the inhabitants]—the woman, in particular” (96). Before knowing her name as Mrs. B, Erdrich calls the woman in the picture as “the woman of this house”

171

as if Erdrich was not the woman living in the house now (107). If the woman in the old photo is “the woman of this house,” what is Erdrich’s role in this house? Erdrich tries to imagine what Mrs. B has done at the exact location where she is living and figure out their commonality: “What have we in common?” and “I imagine her, and I wonder” (97; 104). From an old-forgotten note found slipped when one of the walls is repaired, Erdrich receives a message from Mrs. B: “I am of the opinion that Time, passing away, but the impression of our grief the stronger makes, as streams their channels deeper wear” (108). Through the written note, the two women speak in a way across a hundred years: “And she is right, the woman of this house. Time passing away but the impression of our grief the stronger makes, as streams their channels deeper wear” (109).

Additionally, women’s experience of home indeed shapes Erdrich’s artistic writing. Catherine Wiley and Fiona R. Barnes recognize how women writers recreate an imaginary home in their texts:

[W]riting is a form of self-discovery, in which the writer can

(con)textualize herself, write herself into being, and locate herself on the

page. Writing [. . .] can ground us, and chart a way home that we might not

otherwise be aware of. (xxiii)

For Erdrich, writing provides an intellectual and spiritual way for her to return home:

172

“I, too, tied myself into my chair to get home the only way I could, through writing”

(70). Writing becomes “an intellectual quilt” she weaves from her life experiences

(145). Writing, through which she gets home, serves as an imaginary home for her.

Writing as “who [she] is” represents a personal research into her “divided consciousness,” from “self-erasure” to “self-assurance,” from home sickness to homecoming (4; 5).

Erdrich recognizes that female experiences of home often enrich women’s writing. She suggests that women tell their own life stories, especially those related to childbirth, baby nursing, and mothering experience. Women’s experiences of childbirth are of significance for Erdrich to cope with her literary mentors. Erdrich’s list makes clear if each writer has children or not. What is of interest to me is her desire for knowledge of the relationship between mothering and writing. She ponders over the relationship between writing self and mother’s self: how the two roles as mother and writer influence or affect each other. She intentionally subverts the

“opposition between books and babies” often encountered by women writers or recognized in women’s writings (Friedman, “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor”

52). She attempts to prove that contemporary mothers not only write but write well!

Going through the list, Erdrich observes that it is not until the turn of the 19 century that women are capable of embracing writing as their career. What’s more, Erdrich

173

reads that “it is only now that mothers in any number have written literature” (145). It is not until recently that more and more women with children are able to write for publication. The traditional roles women often play at home, such as mother and wife, become the material for women’s writing. Reflection on and representation of female experience of home becomes a distinguishing feature in women’s writing.

Erdrich’s narrative on birth experience assumes a political import. For a long time, Native communities cherish “women’s ability, sometimes ‘privilege,’ to bear children [. . .]. Native women’s procreative capability becomes a powerful tool to combat Western genocide” (Udel 47). Birth contains in it the potential of continuity, connection, hope, and survival. It denotes the construction and extension of a community. Birth itself is strong, so is its narrative: “[I]n each story, as in almost every birth, there is a promise—the promise that life prospers and continues, that birth carries in it an eternity of hope” (Dahlke 595). It bespeaks an enactment of connection and continuity. Gentle, spiritual, and poetic as it is, Erdrich’s memoir as birth narrative is equally powerful and visionary. In fact, Julie Tharp, a critic, recognizes

Erdrich’s persistence in writing birth motif in her fictions: “One of Erdrich’s rich contributions to the [literature] is her use of birth stories that celebrate survival within perilous conditions” (125). Tharp analyzes the significance of Erdrich’s birth stories:

Birth is by definition an act of connection with another [. . .] It is the basis

174

for human relation. Erdrich’s birth stories have a significant ability to

connect an individual to other people in a web of family, community, or

clan, functioning not so much creation myth, but rather as connection myths.

They explain the basis for connections between people. (127)

The narrative on childbirth is the practice of writing for survival—“beyond ensuring the survival of members of one’s family” (Collins 59). It is a survival agenda enacted through Native American woman’s representation of birth experiences.

It is urgent and imperative for Erdrich to transcribe the experiences of childbirth and motherwork5 into her narration of home experience. It is difficult to pin down a full picture of birth experience even by women who have personally experienced and

“conducted” the birth. However, as birthing is itself a labor “as original a masterpiece as death,” women writers should reclaim their right to writing their birth experience which has long been historically undervalued, disregarded, and even erased in

5 The word, “motherwork,” is used in the sense as defined by Patricia Hill Collins in her essay, “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist theorizing about Motherhood.” Collins defines “motherwork” as the kind of motherhood especially performed by women of color. Different from the dichotomies between male and female and/or work and family generally recognized by feminists and for the case of middle-class white women, motherwork for women of color, according to Collins, focus on the general welfare of the whole family. The conflict over women of color’s motherwork arises “outside the househood, as women and their families engage in collective effort to create and maintain family life in the face of forces that undermine family integrity” (59). Motherwork, for women of color, is intended to ensure not only the survival of the whole family but also that of the whole community. “Motherwork,” according to Collins, refers to “work for the day to come” (59). In other words, motherwork is performed by women of color for the survival of the househood/community in a specific sociocultural context. The study of motherwork then shifts our former research locus of motherhood/mothering from the conflict inside the house to those in the social and cultural contexts. Collins’ keen observation about the motherwork performed by women of color elaborates on that of African-American, Native American, Latino, Asian-American women. Her idea describes well Erdrich’s motherwork. The conflict arises outside of family, rather than inside. Of course, Collin’s theorizing of American women’s of color leaves out the phenomena of double marginalization and oppression sometimes faced by women of color inside and outside the families. Still, her theorization perfectly explicates Erdrich’s motherwork as discussed in the chapter. 175

literature (Blue 146). Erdrich considers motherwork and writing equally crucial to her life and identity: “The need to write and to reproduce are both all absorbing tasks that attempt to partake of the future” (79). As a result, in order to “shift the paradigm of the domestic so as to defamiliarize it, to rethink its politics, to tease out its rich range of possibilities” (Mezei and Briganti 844), Erdrich insists that her life narrative shall include the story of her birth experience told from her perspective, not the story of the child as normally found in most birth narratives:

Labor often becomes both paradigm and parable. The story of the body

becomes a touchstone, a predictor. A mother or a father, in describing their

labor, relates the personality of the child to some piece of the event, makes

the story into a frame, an introduction, a prelude to the child’s life, molds

the labor into the story that is no longer a woman’s story or a man’s story,

but the story of a child. (Blue 45)

Bespeaking an integration of the physical into the intellectual, the unconscious into the conscious, and the emotional into the rational, childbirth demonstrates a story written with female body. The narration of her childbirth experience provides a metaphorical space for Erdrich to locate her “very fractured inner life” in order to contain her multiple identities as writer, mother, and Ojibwe (Moyers 4). It is a space where she can be at home with peace and “belongingness” (Moyers 7).

176

In due course, Erdrich tries to recreate home through her everyday engagement with nature in New Hampshire. Feeling unattached to the farmhouse; however, she strives to make herself feel at home in New Hampshire. One night, she finds herself crying. She suffers from homesickness at home. Caught up by feeling of exile,

Erdrich hopes for a sense of belonging by rooting her self into this land:

I’ve helped our daughters sink roots here too. [. . .], maybe if I water my

asparagus bed with tears, I’ll grow real roots, I think, caught up in the

abject melodrama of the exile. Maybe if I dig and fertilize I’ll flourish, I’ll

belong where I am. (93-94)

As such, gardening is one of the ways upon which she engages for search of home: “I have spent my whole life around people who can walk into the backyard and pull dinner from the ground” (28). She finds that her “five-year-old has [also] inherited the gardening urge—she’s a ferocious planter, digger, weeder, fellow obsessive planner”

(92-93). Together with her five-year-old daughter, Erdrich starts planting not only flowers but trees.

Her act of “sink[ing] roots” is of the most significant, even though she expresses her will to return to North Dakota where her Ojibwe people reside: “I want to fly, to breathe the great rolling sky of the plains” (92). Nonetheless, she cannot leave the

New Hampshire farmhouse where she resides with her family after marriage. Out of

177

love for family, she tries to be rooted into the new place instead: “I want to scatter the lovely colors of the nest. But loving this family as I do, I do the opposite” (92). She sinks roots with the seeds given by her grandmother into the garden outside the farmhouse in order to develop a sense of engagement: “Instead, I sink roots. With ferocity and purpose and a tenacity that resembles joy, I do in fact settle into the planting of my imaginary garden. In the tradition of grandmother, using her seeds, I literally transplant myself into this ground. (92) With the seeds collected by her grandmother, Erdrich “transplants” her life into the ground in New Hampshire.

Erdrich’s usage of the word “transplant” demonstrates her recognition that she is not from and of the place. The passage also indicates the co-existence of two gardens: one is the imaginary garden and the other is the garden physically located outside her house. In deep winter, when the physical garden goes “barren and lifeless,” there is still an imaginary garden in which “[c]olor occupies and feeds the brain” (30).

By sinking root with Grandmother’s seeds into the ground, Erdrich recreates an imaginary garden with her Ojibwe family tradition. Erdrich comes from a family that

“always planted in the wrong season” (27). In deep winter days, when there are no colors except white and gray in her garden, she is plagued with feeling of “longing,”

“a private and surpassing hunger” (30). It is a profound longing and hunger for colors.

By the time spring comes, she finds that the “imaginary garden” remains supportive

178

and comforting throughout the year (27):

The ground I tend sustains me in easy summer, but the garden of the spirit

is the place I go when the wind howls. This lush and fragrant expectation

has a longer growing season than the plot of earth I’ll hoe for the rest of the

year. Raised in the mind’s eye [. . .], it is finally the wintergarden that

produces the true flowering, the saving vision.

To dream in the falling snow, to clothe the ground and leaf out trees [. . .],

and gaze into my heart where I can feel and not see, almost touch. (33-34)

In her dream garden, a beautiful child lies. This imaginary garden, like the imaginary home, “is not real but it is really there” (Stein 2). The garden is beautifully presented in Erdrich’s writing through which she finds her comfort and hope for a future.

Erdrich also writes an inner self into the imaginary home in her life narrative.

In addition to the imaginary garden, there is the physical garden outside the farmhouse. Getting outside somewhat relieves Erdrich’s homesickness. Her preference to staying outside of the farmhouse reflects her attachment to the wild nature. “Out” gradually comes to stand for something hopeful, helpful, and comforting: “[A]s if the obstacle of close confinement makes me aware of greater freedoms in the woods, the impulse to get outside hits me, strengthens, becomes again a habit of thought, a reason for storytelling, an uneasy impatience with walls and

179

roads” (89). Erdrich is thus empowered by and eager for the thought of “out.”

The idea of “outside” implicates the existence of an “inside” and a boundary existing between the two. In fact, Erdrich’s sense of boundary between the “insides” and the “outsides” is supposed to change over time. In the beginning, the urge to be

“outside” drives her “fifteen hundred miles to get back into a place that [she] define[s] as out” (89). The “out” represents the West that “is the outside I’ve internalized” (89).

As times go by, the “out becomes outside my door in New England” (90). Her longing for “out” is relieved by sitting in her writing chamber surrounded by trees or “just by looking out a screen door or window” (90). In order “to compensate for horizon sickness, for the great longing,” Erdrich is finally able to “find solace in [the] trees” outside her window (91).

In an effort to root herself and her daughters into the place, Erdrich conducts an endless conversation with the garden outside. It is “the narrative of flowers” that capably outlives the inhabitant of the farmhouse: “The tale that will live on is the same that survives the other woman, that is, the narrative of flowers” (107). Looking at the flowers in the garden, Erdrich carefully compares her garden with Mrs. B’s as shown in the old photo taken in 1891 and tries to spot the flowers still remaining in the garden. She seemingly feels connected with the woman in the old photo in a way through her caretaking for the flowers in the garden. It is foxglove that reminds her of

180

the woman in the old photo:

I only know that foxglove [. . .] best expresses the slate-hearted gaze that

meets mine in the old portrait. And so it is the foxglove I am most careful

not to disturb. And it is the foxglove [. . .] that I keep for her and multiply

with slow perseverance [for her to continue partaking] of the rich and

rooted fullness of this life. (109-10)

The “narrative of flowers” reveals a connection between two women sharing the gardening service in the garden across times. Writing flowers into an imaginary homescape represents the metaphorical intersection of home with two women’s lives.

Out of the house into the nature is surely a way of survival. In order to remove obstacles in life, Erdrich has to walk out of the shadow of her grandparents’ death.

The deaths of three grandparents heavily depress her to the extent that she almost cannot stand:

I must have been sustained by my grandparents even more than I knew,

because the silence in their wake roars over me, their absences shake me,

and it seems as though something within me is pulled deeply under, into the

earth, as though I still follow after them, stumbling, unable to say good-bye.

(184)

Grandparents’ deaths indicate “the loss of extension”—“our witnesses, our living

181

memories” (186). If birth stands for connectivity and continuity, death points to the loss of connection and relations, a loss of reach to home, the origin. Erdrich employs the fence in the Corbin’s Park as a metaphor for the agony of loss she experiences.

The fence represents the obstacles awaiting her to overcome throughout her life: “The fence is the main component, the defining characteristic of the forbidden territory”

(179). Driven by a “longing” for out of “the forbidden territory,” she needs to remove the obstacles because “[t]he obstacles that we overcome define us” (180; 179).

Furthermore, the choice of a “voluntary death” of the blue jay in face of life and death urges Erdrich to meditate on life pacts she has made with her daughters (195).

One day, caught by a vision outside her window, Erdrich spots a hawk striking at one blue jay. Erdrich is surprised to see that the struck jay, instead of running away,

“dances toward the gray hawk” (194). The blue jay’s dance, seemingly suicidal, is tragic but heroic: “The dance makes me clench down hard on life. But it is also a dance that in other circumstances might lead me, you, anyone, to choose a voluntary death” (194). The blue jay fights for a seemingly hopeless escape from a life-and-death attack, with such a “crazy courage,” for just one minor possibility of survival (195). The crazy courage performed by the blue jay reminds Erdrich of her grandparents. Like the blue jay, they always make possibilities out of impossibilities in perilous situations. Hence it is her responsibility to secure the life contracts for

182

survival of her daughters.

For “outwalking death,” Erdrich walks out into nature and climbs uphills: “To walk off the panic I feel at our impeding loss, I put baby in her blue backpack and take to the snowmobile trails on a Sunday afternoon” (196). Up to the hill, “[t]here is nothing to think” except the idea of outwalking death: “I walk beside the trail, punching toeholds, ascending, trying to outwalk death” (198). “Outwalking” here indicates not only a walking out of death but walking into nature. It informs a transcendent state of mind to overcome obstacles in life. Erdrich leaves the house in order to walk out the sorrow for her grandparents’ death. In fact, walking is not only a way to defeat the obstacle but also a link for the hopeful connection with the future.

The memoir ends up with the last entry entitled “Walking.” Hope is eventually embodied in her daughter’s walking, a newborn baby’s walking into and for future:

“She has to walk to gain entrance to the world. From now on, she will get from here to there more and more by her own effort” (222). Her daughter, one day, is to hopefully take over this ongoing search of home and Erdrich’s stories of home will then live on.

In conclusion, I argue that Erdrich’s sense of home relies on her sense of community. I decode the practice of her homemaking—a physical home in her real life and an imaginary in her writing. The chapter also explores the significance of

183

women’s experience of home to Erdrich’s life narrative. Erdrich’s depiction of a house indicates her alienation from the farmhouse in New Hampshire and her homesickness for the North Dakota landscapes. Outwalking her homesickness,

Erdrich recreates an imaginary home for herself and her daughters in her writing through her connection to the Ojibwe tradition, female experience of home, and her attachment to nature. The memoir “is a book about the vitality between mothers and infants, that passionate and artful bond into which we pour the direct expression of our being” (5). However, “with each celebration of maturity there is also a pang of loss” (69). In her everlasting struggling between letting go and “holding tight” permeating human lives (69), Erdrich offers the most significant and touching life stories for survival.

184

Chapter Six

At Home on Earth in Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir

Focusing on Leslie Marmon Silko’s memoir, The Turquoise Ledge, this chapter recognizes Silko’s homebuilding as a cultural and bodily practice. My critique of the memoir illustrates how cultural imagination contributes to “cultural homemaking”

(Bowerbank and Wawia 226). I explore the ways through which Silko makes herself native to the place and thus recreates a home ground through lived experience, aesthetic appreciation, environmental concern and cultural imagination. The development of Silko’s relationship with a “new” home place is the focal point of analysis in this chapter. N. Scott Momaday’s conception of the ways through which

Native Americans grow attached to their homelands is employed to interpret Silko’s experience of home in the Tucson Mountains and examine the key points involved in the transformation of Silko’s recognition of a place as home. I argue that it is through cultural imagination that Silko becomes connected to the Tucson Mountains. Inspired by the Pueblo heritage, cultural imagination further enables Silko to transcribe her experience of homemaking into life narrative as a cultural project. As such, Silko’s awareness of the Tucson Mountains as home is achieved by an imaginative connection between her Pueblo heritage and the Tucson Mountains. Through her search for turquoise rocks on her daily walks, Silko connects herself to the ancient

185

peoples in this land and this connection, in turn, strengthens Silko’s attachment to the place.

Thirty years after the publication of her first memoir, Storyteller, Silko publishes another memoir, The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir in 2010. Different from

Storyteller which is dedicated to her life when she lives near Laguna Pueblo, The

Turquoise Ledge shifts the focus toward her life in Tucson after 1978. As a self-portrait, the memoir is mainly about environmental concern, tribal heritage, family stories, history of southwest native peoples, and Native American spiritualism.

It informs a locus of self-knowledge, observation on nature, realization of an Indian way of life, exploration into the spiritual world, and reflection on daily walks. Based on the landscapes near an old ranch house in the Tucson Mountains, Arizona, Silko’s writing rejoices the distinctness of knowing of, caring for, and living in one particular place. Silko indicates the ways through which she turns this particular place into

“home ground” (Bowerbank and Wawai 226). In this memoir, Silko describes her walks on the trails through the sandy arroyos near her household in the Tucson

Mountains. On her walks, she searches for the grinding stones through which she imagines her connection with the ancient peoples inhabiting in the Tucson Mountains long time ago. The intimate relationship between Silko and the nature becomes crucial to her recognition of home. Her esthetical appreciation and ecological concern with

186

the natural landscapes in the Sonora Desert lead to her attachment to the place. Silko’s memoir provides a personal reflection on homemaking in a new land through thirty years of life experience and cultural imagination.

The Turquoise Ledge is composed of five parts, respectively titled “Ancestors,”

“Rattlesnakes,” “Star Beings,” “Turquoise,” and “Lord Chapulin.” From a holistic perspective, Silko draws on her Pueblo heritage as part titles which, in turn, delineate a closely intertwined and mutually constituent relationship between self and community. Silko’s memoir well illustrates Hertha Wong’s definition of Native

American autobiography as “auto-ethnography (self-culture-writing),” elaborating on

“a sense of self determined by one’s cultural discourse” (Sending My Heart Back 6).

As an autobiographical writing, The Turquoise Ledge is a slackly-structured account of years of everyday life in the harsh desert. In fact, “it’s a loosely threaded exploration of themes including family, culture, history and the supernatural spirits she calls Star Beings” (Lengel 1). Silko employs a nonlinear, cyclical narrative technique to reflect her daily meditation on life and nature. Throughout the memoir, topics are replaced, dropped out, and picked up on unexpected pages to render a real-to-life representation of personal reflections. Silko writes in a conversational tone as if she had readers walk next to her and listen to her stories rooted in the place.

Generally speaking, most reviewers praise Silko for the sophisticated

187

description of her relationship with nature. They notice how Silko tends the animals around her house and reveals her concern over the environment. Publishers Weekly points out “an exquisite harmony” between the native ways and the natural cycles in this “beautifully composed memoir” (1). Kirkus Review recognizes the work as “a memoir recounting a Native American woman’s spiritual connection with the landscape of the American Southwest” (612). Its reviewers also comments that the memoir serves as “a much-needed treatise on renewing our relationship with the natural world (612). Rosetta Codling, as Atlanta Books Examiner, notices that the nonfiction is “not restricted to Silko’s own, singular zone” (2). Instead, the text is “a review of not just her life[,] but her engagement with the Universe” (Codlng 1).

Louisa Thomas, in The New York Times, indicates that it is “less an autobiography than an exploration of her relationship with the natural and spiritual worlds” (1).

Jenny Shank regards the memoir as a “naturalist’s diary” and a “testament of a woman who believes in stories” (1).

However, there are reviewers expressing disapproval with Silko’s writing style, especially its apparent lack of organization commonly required in the great literary pieces. The reviewer of Kirkus Review is not satisfied with its relative lacks of

“central narrative,” “a cohesive story,” and “a singular narrative thread” (612). Louisa

Thomas is disappointed about the “regrettable” lack of human interaction throughout

188

the memoir because the author’s self-portrait focuses more on her relationships with the land than with people. She regrets that Silko’s writing is sometimes “repetitive and flat, as if she’s giving us notes instead of a narrative” (L. Thomas 2). Gregory

McNamee suggests that it may not be the right book for readers who “have a fear of

[the] slithering friends” since Silko dedicates some many pages to local snakes (2).

John Bear observes that the shifts in time, place, and topic are “disorienting” and the memoir is thus lack of “synthesis” (1). Bear is really annoyed by Silko’s “fragmented” writing style--what Hertha Wong recognizes as a characteristic of Native American autobiography. Feeling confused, Bear disapproves of the unorganized structure: “The

Turquoise Ledge does not follow the ‘I was born / I went to school / I had some laughs / now I’m writing about my life’ arc” (1). In a more polite way, Jenny Shank expresses a similar idea: “It’s not always clear where The Turquoise Ledge is heading, but it reads like a desert nature walk with a fascinating companion” (1).

However, I agree with Susan Slater Reynolds and Gregory McNamee on their observation of Silko’s style. They notice the relationship between Silko’s native heritage and her writing style. Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times explores how the tribal tradition influences Silko’s writing style in the memoir:

While the written word often carries a trail of nostalgia, of digested

experience and longing for the past, Silko’s echoing tone reverberates into

189

the future. No matter how much she writes of ancestors and geography,

these pages echo forward, not back. Sentence by sentence, a reader is given

an enormous amount of useful information about how to get the most out of

life, beginning in the present moment. (2)

Moreover, McNamee, a writer also living in Tucson, shares his review in the

Washington Post, appreciates highly Silko’s skill in recounting the “near-ecstasy” moment of life in the desert. Disappointed at the absence of Silko’s development as a writer in the memoir, McNamee is astonished by Silko’s ability to “ma[k]e herself at home in a desert that is demanding on even the best of days” (1).

In fact, I borrow the chapter title, “At Home on the Earth,” from a book entitled

At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place, edited by David Landis

Barnhill. According to the preface, Barnhill’s At Home on the Earth explores “the possibilities of being at home on the earth: finding place, reinhabitation, and becoming native” (xiii). The book collets twenty-eight essays, indicating multiple ways of be(com)ing at home on earth. Each essay contributor provides his or her own interpretation and way of how to become native to the place—how to make a place into home. As “[a] sense of place was first developed on this continent by

Paleo-Indians,” Barnhill in the introduction indicates that learning the “cultures of

Native Americans” is the first and most certain way to be at home on this land (6). As

190

indigenous peoples are Americans originally native to this land, the book begins with two essays written by two acclaimed Native writers: N. Scott Momaday’s essay titled

“A First American Views His Land” and Leslie Marmon Silko’s essay, “Landscape,

History, and the Pueblo Imagination.” It is with Momaday’s discourse on how the

Early Native Americans develop their sense of place in the Great Americas that I explore into Silko’s experience of being at home on Earth in her autobiographical writing.

Momaday’s reflection on how Native Americans hold the land in great esteem suggests a critical perspective to approach Silko’s life writing. In the essay, “A First

American Views His Land,” Momaday indicates how Native Americans develop a moral relationship with land in accordance with the change of the multiple roles they play in the land for centuries. The ancient Native peoples in the Americas are primarily hunters. At about the time when Christopher Columbus begins his exploration into the New World, Native peoples become hunters, fishermen, husbandmen, and physicians (21). According to Momaday, Native conception of the nature is never a sudden occurrence or an invention by chance. However, “in time

[Native Americans] will come to understand that there is an intimate, vital link between the earth and himself, a link that implies an intricate network of rights and responsibilities” (21). Native American view of the land is, in fact, “an investment

191

that represents perhaps thirty thousand years of habitation. That tenure has to be worth something in itself—a great deal, in fact. The Indian has been here a long time; he is at home here” for thousands of years (22). Native Americans learn to recognize the sacredness in the land

Momaday recounts how Native Americans gradually develop their attachment to the land in their aesthetic appreciation: “Perhaps it begins with the recognition of beauty, the realization that the physical world is beautiful” (22). This strong aesthetic perception of the Earth is evident in the traditional Native artefacts and songs. The antique Indian canoes and traditional weapons found today bespeak their makers’ intrinsic sense of beauty. A Navajo ceremonial song celebrates the gorgeousness of sounds from the natural world: “Grasshopper voice, Speak from the green of plants;

So may the earth be beautiful” (as qtd. in Momaday 23). Momaday observes that the

Navajo song “is filled with reverence, with wonder and delight, and with confidence”

(24). It is Navajo people’s understanding of the natural world and of humanity. The

“aesthetic perception was a principle of the whole Indian world of his time, as indeed it is of our time” (23). The strong reverence for the beauty of the land influences their way of living on Earth and forms an ethical regard toward the nature even today.

The idea of the appropriate is also important in Native American ethic of land.

To be appropriate means to do the right thing. Momaday detects that “[i]t is this

192

notion of the appropriate, along with that of the beautiful, that forms the Native

American perspective on the land” (27). To be appropriate, the elders should transmit

“the old ways,” including their reverence for and knowledge of the land, traditional heritage, and stories to the later generations (26). To do the right thing, tribal youth have to learn from their elders and preserve the old ways. Momaday observes an indivisibleness relationship existing between Native sense of beauty and of appropriateness in the oral tradition. In fact, the idea of the beautiful is sensibly contained in that of the appropriate. Beauty perceived in the natural world truly speaks for the appropriate. In the Native worldview, men’s existence on earth indicates a “spiritual dimension” and men’s relationship with the land features the

“ethical imperatives”:

I think: Inasmuch as I am in the land, it is appropriate that I should affirm

myself in the spirit of the land. I shall celebrate my life in the world and the

world in my life. In the natural order man invests himself in the landscape

and at the same time incorporates the landscape into his own most

fundamental experience. The trust is sacred. (27)

As such, the celebrations of one’s life in the world and the world in one’s life stand as

American Indians’ appropriate investment in the land.

As time goes by, Native Americans gradually integrate themselves, together

193

with their lived experiences, into the landscape which, in turn, shapes their tribal heritage and enriches their cultural practice through the activation of imagination as a bridge and a starter:

The process of investment and appropriation is, I believe, preeminently a

function of the imagination. It is accomplished by means of an act of the

imagination that is especially ethical in kind. We are what we imagine

ourselves to be. The Native American is someone who thinks of himself,

imagines himself in a particular way. By virtue of his experience his idea of

himself comprehends his relationship to the land.

And the quality of this imagining is determined as well as racial and

cultural experience. The Native American’s attitudes toward this landscape

have been formulated over a long period of time, a span that reaches back

to the end of the Ice Age. The land, this land, is secure in his racial memory.

(27-28)

Imagining the beauty in the natural world is thus “ethical in kind” (27). A particular way through which a man draws on the lived experiences to imagine himself constitutes the sense of a people. According to Momaday, the sense of intimacy between an American Indian and the land shapes his or her self-portrait in the course of time. The sense of a Native self is embodied in a particular way of life deeply

194

ingrained in a land after a long period of time. The imagination required for the presentation of this tribal rootedness is thus culturally specific and communally significant. The “ancient ethical regard” for the land bespeaks human concern about the preservation of the natural landscapes and the delight in the beauty of the nature

(28). Truly, Momaday’s idea of how Native Americans cultivate their feeling of attachment to the land through the long term investment of life in the land, their aesthetic perception of beauty in nature, the appropriate response to sustain the land, and cultural imagination helps illustrate Silko’s recognition of the Tucson Mountains as her home.

First of all, the development of Silko’s attachment to the place illuminates the idea that “[b]y remaining long enough, we can become at home in the land” (Barnhill

7):

Yesterday, October 6, I walked for the first time in weeks. The dirt and the

stones of the trial welcomed me back. I felt it through the soles of my

walking shoes; a softness, a giving way, a gentleness that welcomed me like

an old friend. I suppose the trial and I are old friends after thirty years of

my horseback rides and walks. For years I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep

the old house or the acreage so I tried not to become too attached to the

place. But now I’ve lived with these black basalt peaks green with saguaro

195

and palo verde years longer than I lived in my beloved birth-place of

sandstone, lava hills and juniper. All along I’ve been blessed. (294)

In the passage, Silko indicates her previous sense of uncertainty about the new place and then her later confirmation of the place as her beloved home. In the beginning she withholds her love for the place. However, after living there longer than her birth-place, she feels at home on Earth in the Tucson Mountains. In a world of

“softness” and “gentleness,” the Tucson Mountains, acting like her old friend, welcomes her home. Thus, Silko expresses her will to be buried there after her death:

“On my walk this morning in the big arroyo I was thinking how delicious the cool air was, [. . .], I wanted my ashes scattered there” (187). Also, once on her walk, she thinks, “I can think of no better place to die than out on the trail in these hills with the saguaros and all the other beings I love” (231). She shows an everlasting attachment to the Tucson Mountains. This sense of attachment is also recognized by Andrew

Gorman-Murray and Robyn Dowling as a typical idea of home (1). Gorman-Murray and Dowling lists the relationship between the sense of attachment and home: “The idea [. . .] of home is perhaps typically configured through a positive sense of attachment, as a place of belonging, intimacy, security, relationship and selfhood.

Indeed, many reinforce their sense of self, their identity, through an investment in their home, whether a house, hometown or homeland” (1).

196

Actually, life in the Tucson Mountains is tough for Silko as a woman growing up in the Laguna Pueblo area located in a high desert plateau country. The shadow of drought and the impact of heat wave are often vividly depicted throughout the memoir.

In face of the severe reality of life in the desert, the question has been raised once in a while as to why she chooses to live there: “As the thirty-seventh or thirty-eighth day of the heat wave dawned, a voice in my head said, ‘Tell me again—why exactly do I live here?’” (125). However, she has never been defeated by the physically demanding environment. Instead, her memoir illustrates her long-term investment in the land: It is an investment that represents thirty years of habitation in the harsh desert. Silko discloses in an interview that it takes her about ten or fifteen years to be

“comfortable” with the exact words for the Sonora Desert: “as a writer it took me a while before I really felt comfortable [to] where it was second nature” (“A

Conversation” 3).

The description of her lived experiences in the desert deliberates Silko’s regard of the Tucson Mountains as her home place and her awareness of a self gradually integrated into the terrain. In the memoir, Silko provides her first-hand observation on and experience of her life in a desert: “Some newcomers complain that the desert ‘had no seasons,’ but the desert has many seasons; each time it rains, we have another spring time” (161). Silko’s perception bespeaks a local knowledge “grounded in

197

information and experience” of life in a specific place; it informs a “bioregional” perspective (Snyder 99; 97). When she moves to Tucson thirty years ago, people gossip about the “eccentrics (usually older women who lived alone) who covered all their windows with aluminum foil followed by a layer of newspaper” (169). Thirty years later, she becomes one of the “eccentrics” in order to better live off the threats of heat and drought: “The dim interior of my house in the summer saves me hundreds of dollars in electricity for cooling the air” (169). As one “eccentric,” she stays inside a house whose windows are covered with materials good enough to keep the heat away:

The windows indoors are covered with shiny silver Mylar emergency

blankets or ‘space’ blankets originally developed by NASA to protect the

astronauts. Tucson at the end of June and in early July is nearly as hot as the

surface of Venus, so the space blankets work great, and they are

inexpensive. The only problem is to find the right tape. It was so hot the

duct tape I sued to fix the emergency blankets over the windows wouldn’t

stick, and the blankets fell down and I had to use thumb tacks to hold them

instead. (168-69)

The minute examination of the right type of tape used for the blankets over the windows indeed shows Silko’s authority over the way of life in the local area.

Through lived experiences rooted in the place, Silko holds a life-long bond with the

198

terrain in the Tucson Mountains. It bespeaks that a “sense of physical insideness, of being almost physiologically melded into the environment, results from an intimacy with its physical configuration stemming from the rhythm and routine of using the space over many years” (Rowles 146). Her thirty-year life experience leads to her intricate investment in the dry desert. The boundaries of the self and environment are thus blurred and gradually merged into one.

Walking, as a daily ritual, reinforces Silko’s attachment to her home grounded in the Tucson Mountains. James S. Duncan and David Lambert mention that “[h]ome and residential landscape are primary sites in which identities are produced and performed in practical, material and repetitive reaffirming ways” (387). Silko’s walking indicates an actual, bodily and daily practice in the landscape around her house. Walking practice embodies a sense of materiality and a sense of the self as a bodily creature. On walks, the body is transformed into an agent through which the mind and the environment are interlinked and interacted with imagination. Walking involves the combination of the mind and the body, including sight, listening, smell, taste, touch, reflection, imagination, and acting. It becomes a bodily ritual for Silko to perform daily in the Tucson Mountains, providing a crossroad between the self and the nature, the inside and outside, the mind and the body, and the historical and the place: “Now I walk and I keep my eyes on the trail while scanning up and around

199

from time to time” and “I like to think about the interesting things I saw on my walk

(231-32; 233). The more she walks, the more she is gratified by the positive forces of the nature: “Each time the trail went downhill [. . .], the cool moist air rushed past my face in the most delicious manner. I felt my skin drink it in” (160). Through walking, she is connected to the Earth: “I felt an effortless connection with every part of the trail” (177). She falls deeply in love with the trail: “The trail is a beloved friend I realize now. I didn’t’ know how much I missed it until I started to walk today. I intended to go left and take just a short walk in the arroyo, but my feet wouldn’t leave the trail” (176). Walking, as a bodily ritual, assists Silko in her connection with the past and attachment to the place. Indeed, walking is compared to the journey the ancient peoples have taken. Like the ancestors narrating their migration stories, together with the description of the specific landscapes, Silko feels inspired to write by walking on the trails: “To walk or not to walk? I tell myself the more walks I take the more material I will have for the manuscript” (231). The trails on which she walks become “a ritual circuit or path which marks the interior journey that Laguna people made: a journey of awareness and imagination in which they emerged from being within the earth” (“Landscape” 39). Under such circumstances, Silko’s walking into the Sonora Desert is in fact her way of walking herself home that is physically located in the Tucson Mountains and imaginarily connected to her Pueblo heritage.

200

Furthermore, walking narratives—writing on walking tours--help Silko grasp and articulate her momentary reflection on the place and indicates to her a way home.

Silko’s narration of walking tours bespeaks the operation of her mind in relation to the surroundings: “I find that I go into a different state of consciousness when I walk—almost like a trance in which I’m not fully aware of where exactly in the big arroyo I found them” (213). Walking practice challenges the mind-body binary, showing the mind enacted with body, and body imprinted on the mind. Walking narratives serve as a psychological map, delineating a tour of self-reflection and self-transcription on the way with regard to the history and the landscape of a specific place in everyday life. As walking is place-oriented, self-intended, and history-concerned, walking narratives indicate something more than a materialistic description of the physical landscapes and a list of statistic figures about a place. It involves personal reflections about and imagination of the self, history, time, memory, life experiences, and the place. Thus, it helps the walker-narrator explore into the self, history, and place all together. Walking is, like writing, a form of self-discovery, in which the walker contextualizes his/her self, walks oneself into a local landscape, and place oneself in an ongoing dialogue with the past, the present, and the future. Writing on walking experience is thus a way to locate a contextualized self onto the page.

Silko’s memoir indicates how she makes herself at home on earth through writing and

201

walking herself into being and “a psychic positioning” into the surrounding environment (Snodgrass 234).

Silko’s notion of home bespeaks a home place, a home ground, a place with its natural surroundings. Her inclusion of the natural world into her home place bespeaks her family heritage. A house, a man-made construction for accommodation, never fully elaborates on Silko’s idea of home. Pueblo people expect that the old house would collapse with the deceased elders. For years as she ages, she learns to

“appreciate how the old women in [her] family felt about their run-down house: let it stay with its leaks and holes until [she’s] gone and then they may tear it down” (190).

She also describes how her father is at home in the natural world around Laguna:

The hills and mesas around Laguna

Were a second home for my father

….

When we were growing up

He took my sisters and me hiking and exploring

Those same hills the way he had done when he was a boy.

He is still most at home in the canyons and sandrock. (Storyteller 160)

Like her father, Silko’s sense of home partly resides in “the terrain—some specific detail of the setting because “the landscape resonates the spiritual or mythic

202

dimension of the Pueblo world even today” (“Landscape” 37; 38). Silko’s notion of home takes in the natural surroundings around her house.

Momaday sensibly observes that the “Pueblo Indians are perhaps more obviously invested in the land than are other people. Their whole life is predicated up on a thorough perception of the physical world and its myriad aspects” (“A First

American” 25). As home is “a place imbued with cultural and ideological meaning”

(Kaika 266), Silko invests her spiritual self into the landscape—to live of the place in an Indian way. She lives an Indian way of life which features a physical relationship and the emotional association with the land. As a result, she acquires the ability to appreciate the beauty in nature. On one morning walk, she is charmed by the magnificence of the natural surroundings: “the air was so invigorating and the desert plants so lush, and the green blue light so beautiful with the sun behind the mountain”

(198). She then decides to make up a song to celebrate the wonder of nature:

beauty beauty

as I go oooooooh.

Heyah! Heyah Heyah Heyah Heyah ah ah! (198)

Natural beauty attracts her to walk into the arroyos and embrace the vitality of the

203

Earth: “What an unexpected gift this rain! It means the arroyo may begin to transform the damages the man and this machine caused. I felt an effortless connection with every part of the trail” (177). Her appreciation for the beauty and the regeneration of nature enables Silko to grow attached to the Tucson Mountains and recognize the harmony shared among all beings on Earth.

As I walked I looked at the dark basalt hills, and at the cactus and shrubs

and trees; all of them were in harmony with one another, and I felt within

that beauty. In an instant I saw that even man-made things—the roll of old

fence wire, the old rail ties withered by sixty years of the heat and the

sun—were in the light of that beauty. In that beauty we all will sink slowly

back into the lap of the Earth. (236)

The appeal to the beauty leads to an attachment to the place where beauty resides. It shows Silko’s affection for the beautiful Earth from which all beings originate and the interdependent ecosystem where “human beings joined with the animal and plant world” (“Landscape” 40). It is a bioregion that “calls for celebration and the singing”

(177).

The harmony of the natural world further constitutes the spiritual dimension of

Pueblo Indian’s perception. All beings on Earth are endowed with spirits that can communicate with one another. Clouds and rain can catch the magic power of the

204

Nahuatl words written with ink on paper. Macaws and parrots can talk to the clouds and the ancestors. Silko has faith in “the realm of the spirit beings” and the contact of the ancestors “from time to time” (15). Respecting the spirits of all beings, Silko believes in the return of the “beloved ancestors” as rain (171). She also detects the return of the dead as wild creatures or even as stones. For Silko, even a “rock has being or spirit” (“Landscape” 31). Therefore, on her walks, she offers the rocks the choice whether to go home with her:

If I put my hand on a rock and it does not come loose from the earth the

first tme I try to pick it up, then I leave the rock where it is. It reminded me

again how the old folks used to admonish us children to ‘let it be!’ To leave

things as they are, all things in this world—animals and plants and rocks.

Human things had to be respected, too and the special places where the

ancestor spirit resided. (144)

In the old times, the grinding stones endowed with spiritual power are capable of warning their owners to be away from danger. Under such circumstances, nature

“interconnects the human and nonhuman inhabitants of a place in ways that benefit all forms of life native to that place” and “the home of the [indigenous] people”

(Bowerbank and Wawia 228).

In addition, Silko’s acquisition of the Nahuatl language, a group of related

205

traditional Aztecan languages and dialects, demonstrates her efforts to reconnect with the local indigenous heritage. Silko’s decision to continue the usage of the local dialect confirms Momaday’s vision of the appropriate in the development of Native

Americans’ attachment to the place. What sounds interesting to me is that she chooses to learn Nahuatl instead of Laguna.6 On one hand, it demonstrates her determination to be personally acquainted with the culture and history of the Tucson Mountains. On the other hand, it also reveals Silko places her American Indian heritage in a larger cultural and historical context, from Pueblo Laguna to a broader “Aztec territory”

(144).7 In her childhood, the Pueblo of Laguna tribe files a lawsuit against the federal government for the purpose of land recovery. Silko hence learns of the importance of family stories and tribal accounts transmitted by the elders, even though the lawsuit fails in the end. Silko knows if she can tell “the story clearly enough then all that was taken, including the land, might be returned” (26). As such, she narrates not only the

6 Silko has once tried to learn some Diné greetings and phrases when she teaches at Diné College. However, it fails because she thinks, “How could I learn Diné when I never learned Laguna?” (44). 7 According to an entry, titled as “Pueblo Indian Languages,” in the website of Native Languages of the Americans: Preserving and Promoting American Indian Languages, a Non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the use of American Indian languages, “the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona all share a common ancestry, descending from the ancient Anasazi civilization” (1). However, Pueblo peoples are “linguistically diverse” (1). The Hopi is one of the Pueblo Indians who speak “a Uto-Zatecan language distinctly related to Nahautl (1). A connection between Pueblo peoples and Aztecan Indians can be established. Silko observes that a close even shared common ancestors among Pueblo peoples and Aztecan Indians is very possible: “The Hopi language is closely related to Nahuatl. Many words are identical; the word for ‘ear’ is one. The old Spanish maps that lable northern Arizona and northern New Mexico ‘Aztec territory’ are not fakes. All this territory is the realms of speakers of the Nahuatl-related languages, thus those Indians and mestizos who travel or migrate from Mexico need no permits or visas to be here—this land is theirs too” (The Turquoise Ledge 144). Another evidence to show Silko’s recognition of a shared common indigenous heritage is displayed in her description about how “the ancestors here in the Southwest” called the macaws and parrots ‘rain birds’” (220). 206

tribal myths and historical events passed down in the Laguna Pueblo village but also the Aztecan myths and the stories of the traditional Indian trade routes which cover

Arizona, New Mexico, all the way to Guatemala. The description of the 2006 sacred run for rain by Hopi runners from northern Arizona to the Mexico City again confirms

Silko’s recognition of the Aztecan territory (145).

Moreover, holding strong faith in the magic power of the Nahuatl, Silko believes that “[l]ocal indigenous languages hold the keys to survival” because “the survival information is encoded in the grammar of the [local indigenous] language”

(46). In the Sonora Desert, water and rain are extremely precious resources for survival. In times of drought, the Native people make a pilgrimage with rain book written in Nahuatl to ask for rain. As for Silko, with the two Nahuatl-English dictionaries, she tries to obtain the “coded messages that may inspire [her] to write”:

“It is possible to do a great deal with a language we don’t speak or understand, as long as we freely employ our imagination and have access to good dictionaries” (241-42).

Excitingly, when she writes down a list of Nahuatl words for rain and water, she envisions the working of a Nahuatl “rain cloud spell”: “Apparently, certain Nahuatl words written in ink on paper can bring rain clouds at certain times” (238; 246).

Judith Plant, a bioregionalist scholar, mentions that keeping a harmonious relationship between human and the earth is a kind of “homing in” experience. Plant

207

redefines the word “home” as a place, or say, to localize home “in the natural world”

(Plant, “Revaluing Home: Feminism and Bioregionalism” 21). Therefore, the promotion of harmony in the natural world is a way to nurture our home. As such, restoring harmony to the world can be metaphorically perceived as a way of homing in. To some extent, Plant’s idea is similar to Momaday’s discourse on how Native

Americans come up their ethical regard of land: The notion of the appropriate forms the Native American perception of the land to which they grow attached as home place. To be at home on earth, Native Americans rightfully insist on the continuum of all beings on Earth.

Silko appropriately lives her life as a nurturer for the surrounding environment and protect her home with “personal experiences as mothers and through knowledge gained from the community and their bodies” (Peeples and DeLuca 62). She provides a first-hand lived experience for and observation on the environmental issues in

Laguna Pueblo and the Tucson Mountains. Regarding the issues on environmental concern, Silko plays two different roles from time to time: she is at some time a heartfelt nurturer to nature and “an angry mother” at some other time (Peeples and

DeLuca 59). On one hand, she is a nurturer to the environment of the Tucson

Mountains. Her house gradually becomes a shelter for the wildlife living inside or around the house. On the other hand, in face of ecological crises, she embodies the

208

“militant motherhood” as defined by Mari Boor Tonn: Militant motherhood is

“grounded both in physical care and protection and in a feminine rhetorical style that is at once affirming and confrontation” (3). She then appears as an angry mother to protect her beloveds with whatever measures she considers best.

Ever since her move to Tucson in 1978, the old ranch house has been not only a home for herself but for the wildlife: “The old ranch house and the sheds and outbuildings are home to pact rats and deer mice [. . .]. So in the beginning, I got to know the snakes and pact rats because we were neighbors” (82). Silko generously shares her residence with rattlesnakes and comes to their rescue for several times.

Silko learns to respect the snakes from her mother’s Cherokee heritage: “It was his daughter, my mother’s grandma Goddard, who taught my mother that the black snake in the cellar was their friend. The Cherokees revered snakes before Christianity arrived. So my mother taught me to respect but not to fear snakes” (37). She has “a pipe installed under the kitchen floor out the west wall of the house to allow the snakes to get in and out from under the house” (100-101). In times of drought, she

“must share the well water with the wild creatures” (234). Silko keeps sugar water for hummingbirds and bees in the garden and collects rain water for the wildlife in order to help them survive the harsh weather.

To be appropriate, Silko provides a written testimony of the uranium mining in

209

Laguna Pueblo where she grows up. As a matter of fact, “[i]n their natural undisturbed state, the uranium-bearing minerals in the earth beneath Paguate village were healing mediums, not killers” (74). In times past, the uranium in the spring water is considered a healing mineral by the medicine people. However, the uranium mining around the Laguna Pueblo area reveals a “radioactive colonization” (Churchill 289).

Silko’s testimony starts with the teaching given by the Indian elders: “The old forks used to admonish us to leave things as they are, not to disturb the natural world or her creatures because this would disrupt and endanger everything, including us human”

(69). She accuses of the U.S. Federal Government’s imposition of the uranium mining on the Laguna people: “The U.S. Federal Government by way of the Department of the Interior/Bureau of Indian Affairs forced the Laguna Pueblo people to allow

Anaconda to blast open the Earth near Paguate for an open-pit uranium mine” (69).

The Pueblo people then suffer from the threat of radioactive fallouts and yellowcake:

“Because I was born in 1948 I had a few years to grow before my body was subjected to the radioactive fallout. I’ve been blessed with good health thus far, but my younger sisters have not been as fortunate” (70). The practice of mining destroys not only their health but also the natural environment. The mining company is “not required to dispose of the radioactive tailings or store them safely to prevent contamination of the air or groundwater. For years the mountain-like piles of radioactive tailings remained

210

there” (70).8 Laguna workers, unknown to the danger of the materials, work in the open-pit mine for twenty years, without suitable protective gears for their health.

More shocking is found in the declassified papers. The papers reveal that handicapped children in Indian boarding schools are secretly “fed plutonium in their oatmeal [by researchers] ‘to see what would happen’” (70). Silko apparently answers the question about “what would happen” with the event of a “suicide pact” conducted by seven young promising high school young men at Paguate (72).

In the Tucson Mountains, Silko not only records down but also defends against any potential threats to the desert. She does what is necessary in order to prevent further damages anybody could have brought to her home place. Silko witnesses that environmental degradation is not an unusual phenomenon in the desert; as a matter of fact, the desert has been inflicted with irreparable damages for years:

In the past thirty years the bulldozers and urban sprawl of Tucson have

destroyed hundreds of square miles of pristine desert habitat and left the

desert tortoises in danger of extinction along with the Gila monster lizards

8 Ward Churchill undertook a comprehensive research into the uranium mining extraction enterprise the indigenous reservations and provides sufficient data about the damages and injustice caused by the mining. According to his research, about ninety percent of the uranium mining occurred somewhere around the indigenous reservations in Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Arizona. Receiving an income that is “less than half what a non-Indian open-pit miner,” the Indians miners were not provided with sufficient worker’s safety. For example, they were often instructed to stir yellowcake in hand. As a result, the workers suffer high rates of lung cancers by 1980 (310; 314). What’s more, U. S. Federal Government did not require a “post-mining cleanup of any sort, thus sparing Kerr-McGee and its cohorts what would have been automatic and substantial costs of doing business in off-reservation settings. When lucrative mining was completed, the corporations were thus in a position to simply close up shop and walk away” (Churchill 310-11). “On Navajo, this involves the necessity of dealing with hundreds of abandoned mine shafts ranging from fifty to several hundred feet in depth” (Churchill 311) 211

and spotted owls. (82)

Silko expresses her deepest concern over the ecosystem and sadness for the ecological disasters: “After all these years in Tucson, I’m still not accustomed to the way untouched rocks and hills and the living creatures here can be crushed alive by these men and their machine without a second thought” (177).

Once on her walk, she is stunned to find the sandbars are gone—“gouged out and removed by the same machine that smashed the gray basalt boulder and took it away in pieces” (169). Feeling at a loss, she is “outraged” by and “shocked” at the environmental destruction (169; 170). As the Man with a bulldozer, thus called by

Silko, continues his damages to the land by destroying more boulders and sandbars,

Silko is trapped by a guilty conscience for no action since her first witness in July.

Silko hopes to stop his misconduct before things get out of hand. Anxious for environmental disasters, Silko becomes the embodiment of “militant motherhood,” looking for ways to protect her beloved land (Tonn 3). First of all, she makes certain phone calls to report about the damage. Unfortunately, the officer considers the catastrophes “not significant” enough for their attention. Silko notices that the Man has endangered the ecosystem in the arroyo and tilted the balance of the whole environment:

The excavating machine not only tore up the boulders, it disrupted the

212

entire area, and left many creatures homeless as well as hungry and thirsty.

The suffering and distress of so many living beings from the same location

of the desert created an anxious angry energy of conflict that permeated the

area. I felt it strongly; the disturbance was real and pervasive, even on a

psychic level. The fury of the owls was powerful, but the man with the

machine was full of fury as well. (206)

To her resentment, she perceives “the damage done to the great horned owls’ habitat by the machine which was just as ferocious and out of proportion as the attack on [her] beautiful macaws” (307). Thus, she has to “do something. At least [she has] to try”

(308). She decides to see to the Man in an Indian way. She paints white crosses, symbol of the Star Beings, on the boulders, hoping to discourage the Man with the magic power of the spiritual beings. It works to an extent that the Man gives up those boulders with white crosses.

Silko’s desire for searching for the “ancestors’ home” in the Tucson Mountains further explicates that this is the place, the land, the landscape to which she has a sense of belonging. Silko is excited by her finding of “signs of the ancestors’ home—dark basalt and pale quartzite grinding stones” in the arroyo nearby: “I felt a great blessing from the ancestors who lived here and made stones into tools thousands of years ago ” (259) . The fact that the ancestors have “lived” in the same place makes

213

good sense to Silko:

Only once, years before, I had found a perfectly chipped arrow point of

fine-grained basalt near my gate down the hill. Back then I didn’t realize

the ancestors lived here—I knew they used to hunt here, but that’s all. [. . . ],

this was the first indication that the ancestors had lived near my house. No

wonder some nights I saw figures in the darkness or heard women’s voices

singing grinding songs. (259)

The remains left in the arroyo enable Silko to hold an imaginative bond between herself and the ancient people in terms of the shared geographical conditions: “The ancestors must have found them in the big arroyo as I still do, but I imagine that the turquoise rocks may have been too valuable for the people here to keep and were traded away to the south for macaw feathers or food” (260). Silko imagines that the ancient people would trade the rocks for food, “just as [her] Paguate ancestors trade the sandstone griddles for corn in lean years” (260). Silko’s recognition of the ancient people as her “ancestors” enhances her sense of belonging. They share the same geographical features and landmarks in the place which in turn shapes their narratives.

According to Silko, the “narratives linked with prominent features of the landscape

[. . .] delineate the complexities of the relationship which human beings must maintain with the surrounding natural world if they hope to survive in this place. Thus the

214

journey was an interior process of the imagination” (“Landscape” 39). Here Silko, through cultural imagination, connects her native heritage to that of the ancient people as the turquoise ledges and the grinding stones are crucial indications to the

Southwestern Native peoples as a culture. This cultural imagination linking her dwelling place to ancestors’ home further strengthens her recognition of the Tucson

Mountains as her home place.

Silko draws on her ancestral heritage for her cultural imagination which, in turn, brings for her cultural attachment to the Tucson Mountains. The turquoise ledge, used as the memoir title, is the embodiment of her ancestral history; the collection of turquoise rocks on her walks further indicates her yearning for a reconnection with ancestors. In part one, “Ancestors,” Silko describes her experience of losing a turquoise stone given by Uncle Robert Anaya when she is a teenage girl. This obsession with “the lost piece” leads to her later collection of the turquoise and grinding stones on her walks into the arroyo and hills (10). The “lost piece” signifies the Pueblo heritage she intends to preserve and pass down in her writing. The turquoise, as the precious stone “most desired by the deities for their ornaments and ceremonies,” is closely related to the histories and life of the ancient Indian people

(151). Turquoise may explain why the relics of a huge ancient pueblo “that lies undisturbed under the sand” have been found “just west of the [contemporary

215

turquoise] diggings (191). The ancient pueblo, with eighty kivas and eighty plazas, is as big as Aztec and Maya cities. As such, the existence of a turquoise ledge near or even under her house provides a most strong indication for connection with the ancestors.

With the stones picked up during her everyday walks, Silko explores into the track of time. When she sees a grinding stone worked with human hand, she cannot help to “bring it to the house so it will have a home again” (12). For Silko, the history of the ancient people is embodied in their experience with the stones:

These grinding stones were fundamental to survival [. . .]. For a woman, her

grinding stones were her partners in feeding and caring for her family. The

stones were handed down from generation to generation. No wonder the

grinding stones sometimes talked, and gave their owner warnings about

those who might harm her or her family. (11-12)

As such, Pueblo people often settle on or near the sandstone formations “because long ago in times of drought, the survival of the people depended on the rain water stored in the sandstone pools” (Sacred Water 18). The stone also bespeaks the indigenous belief in a mythical-spiritual world. Everything, even a stone, is entrusted with spirits--“a quality of transcendence” (Harrod 122). The connection between the past to the present is what really matters and makes the history alive. There are traditional

216

songs and tribal myths related to the grinding stones. The stone also reminds Silko of a memory in which Great Grandmother A’mooh grinds green chili with the stone in her kitchen. The recipe of piki bread is also passed down due to its use of special sandstone griddles. The history of the Paguate village, her great grandmother’s clan, is also retraced with the experience of the griddle stones (17-21).

The inclination to connect the present with the past is never absent throughout

the memoir. The concept of cyclic time is crucial to Silko’s imaginative connection

with the ancient ancestors. Silko believes that “things long ago and things yesterday

do link up. In the human imagination something that just happened and something

that happened long time ago really can be immediate and present. That’s the way I

work” (“A Conversation” 2-3). The collection of turquoise stones which

metaphorically suggest a historical connection between the ancient heritage and the

contemporary world enhances Silko’s motivation for writing and walking: “I needed

almost daily contact with the turquoise rocks on my walks to develop my interest” (6).

Her search for the turquoise rocks on her daily trip indicates that she walks on the

same trails and arroyos as the ancestors once did. The feeling of sameness forms a

cultural bond between them by connecting her present to the ancient past. Walking on

the same trails and sharing one living area explicate Silko’s idea that the “continued

use of that [ancient] route creates a unique relationship between the ritual-mythic

217

world and the actual, everyday world” (Silko, “Landscape” 38). Walking into the

Tucson Mountain, Silko is caught by the feeling of “sameness” in the presence of nature: “The ancient people stood here and looked at the Catalinas with the sun rising over them; they watched for any clouds that might come. Clouds from any direction were always welcomed” (226). The space allows an imaginary overlap between journeys across times: “I might be standing here a thousand years ago, or ten thousand years ago” (226). Here difference in times between the past and the present is wiped out and a historical connection across times is established.

The messages left by the ancient Indians on the rock reveals a common home ground shared between Silko and the ancient people. Silko believes that

“[p]ictographs and petroglyphs of constellations or elk or antelope draw their magic in part from the process wherein the focus of all prayer and concentration is upon the thing itself, which, in its turn, guides the hunter’s hand” (“Landscape” 33). The petroglyphs she finds on her walks indicate to her the way home. The messages inscribed on the rock solidify her suspicion that the ancient people live in the Tucson

Mountains thousands of years ago: “I thought the stones were a sign of human occupation but I never detoured to find out. But now that I’d rediscovered the petroglyph on the boulder only a short distance away, I knew what I’d suspected was true: thousands of years ago people lived here in the Tucson Mountains” (258). The

218

fact that ancient people survive the great heat and the droughts and make stones into tools for trades reminds Silko of her Paguate ancestors. Here cultural imagination bridges the gap in time between the present her and the ancient people. It arouses in

Silko a sense of belonging, community, connection, and relations. She is contextualized in the cyclic times and localized into the same place shared among her and the ancient people:

The ancient ones are nearby. Sometimes late at night in the wind you can

hear them sing or on a long hot summer afternoon you can hear them

laughing and talking in the shade. Maybe the old ones that used the concave

mutates under the big palo verde tress on the hills a thousand years ago,

maybe they brought the turquoise up from the big arroyo just as I have.

(176)

She thus recognizes that “[t]he ancestors didn’t go anywhere; they are still here, right now” (274). The ancestors are here at home with her at present! It is a past revisited and a present reclaimed; the past and the present intersect at the Tucson Mountains.

Accordingly, she keeps searching for stones for the evidence of a turquoise ledge: “Does this mean there is a turquoise ledge up here somewhere too” (195)? To her surprise, she finds turquoise stones in her garden, on her driveway, and even on the closet floor of her bedroom—“more evidence that there is turquoise under the hill

219

where my house is” (179). She is astounded by the possibility that a ledge may exist under her house. Finally, with more stones found, she manages to locate the turquoise ledge under her house:

Here are the turquoise ledges I’ve located so far: Right at the front gate to

my house there is a gray basalt rock with a trace of lime or calcium

carbonate with four tiny scattered deposits of turquoise. My earlier

suspicions of a ledge here when I found stones in the back yard in July and

August was confirmed. [. . .] So I’ve learned that I’m surrounded by

turquoise ledges. The water in the big arroyo means the ledges there may be

larger. (211)

She understands that “the house [she] live[s] in sits on top of a chalky turquoise ledge of brightest blue” (225). Here the turquoise ledge serves as a thread through times, connecting the present to the past and even into the future. The turquoise ledge bespeaks an exchange of time between Silko and the ancestors. Silko consequently regards “the turquoise bead as a gift, a sign of the loving presences of energies always nearby and helping [her]” (118).

Moreover, the turquoise stones collected during her walks also empower Silko to write her life stories. Indeed, they add to the accuracy and vividness of the journey/walking Silko makes: “Thus the continuity and accuracy of the oral narratives

220

are reinforced by the landscape—and the Pueblo interpretation of that landscape is maintained” (“Landscape” 37). The more stones she collects, the more she is capable of writing: “The writing I saw on the stone was in turquoise threads. As soon as my eyes fell on the markings, my brain registered both ‘turquoise’ and ‘writing’ at the same time” (161). Silko makes evident the importance of turquoise stones to her writing: “The turquoise pieces I’ve found since I broke my foot came to me so I could keep writing about the stones even while I couldn’t walk in the big arroyo” (174). She cannot write unless she has the right stone to complete an unfinished sentence and fill in the blank left on her paper. As such, Silko considers that the markings on the stone are “messages from supernatural world,” waiting to be decoded by humans (162). She studies carefully the particular shapes, recognizes the colors, recalls the places where they were picked up, and imagining them into being on the pages with their specific formations. As the history of the ancient people is embodied in the turquoise stones, writing on turquoise is a way for her to retrieve her ancestral past and locate her sense of belonging. She thus says, “I like to keep favorite rocks near me when I’m writing although they barely leave me any space to work” (163).

For Silko, painting, like writing, is a way to connect with the Indian heritage.

Painting and writing are mutually inspired and interlinked due to their connections with the Indian tradition. In 2005, Silko sketches the old petroglyphs of the Laguna,

221

focusing on the figures with white crosses representing the Star Beings. Then, she is no longer satisfied with the duplication of the photos. Recalling the experiences she has with the Star beings, she makes certain revision of their images with her own imagination. She develops a “close relationship with them [the Star Beings] because of the process of painting—each stroke of the paintbrush brought the form of the being a bit closer to its emergence in the world” (134). In Silko’s memoir, painting and writing are closely related to and relied on each other. When she paints, she writes in relation to her painting. As “the Star Beings are linked to turquoise” (229), they represent a return and a connection to the past and the far away. The portraits of the

Star Beings, like turquoise, serve as her inspiration and muse. In her portraits, the traditional and the new are combined to form a new narrative with painting, just like a story is mixed with personal reflection of the speaker. With the portraits, she realizes that the Star Beings “make contact with the dreams and imagination of selected artist whose consciousness is open to them” (136). Silko draws on her Pueblo heritage in her writing and painting: “I sit in front of the portrait I’m painting, and only then am I able to write. Whatever I write is connected somehow to the Star Beings or to the particular Star Being I am working on at the time” (140).

Silko also trusts in the magic power of the portraits. The portraits of the Star

Beings, gradually giving way to the star map, assume strong supernatural power:

222

Six or seven days after the owl attack, Bill and I were awakened one night

by a loud sound that shook the bedroom [. . .], and it was then I realized

something strange was going on—not of this world [. . .]. The odd energy

came in a straight line from the site of destruction in the big arroyo east of

my house [. . .]. I wasn’t afraid because all nine of the Star Being portraits

were facing the east that night, and protected the house from the “werewolf

energy” sent my way by the machine man. (207)

Silko feels at home taking care of two artistic works: “A happy anticipation of working on the painting each day reminded me of the happiness I felt writing novels.

The joy I feel when I paint the being is their gift to me’ (140). The emotion of happiness, out of a sense of “cosmic interconnection” is crucial in one’s sense of attachment (Wong, Sending My Heart Back 14).

To sum up, with Momaday’s interpretation of Native Americans’ attachment to their homeland, I analyze Silko’s bodily practice of constructing a home in a place new to her thirty years ago. The investment of thirty year of life, the aesthetic perception in the nature, the notion of the appropriate, and cultural imagination all together shape Silko’s cultural project of homebuilding in The Turquoise Ledge. Silko transcribes her daily walks into her narration of home, a story map for what she has done with her body in a place as her home. With the turquoise stones collected on her

223

daily walks, Silko localizes turquoise ledges under her house and recognizes that she and the ancestors share one same land, the Tucson Mountains. Walking, painting, and writing, as different as they are in physical format, are creatively threaded into Silko’s autobiographical narrative. The Turquoise Ledge as a narrative on home through bodily practice of everyday life is intended to serve as a “valuable repositories” for

Silko to transcribe her feeling of attachment to the Tucson Mountains into her life narrative (28). I demonstrate that she constructs a home in a new place by Native heritage, cultural imagination, and bodily practice. Being at home on Earth, she develops an intimate relationship with the physical environment and connects over time to ancestors thousands of years ago. As a life narrative, The Turquoise Ledge is

Silko’s story on home involving all the necessary information and details for her homing journey in term of cultural imagination and artistic creativity.

224

Chapter 7

Conclusion: Writing My Way Home

Home is a good place to begin. [. . .], finding a place in the world where one

can be at home is crucial. Home is literal [. . .]; or a dream [. . .]; or a

nightmare [. . .]. Home is an idea: an inner geography where the ache to

belong finally quits, where there is no sense of ‘otherness,’ where these is,

at last, a community. (1)

--Janet Zandy, Calling Home: Working Class Women’s Writings

Home is a good place not only to start but to draw to a close. Joy Harjo writes in her poem that the world may end suddenly on the kitchen table. Likewise, home is the point with which I conclude this dissertation. What constitutes Native women’s sense of home? What makes a place as home? It is never an easy question to answer even at the end of this project. Maybe the sense of community--the feeling of connection, relatedness, and satisfaction--can be a way to conceptualize Native women’s notion of home. In face of colonization, many Native women lose their home; however, through the sense of community they recreate and re-orient a home in their life narratives.

Surely, there are more than one constituent that affect human sense of community.

According to David W. McMillan and David M. Chavis, the sense of community can be derived from a “shared emotional connection”: It is “the commitment and belief

225

that members have shared and will share history, common places, time together, and similar experiences” (9). McMillan and Chavis argue that the sense of a shared history shapes human sense of community: “A shared emotional connection is based, in part, on a shared history. It is not necessary that group members have participated in the history in order to share it, but they must identify with it” (13). It well explicates how the shared history and life experiences enable Native American women to construct their home in their self-portraits. It is through female bonding and cultural imagination they can be at home in their writing and in real life.

Female bonding, as cherished friendship and mutual cooperation in women,

indeed shapes an intellectual home in women’s life and texts. The sense of

connectedness sometimes results from specific life experiences shared among

women. To illustrate, I would like to provide a personal account of the female

bonding I share with my mentor, Dr. Joni Adamson, whose warm companionship

and intellectual mentorship shelter me for years. Ever since we met in the year of

2004 we have shared a solid friendship. She adopted me as her daughter in Taiwan

and continues to provide keen perception in my study. She offered useful guidelines

for my thesis, suggested the critical perspective for my paper on Diane Glancy’s

Pushing the Bear presented in 2008 American Studies Association Annual

conference held in Albuquerque, USA, and most importantly, has given her

226

unlimited support for writing this dissertation. She described the dissertation as an accomplishment of “many years [of our] working together and talking about ideas.”

She serves as an endeared mother, an intellectual mentor, and a spiritual leader. As a junior researcher, I long for her knowledge and guidance in my literary research and life orientation. I always remember her proverb: “To write a great paper, you have to learn to be happy with a messy home once in a while.” It is the very first-hand lesson she acquired from her lived experience as a mother professor. Those words eliminate my feeling of guilt in face of work-life conflict. She provides an emotional home I can always return for help, love, and support. Likewise, Erdrich’s research into her

“mother’s list” is based on and driven by the feeling of female bonding (144). As women’s experience of home often constitutes a common ground for women’s companionship, she explores the significance of her role as a mother writer and proposes to establish a mother’s network to take better care of children.

Also, cultural imagination is always imperative for Native women’s construction of home in their life writings. When the physical home is no longer there, Native women strive to build a home, or even invent one within their self and in their texts. Even if the road home is lost, they pave the way home by learning to identify with tribal history in order to fulfill the commitment to feel belonging to and participate in a larger cultural pattern. The farther they are from home, the tougher

227

the way is for them to return. Therefore, growing up off reservations, Hogan and

Glancy try hard to catch the sense of connectedness. It’s through imagination Native

women get reconnected with their heritage, home places, and histories. Writing

home leads to their feeling of a shared emotional connection with their life stories

because their experiences of home are not just personal but communal.

Overall, this project manages to decode the literary representation of home in the Native women’s life narratives and explore how their self-writings are intertwined with their experiences of home. As Hertha Wong understands Native American autobiography in terms of tribal sense of self, life, and language, I continue and extend her reading by shifting the focus to the sense of home, intersecting with self, life, and writing. Generally speaking, I concentrate on contemporary writers’ life narratives in order to grasp the significance of home to Native women today. Four life narratives are approached from the critical perspective of home to examine how

Native women inform and represent their experience of home in life writings. The dissertation explores the possibilities of “home” as a methodology to approach Native women’s life writings. Chapter One provides a general introduction to the project.

Chapter Two formulates a theoretical framework to explicate the implications of home.

Chapter Three examines Linda Hogan’s The Woman’s Who Watches over the World: A

Native Memoir,” analyzing the interrelationship between family history and cultural

228

trauma. I argue that Chickasaw’ experience of home loss is intertwined with and embodied in Hogan’s life in terms of broken mother-daughter relations. In Chapter

Four, the critique of Diane Glancy’s Claiming Breath focuses on the relationship between home and journey, exploring how her experience of road trips helps contextualize home in her writing. With Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance: A

Birth Year” as the focal text, Chapter Five observes the everyday life at home through the analysis of Erdrich’s role as a mother writer. I also argue that Erdrich’s notion of home relies on her sense of community. The Ojibwe tradition and everyday engagement with nature shape her sense of home and bring forth an imaginary home in her writing. In Chapter Six, Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Turquoise Ledge is read to explore the ways through which Silko makes herself native to the place and recreates a home ground with cultural imagination.

Hopefully, my reading can be seen as complementary to Hertha Wong’s understanding of Native American autobiography. I also agree with Elizabeth

Cook-Lyn as she argues against the notion of a self representing a whole community

(58). Therefore, I intend not to generalize from the analyses of four life narratives to representative Native women’s experience of home. With four life writings as my pivotal texts, I gauge the notions of home as represented in the texts per se. I do not mean to disclose all the notions of home in Native women’s life writings in this

229

project, nor has this project sufficiently provided a systematic reading of all the implications of home in Native life works. Instead, I envision this project as examining the construct “home” in the life writings as represented by four targeted writers. As a matter of fact, no critical approaches are representative enough. Craig

Gurney states that scholars do not have to “generate research with validity for a wider universe, but to construct an internally coherent case study that discovers the variables that have explanatory value in specific cultural contexts; in this case the ongoing social construction of [. . .] people’s sense of home” (376). Gurney’s statement helps justify my using four Native women’s life stories as “study cases” to “discover [any possible] variables” that can thus be seen as representing some constituents of home in their life narratives. I look for significant events depicted in their texts, explore how the events influence or inform their sense of home, and further illustrate how their life experience shape a cultural construction of home in their writing.

However, the research and exploration into home does not end with this dissertation. Joni Adamson contends that we need to “come together in the ‘middle place’—that contested terrain where interrelated social and environmental problems originate—to work for transformative change” (xvii). Adamson encourages cultural and literary critics to struggle for the “common ground”--“the search to find ways to understand our cultural and historical differences and similarities” (xvii). To better our

230

society, Adamson proposes to employ “theories that emerge from a middle place between the universal and the local, theories that do cultural work in the world, theories that provide us with explanatory critique and alternatives for change, theories that give us the tools to build a more socially and environmentally just society” (99).

This research into home in Native American women’s life narratives works in hope to reach this “middle place” as human experience of home is relatively universal but specifically personal and cultural. As literary works deeply rooted in the particulars of place and time, Native women’s life narratives involve multifarious intersections of home with self, life, and writing. Their texts demonstrate that the idea of home is full of far-reaching implications, possibly ranging from a physical part of life, a psychological space in mind, to a poetic metaphor in writing. The project hopes to act as an initial point to arouse a greater interest in the study of home in literature.

Therefore, the research into the complex notions of home definitely will not be finished with the concluding remarks. On the contrary, we are inspired to look forward to further discussions about the manifold definitions and diverse representations of home in cultural studies and literary works.

In fact, the conception of home is not only fluid but also innovative. On one hand, home is fluid, implicating multi-layered and diversified perspectives, including the biological, the psychological, the historical, the cultural, the personal, and the

231

emotional ones. On the other hand, home is full of possibilities, with the potentials of narrative structure, spiritual inspiration, and creative imagination. The experience of home remains both personal and communal. It is personal as the experience of home is individually different; it is communal in a way that everyday life at home appears culturally specific. As a physical place heavily laden with lived experience, home captures human imagination for artistic creation. Personal and communal, the concept of home is never stable, but situated in a process of transformation and continuum.

The notion of home involves personal recollection of the past, reflection on the present, and enactment for the future. Writing from home replicates not only a reminiscence of life experience, but also leads to a cultural project of homemaking for existence and for future. As the notion of home concerns “the continuum, the span, the afters, and befores,” writing home helps the narrator to reconnect to the past, addressing the present and leading to the future (Erdrich, Blue 8). Writing from home ground divulges personal reflection on self, life, and writing.

Writing from home as a methodology elaborates on Native Americans’ yearning for home in academia and cultural recognition. For the past few decades, Native

American scholars began researching into indigenous methodologies for native issues

(Sherzer and Woodbury 1987; Coltelli 1990; Vizenor 1993; Krupat 1996; Weaver,

Womack, and Warrior 2006; Womack, Justice, and Teuton 2008). Native scholars

232

intend to take hold of the power of discourse in Native American studies by persistently developing indigenous research methodologies. “Working from home” is one of such a proposal for the development of indigenous methodologies. The special issue of American Indian Quarterly, entitled “Working from Home in American

Indian History,” collects several essays to illustrate how American Indian intellectuals can potentially work from home in their specific fields of study. Philip Deloria, in his commentary on this special issue, indicates that home is never merely a physical existence. In fact, home is not only a “location of work but also its subject and perhaps its methodology” for Native American Studies (“Commentary” 546). He also regards “home” as “a range of [Native academics’] desire” for contributions to Native communities, self-understanding, feeling of security, and shifting approaches to indigenous studies (548-49). The idea of “working from home” serves as a potential methodology to approach Native issues and reveals Native scholars’ concerns at the prospect of “establish[ing] an authoritative claim to an academic home” (459).

In Native American culture, home serves as a site of potentials for creation and imagination. Donald L. Fixico proposes the idea of “writing from home,” writing from “[Indian] cultural perceptions and home place,” to represent an exclusively

Indian experience (“Writing from Home” 553). For Native writers, historians, activists, and scholars of humanities, home suggests far more than a “metaphor” in

233

writings. Home is not just a place to set off but also a target of return. It involves an aspiration for creation, a process under construction, a site for resistance, and an image of survival. In fact, Native American writers and scholars are not satisfied with home simply as an idea or an object for study. By contrast, they are actively searching for ways through which home can serve as a strategy of representation, a mean of articulation, a pattern of recognition, and a site for self-positioning. Like Linda

Tuhiwai Smith, a Maori scholar, who suggests that indigenous research projects should reflect “a shift” of the indigenous people from “research object” to “our own researchers” (42), Native women not just write their own homes from home, but for home and to home.

To illustrate the import of home in Native women’s life narratives, Alison

Blunt’s observation on the study of home is strategically translated to approach Native women’s writing in my project. Blunt, in her article entitled “Cultural Geography:

Cultural Geographies of Home,” summarizes three critical perspectives which cultural critics often apply to research into the complex notions of home. One concern with the study of home is the material geography of home. The critique may focus on the mobility, location, and segregation of the residence. It takes a look at the display, use, and meaning of the objects within the abode. For example, the kitchen as a recognizably gendered space at home helps cultural critics explore the apparent

234

contradictions in the multiple roles contemporary women often play in the global society (Blunt, “Cultural Geography” 506-9). Under such circumstances, the layout of the house described in Native life narratives reveal crucial information about the narrators’ idea of home.

Blunt also recognizes that “the lived experiences, social relations and emotional significance of domestic life” provide comprehensive perspectives through which the implications of home can be accessed and examined in a broader social and cultural context (“Cultural Geography” 509). Home becomes politically significant and metaphorically meaningful. Apart from home represented in the postcolonial, indigenous, imperial, transnational, diasporic, and ethnic contexts, critics also focus on the traditional roles women play at home: “[R]ecent research has explored the ways in which the symbolic and material importance of the home in fashioning both nation and empire has been embodied by women, particularly as wives and mothers”

(Blunt, “Cultural Geography” 510). Craig Gurney’s suggestion of approaching home through its “episodic ethnographies” in life narratives can be classified into such a perspective:

“[E]pisodic ethnographies” [is referred to as] the way in which people

make sense of home as a social construction. They provide the opportunity

to reflect upon the significance of climatic events in personal biographies

235

and the impact they have upon the meaning of home. Each climatic

experience becomes a defining moment or a turning point. (Gurney 376)

Likewise, “house biographies” is a critical method used to tell “the story of a house-as-home through the lives of its past and present inhabitants” (Blunt and

Dowling, Home 37). As a matter of fact, “house biographies” is strategically appropriated to explain that home is beyond the notion of dwelling in my study of

Erdrich’s memoir.

Finally, the relationship between nature and human beings is the other central perspective in my project. The critics “consider human and nonhuman cohabitation in relation to the philosophy and ethics of domestication and within the space of the private garden” (Blunt, “Cultural Geography” 511). Blunt’s emphasis on the idea of

“cohabitation” and Native American awareness of “interdependence” both point to an ecological concern. More than an ecological concern, however, American Indians have a profound respect for and cultural attachment to the native land they call as home. In Native American context, this perspective is subtly transformed to the tribal sense of nature as an extension of home. It bespeaks the sense of home place which is extremely significant in Native women’s life narratives.

Native women put into practice Fixico’s idea of “writing from home” in their life narratives. Home becomes a significant aspect in their life writings. This

236

observation drives me to approach their life stories from the perspective of home—to interpret personal experiences of home in a broader cultural and social context in

Native women’s life narratives. These works reveal in great detail the complex intersections of the sense of home with self, life, and writing, informing a great command of the relationship between “selfhood and homemaking” (Wiley and Barnes

3). A Native autobiographical writing becomes an ongoing enactment of search of home in real life and in literature. Writing from home thus helps bring a theoretical perspective for literary critics to understand Native women’s life works. Both writing from home and writing home help characterize Native women’s life narratives as a distinctive genre in Native American literature today.

Different from male writers, Native women extensively transcribe their first-hand experiences of home into their life narratives. For the past two decades, the urge to narrate “home” has stayed prominent for Native women writers. They aim to provide their distinctive stories about home. The notions and experiences of home are certainly different, yet their concern and desire for home always remain solid. Taken together, four women are identical in their craving for the inscription of lived experiences, family stories, and home attachment into their writings. Native women possess specific life experiences which, in turn, shape their ideas and their writings of home in various ways and at diverse life stages. They provide evocative accounts of

237

home in the contemporary world. The importance of home in Native women’s writing, especially their life narratives, runs deeper than as a mere backdrop for plot or in characterization. Writers’ narration of home reflects their sense of self orientation and quest for belonging in their writings.

To Native American women, writing home contains their life, not merely their work. Their narration of home is not only poetic but also political. Through writing home, they recreate and localize the sense of self and life in their writings. The autobiographical home points to the space towards which Native writers orient their self. This home is no less real than the real home, but more meaningful and substantial than the one in physical world. Home writing provides the textual space where Native women build home in their life narratives. Home can also be a diasporic imagination for homeland lost under Euroamerican colonization of the Americas. It can be a narration of birth and nursing experience at home. It can be the construct of feeling at home in whatever or wherever they esteem crucial in their personal life and communal heritage. It introduces the impact of culture on creativity. Desire for home unlocks the potential for artistic creativity—a cultural practice of homemaking in their writing. Writing home serves as a bodily realization of their search for home and journey to home. No longer does home simply refer to a physical place in real world or an emotional space in mind, it is rather an enactment of homing. Home remains

238

situated between the physical and the imaginative. Writing home enables the narrators to relieve the unresolved agony of life; it is equipped with the imaginative power to deal with and further better the reality. It is not only imaginative and artistic but real and powerful. Writing home enables the narrators to act out their pains in real life while its artistic appeal inspires human imagination for creation.

On the other hand, in their ongoing search for a place of belonging, the autobiographical home gradually becomes a politically contested site in face of colonization. Home as described in Native life narratives often stands beyond the notion of physical buildings in real life. Home consequently functions as tribal resistance to the colonial experience of domicide in American Indian history. Hogan’s life narrative records a lived testimony of Chickasaw’s experience of displacement and relocation throughout the colonization. Glancy describes how she yearns for a home lost long time ago in the Trail of Tears. She insists that human imagination can possibly blur the boundary between travel and home in order to recreate a home away from home. By picking up tribal stories on her road trips, she fulfills the cultural project to build the road home. Moreover, Erdrich’s memoir is indeed a proclamation of women’s creative and reproductive power in face of patriarchal society. Using veils wearing on women’s face as a metaphor, Erdrich encourages her daughter to recognize the value of “NO”: “To teach the no to our daughters” (140). Erdrich also

239

proposes the sense of female bonding to overcome the restriction imposed on women today. Her memoir can be read as counter-narrative against patriarchal ideology in mainstream society. Finally, Native women’s narration of home also serves as an environmental writing. Silko’s memoir is in fact considered natural writing in one way.

She provides a written testimony of uranium mining in Laguna Pueblo. Writing home enables her to expose the “radioactive colonization” her people have faced (Churchill

289). Silko’s concept of home also indicates her will to place her indigenous heritage in a larger cultural and historical context, from Pueblo Laguna to a broader “Aztec territory” (144). The politics of home remains apparently noteworthy in Native women’s life narratives.

To sum up, I close the dissertation with the perception that Native women compose their life stories from home, about home, and of home. As Susan Friedman states that “[w]riting about the loss of home brings one home again. You can’t go home again—except in writing home” (“Body on the Move” 207), Native women not only write their life stories from home but also write about home in order to be home again. In face of colonial displacement, homing becomes a recurring issue and a matter of urgency in Native life narratives. Writers are always caught by an overwhelming urge to quest for home in their self-narrations. They write in hope for

“coming home” (Bevis 584). Erdrich delicately expresses her yearning for home with

240

her great-grandmother’s story:

I remembered my great-grandmother Virginia Grandbois. When she had

aged past the reach of her own mind, she wanted to walk home. Every day

my grandmother, Mary Gourneau, who was caring for her, tied her into her

chair to keep her from walking off into the fields and sloughs. I, too, tied

myself into my chair to get home the only way I could, through writing.

(70)

Writing provides the unique means to tackle the agony of home loss and gradually turns out to be the particular way through which Native women can get home. Writing home leads the way home. Through writing, Native writers are finally home.

241

242

Works Cited

Adamson, Joni. American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism:

The Middle Place. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2001. Print.

Alexander, Jeffrey C. “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” Alexander, et al. 1-30.

Print.

Alexander, Jeffrey C, et al., eds. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: U

of California P, 2004. Print.

Allen, Paula Gunn, ed. Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and

Course Designs. New York: MLA, 1983. Print.

---. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions.

Boston: Beacon, 1992. Print.

---. “The Living Reality of the Medicine World.” Grandmothers of the Light: A

Medicine Woman’s Sourcebook. Boston: Beacon, 1992. 2-24. Print.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983. Print.

Andrews, Jennifer. “A Conversation with Diane Glancy.” American Indian Quarterly

26.4 (2002): 645-58. Project Muse. Web. May 24, 2011.

Anker, Peder. “The Philosopher’s Cabin and the Househood of Nature.” Ethics,

Policy & Environment 6.2 (2003): 131-41. Print.

243

Antoniou, Maria. “My Cypriot Cookbook: Re-imagining My Ethnicity.”

Auto/Biography 12 (2004): 126-46. Print.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 1987. 3rd Ed. San

Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2007. Print.

Barnhill, David Landis, ed. At Home on Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A

Multicultural Anthology. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Print.

---. “Introduction.” Barnhill 1-13. Print.

Bartel, Sandy. Rev. of The Woman Who Watches over the World: A Native Memoir.”

Voices from the Gaps: Driven to Discover. U of Minnesota, n.d. Web. 5 May

2011.

Basso, Keith H. “Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape.”

Sense of Place. Ed. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso. Santa Fe: School of

American Research Press, 1996. 53-90. Print.

Bataille, Gretchen. “Transformation of Tradition: Autobiographical Works by

American Indian Women.” Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical

Essays and Course Design. Ed. Paula Gunn Allen. New York: MLA, 1983.

85-99. Print.

Bataille, Gretchen, and Kathleen Mullen Sands. American Indian Women, Telling

Their Lives. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984. Print.

244

Bear, John. “Throw Me off the Ledge: Silko Gets Spacey in New Memoir.” Alibi.com.

19.49 (2010). Alibi.com., 9 Dec. 2010. Web. 12 Apr. 2011.

Berner, Robert L. Rev. of The Woman Who Watches over the World: A Native Memoir.

American Indian Culture & Research Journal 26.2 (2002): 207-10. EBSCOhost.

Web. 5 May 2011.

Bevis, William. “Native American Novels: Homing-in.” Recovering the Word: Essays

on Native American Literature. Ed. B. Swan and Arnold Krupat. Berkeley, CA:

U of California P, 1987. 580-620. Print.

Blackman, Margaret B. During My Time: Florence Edenshaw Davidson, a Haida

Woman. Rev. ed. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1992. Print.

Blomley, Nicholas. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property.

New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Bloodworth, William. “Varieties of American Indian Autobiography.” MELUS 5.3

(1978): 67-81. JSTOR. Web. 5 May 2011.

Blunt, Alison. “Cultural Geographies: Cultural Geographies of Home.” Progress in

Human Geography 29.4 (2005): 505-15. Print.

Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Boardman, Edna M. Rev. of The Woman who Watches over the World. Young Adult

Review. Gale Group, 1 Jul. 2002. Web. 5 May 2011.

245

Bowerbank, Sylvia, and Dolores Nawagesic Wawia. “Wild Lessons: Native

Ecological Wisdom in ruby Slipperjack’s Fiction.” Homemaking: Women

Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home. Ed. Catherine Wiley and Fiona R.

Barnes. New York: Garland, 1996. 223-38. Print.

Brown, Joseph Epes. Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious

Traditions. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.

Brown, Michael. Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe.

London: Routledge, 2000. Print.

Brumble, H. David, III. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley: U of California P,

1988. Print.

---. An Annotated Bibliography of American Indian and Eskimo Autobiographies.

Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1981. Print.

Brussat, Frederic, and Mary Ann Brussat. Rev. of The Woman Who Watches over the

World: A Native Memoir. Spirituality Practice: Resources for Spiritual Journeys.

N.p., 2012. Web. 5 May 2011.

Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and

Literary Imagination. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. Print.

Caruth, Cathy. Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.

246

Castillo, Susan. “A Woman Constantly Surprised: The Construction of Self in Louise

Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance.” European Review of Native American Studies

11.1 (1997): 39-41. Print.

Churchill, Ward. A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas,

1492 to the Present. San Francisco: City Lights, 1997. Print.

Cieraad, Irene. “Introduction: Anthropology at Home.” At Home: An Anthropology of

Domestic Space. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999. 1-12. Print.

Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. Print.

Cochran, Stuart. “The Ethnic Implications of Stories, Spirits, and the Land in Native

American Pueblo and Aztlan Writing.” MELUS 20.2 (1995): 69-91. JSTOR.

Web. 5 Mar. 2011.

Codling, Rosetta. “The Turquoise Ledge of Leslie Marmon Silko.” Examiner.com.

Examiner.com, 9 Feb. 2011. Web. 12 Apr. 2012.

Collins, Patricia Hill. “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing

about Motherhood.” Representations of Motherhood. Ed. Donna Bassin,

Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. 56-74.

Print.

Coltelli, Laura. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln, NE: U of

247

Nebraska P, 1990. Print.

Cook-Lyn, Elizabeth. “You May Consider Speaking About Your Art….” I Tell You

Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. Ed Brian Swann

and Arnold Krupat. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987. 55-64. Print.

Cooperman, Jeannette B. The Broom Closet: Secret Meanings of Domesticity in

Postfeminist Novels by Louise Erdrich, Mary Gordon, Toni Morrison, Marge

Piercy, Jane Smiley, and Amy Tan. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Print.

Dahlke, Laura Johnson. “Essays on Childbirth: The Way and How.” Women’s Studies

38.5 (2009): 577-96. Print.

De Certeau, Michel. “Politics of Science: The Long March of the Indians.”

Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U

of Minnesota P, 1986. 225-33. Print.

De Hernandez, Jennifer Browdy. “On Home Ground: Politics, Location, and the

Construction of Identity in Four American Women’s Autobiographies.” MELUS

22.4 (1997): 21-38. JSTOR. Web. 15 May 2010

Deloria, Philip J. “Thinking about Self in a Family Way.” The Journal of American

History 89.1 (2002): 25-29. JSTOR. Web. 2 Jun. 2011.

---. “Three Lives, Two Rivers: One Marriage and the Narratives of American Colonial

History.” Rikkyo American Studies 32 (2010): 103-28. JAIRO. Web. 14 Jan.

248

2011.

---. “Commentary on ‘Working from Home in American Indian History.’” Working

from Home in American Indian History. Ed. Susan M. Hill and Mary Jane

Logan McCallum. Spec. issue of American Indian Quarterly 33.4 (2009):

546-52. Project Muse. Web. 6 Jun. 2011.

“Diane Glancy.” Voices from the Gaps: Driven to Discover. U of Minnesota, n.d. Web.

20 May 2012

Dirlik, Arif. “Placed-Based Imagination: Globalism and the Politics of Place.

Prazinack and Dirlik 15-51. Print.

Duncan, James S., and David Lambert. “Landscapes of Home.” A Companion to

Cultural Geography. Ed. James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson, and Richard H.

Schein. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 382-403. Print.

Edwards, Natalie, and Christopher Hogarth, eds. “Introduction.” Gender and

Displacement: “Home” in Contemporary Francophone Women’s

Autobiography. Ed. Natalie Edwards and Christopher Hogarth. Newcastle:

Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 1-14. Print.

Eng, David. “Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American

Studies.” Social Text 52/53 (1997): 31-52. JSTOR. Web. 5 Jan. 2011.

249

Erdrich, Louise. The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year. New York: Perennial, 1995.

Print.

---. Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country. Washington, DC: National Geographic

Society, 2003. Print.

Erikson, Kai. “Notes on Trauma and Community.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory.

Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 183-99. Print.

Evers, Larry, and Ofelia Zepeda, eds. Home Places: Contemporary Native American

Writing from Sun Tracks. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1995. Print.

Eyerman, Ron. “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American

Identity.” Alexander, et al. 60-111. Print.

Fischer, Michael M. J. “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory.” Writing

Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and

Geogre E. Marcus. Berkeley, U of California P, 1986. 194-233. Print.

Fixico, Donald L. “American Indian History and Writing from Home: Constructing an

Indian Perspective.” Working from Home in American Indian History. Ed. Susan

M. Hill and Mary Jane Logan McCallum. Spec. issue of American Indian

Quarterly 33.4 (2009): 553-60. Project Muse. Web. 6 June 2010.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender

Difference in Literary Discourse.” Feminist Studies 13. 1 (1987): 49-82. JSTOR.

250

Web. 12 Aug. 2010.

---. “Bodies on the Move: A Poetics of Home and Diaspora.” Tulsa Studies in

Women’s Literature 23. 2 (2004): 189-212. JSTOR. Web. 12 Aug. 2010.

---. “Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice.” The Private Self:

Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Shari Benstock.

Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988. 34-62. Print.

Glancy, Diane. Claiming Breath. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992. Print.

---. The Cold-and-Hunger Dance. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998. Print.

---. In-Between Places. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2005. Print.

---. The Dream of a Broken Field. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2011. Print.

---. Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears. New York: Harvest, 1996. Print.

Godard, Barbara. “Voicing Difference: the Literary Production of Native Women.”

Amazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing. Ed. Shirley Neuman and

Smaro Kamboureli. Edmonton: Longspoon, 1986. 87-107. Print.

Gorman-Murray, Andrew, and Robyn Dowling. “Home.” M/C Journal: Home 10.4

(2007): 1-6. Web. 20 Feb. 2012.

Grim, Jessica. Rev. of Claiming Breath. Oberlin Coll. Lib, Ohio. Reed Business

Information, 1992. Web . 20 Mar. 2012.

Gruchow, Paul. Grassroots: The Universe of Home. Minneapolis: Mikweed Editons.

251

1995. Print.

Gurney, Craig. “‘…Half of me Was Satisfied:’ Making Sense of Home through

Episodic Ethnographies.” Women’s Studies International Forum 20.3 (1997):

373-86. Print.

Hale, Duane K., Arrell M. Gibson, and Frank W. Porter III. The Chickasaw. New York:

Chelsea House, 1991. Print.

Halpern, Sue. “Mother’s Day.” Rev. of The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year. New York

Time. New York Times, 16 Apr. 1995. Web. 15 May 2011.

Harjo, Joy. “Perhaps the World Ends Here.” Wiley and Barnes 3. Print.

Harjo, Joy, and Gloria Bird, eds. Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary

Native Women’s Writings of North America. New York: Norton, 1998. Print.

Harrod, Howard I. The Animals Came Dancing: Native American Sacred Ecology and

Animal Kinship. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2000. Print.

Hill, Susan M., and Mary Jane Logan McCallum, eds. Working from Home in

American Indian History. Spec. issue of American Indian Quarterly 33.4 (2009):

427-603. Project Muse. Web. 6 June 2011.

Hogan, Linda. “Who Puts Together.” Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical

Essays and Course Designs. Ed. Paula Gunn Allen. New York: MLA, 1983.

169-77. Print.

252

---. Solar Storms: A Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Print.

---. Dwelling: A Spiritual History of the Living World. New York: Norton, 1995. Print.

---. “The Two Lives.” I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American

Writers. Ed. Arnold Krupat and B. Swann. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 231-49.

Print.

---. The Woman Who Watches over the World: A Native Memoir. New York: Norton,

2001. Print.

---. Red Clay: Poems & Stories. New York: Greenfield Review, 1991. Print. hooks, bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print.

---. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990.

Print.

Hopkins, Sara Winnemucca. Life Among the Piutes: their Wrongs and Claims. 1883.

Ed. Horace Mann. Bishop, CA: Sierra Media, 1969. Print.

Huang, Hsinya. “Writing Native Self, Writing Life—Linda Hogan and Anita

Endrezze.” Euramerica 39.2 (2009): 253-93. Print.

Ifekwunigwe, Jayne. Scattered belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of “Race,” Nation

and Gender. London: Routledge, 1999. Print.

Jaimes, M. Annette. “‘Patriarchal Colonialism’ and Indigenism: Implications for

Native Feminist Spirituality and Native Womanism.” Hypatia 18.2 (2003):

253

58-69. Project Muse. Web. 22 Sep. 2010.

Johnson, Kendall. “Imagining Self and Community in Native American

Autobiography.” The Columbia Guide to Native American Literature of the

United States: 1945-Present. Ed. Eric Cheyfitz. New York: Columbia UP, 2006.

357-401. Print.

Johnson, Rochell. Rev. of The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year. Women’s Studies: An

Inter-disciplinary Journal 26.6 (1997): 645-49. Print.

Kaika, Maria. “Interrogating the Geographies of the Familiar: Domesticating Nature

and Constructing the Autonomy of the Modern Home.” International Journal of

Urban and Regional Research 28.2 (2004): 265-86. Project Muse. Web. 22 Sep.

2010.

Krasner, James. “Accumulated Lives: Metaphor, Meteriality, and the Homes of the

Elderly.” Literature and Medicine 24.2 (2005): 209-30. Project Muse. Web. 22

Sep. 2010.

Kristeva, Julia. The Krsiteva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Print.

Krupat, Arnold. For Those Who Come After: a Study of Native American

Autobiography. Berkley: U of California P, 1985. Print.

---. The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture. Lincoln: U of Nebraska

P, 1996. Print.

254

---. The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon. Berkeley: U

of California P, 1989. Print.

---, ed. Native American Autobiography: An Anthology. Madison: U of Wisconsin P,

1994. Print.

Krupat, Arnold and Brian Swann, eds. Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native

American Writers. New York: Modern Library, 2000. Print.

---, eds. I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers.

Lincoln: UP of Nebraska, 1987. Print.

Lengel, Kerry. “‘Republic’s’ November Book Pick: Silk’s Turquoise Ledge.” The

Arizona Republic. Azcentral.com, 10 Nov. 2010. Web. 13 Apr. 2011.

Levy, Helen F. Fiction of the Home Place: Jewett, Cather, Glasgow, Porter, Welty,

and Naylor. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1992. Print.

Mackay, James, ed. The Salt Companion to Diane Glancy. London: Salt Publishing,

2010. Print.

---. “Introduction: Red State Poet.” Mackay 1-14. Print.

---. “‘That Awkwardness Is Important’: An Interview with Diane Glancy.” Mackay

170-92. Print.

Mackay, Polina. “Highway to Home: Diane Glancy’s Travel Poems.” Mackay 30-43.

Print.

255

Malpas, J. E. Place and Experiences: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1999. Print.

Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.

Print.

McMillan, David W., and David M. Chavis. “Sense of Community: A Definition and

Theory.” Journal of Community Psychology 14.1 (1986): 6-23. Web. 9 Sep.

2012.

McNamee, Gregory. Rev. of The Turquoise Ledge. The Washington Post. The

Washington Post, 16 Dec. 2010. Web. 13 Jan. 2012.

Mezei, Kathy, and Chiara Briganti. “Reading the House: A Literary Perspective.”

Signs 27.3 (2002): 837-46. JSTOR. Web. 13 Jan. 2012.

Miller, Jane. “Introduction.” Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography. Ed. Jay

Miller. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990. Print.

Million, Dian. “Intense Dreaming: Theories, Narratives, and Our Search for Home.”

American Indian Quarterly 35.3 (2011): 313-33. Project Muse. Web. 13 Sep.

2012.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. “Other than Myself/My Other Self.” Travellers’ Tales: Narratives

of Home and Displacement. Ed. George Robertson, et.al. New York: Routledge,

1994. 9-26. Print.

256

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, and Biddy Martin. “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got

to Do with It?” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis.

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 191-212. Print.

Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. New York: Perennial, 1968. Print.

---. The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passage. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.

Print.

---. “A First American Views His Land.” Barnhill 19-29. Print.

Moyers, Bill. “An Interview with Louise Erdrich.” Bill Moyers Journal. Public Affairs

Television, 9 Apr. 2010. Web. 17 Jun. 2011.

Nabokov Peter. “Orientations from Their Side: Dimensions of Native American

Cartographic Discourse.” Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native

American Mapmaking and Map Use. Ed. G. Malcolm Lewis. Chicago: U of

Chicago P, 1998. 241-69. Print.

Nowicka, Magdalena. “Mobile Location: Construction of Home in a Group of Mobile

Transnational Professionals.” Global Networks 7.1 (2007): 69-86. Web. 13 Jan.

2011.

O’Brien, Lynne Woods. Plains Indian Autobiographies. Boise: Boise State College,

1973. Print.

Occom, Samson. The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership

257

and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America. Ed. Joanna Brooks.

Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.

Osbey, Brenda Marie. “Writing Home.” The Southern Literary Journal 40.2 (2008):

19-41. Project Muse. Web. 5 May 2010.

Owens, Louis. Mixedblood Messages : Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman : U of

Oklahoma P, 1998. Print.

Peeples, Jennifer A., and Kevin M. DeLuca. “The Truth of the Matter: Motherhood,

Community and Environmental Justice.” Women’s Studies in Communication

29.1 (2006): 59-87. Project Muse. Web. 5 Sep. 2010.

Plant, Judith. “Searching for Common Ground: Ecofeminism and Bioregionalism.”

Home! A Bioregional Reader. Ed. Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant,

et al. Gabriola Island: New Catalyst, 2007. 155-61. 79-82. Print.

---. “Revaluing Home: Feminism and Bioregionalism.” Home! A Bioregional Reader.

Ed. Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, et al. Gabriola Island: New

Catalyst, 2007. 21-23. Print.

Porteous, J. Douglas, and Sandra E. Smith. Domicide: The Global Destruction of

Home. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2001. Print.

Prazniak, Roxann, and Arif Dirlik, eds. Places and Politics in an Age of Globalization.

Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001. Print.

258

“Pueblo Indian Languages.” Native Languages of the Americas: Preserving and

Promoting American Indian Languages. Native Languages of the Americas, n.d.

Web. 22 May 2011.

Pulitano, Elvira. “A Conversation with William Yellow Robe.” Studies in American

Indian Literatures 10.1 (1998): 19-44. JSTOR. Web. 10 Sep. 2010.

Rabuzzi, Kathryn Allen. The Sacred and the Feminine: Toward a Theology of

Housework. New York: Seabury, 1982. Print.

Rev. of Claiming Breath. Kirkus Reviews. Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 1992. Web. 5 May

2011.

Rev. of The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year. Powell’s Books. Powell’s Book, n.d. Web.

12 May, 2011.

Rev. of The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year. Kirkus Reviws. Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb.

1995. Web. May 12, 2011.

Rev. of The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir. Kirkus Reviews. Kirkus Review, 1 Jul. 2010.

Web. 12 Feb. 2012.

Rev. of The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir. Publishers Weekly 257.33. 23 Aug. 2010.

EBSCOhost. Web. 11 Apr. 2012.

Rev. of The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir. PW: Publishers

Weekly. PW, 21 May 2001. Web. 5 Sep. 2011.

259

Reynolds, Susan Salter. Rev. of The Turquoise Ledge. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles

Times, 9 Jan. 2011. Web. 13 Apr. 2011.

Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New

York: Norton, 1976. Print.

Rios, Theodore, and Kathleen Mullen Sands. Telling a Good One: The Process of

Native American Collaborative Autobiography. Lincoln: U of Nebraska U, 2000.

Print.

Romines, Ann. Home Plot : Women, Writing & Domestic Ritual Account. U of

Massachusetts P, 1992. Print.

---. “Domestic Troubles.” Colby Quarterly 24. 1 (1998): 50-60. Web. 3 Jan. 2012.

Rowles, Graham D. “Aging in Rural Environments.” Elderly People and the

Environment. Ed. Irwin Altman, Mortimer Powell Lawton, and Joachim F.

Wohlwill. New York: Plenum, 1984. 129-57. Print.

Rubenstein, Roberta. Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and

Mourning in Women’s Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Print.

Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. American Indian Literatures: An Introduction,

Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography. New York: MLA, 1990. Print.

Samson, Sue. Rev of Women Who Watches over the World: A Native Memoir. Library

Journal 126.10 (2001): 174. Web. 3 Sep. 2011.

260

Sands, Kathleen Mullen. “Collaboration or Colonialism: Text and Process in Native

American Women’s Autobiographies.” MELUS 22.4 (1997): 39-59. JSTOR.

Web. 4 Sep. 2010.

---. “American Indian Autobiography.” Studies in American Indian Literature:

Critical Essays and Course Designs. Ed. Puala Gunn Allen. New York: MLA,

1983. 55-65. Print.

Sarup, Madan. “Home and Identity.” Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and

Displacement. Ed. George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, et al. New

York: Routledge, 1994. 93-104. Print.

Schweninger, Lee. “‘She Gives Me a Metaphor:’ Survival and Louise Erdrich’s The

Blue Jay’s Dance.” Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses

to the Landscape. Athens: U of Georgia, 2008. 96-112. Print.

Shank, Jenny. “Rattlesnake Whisperer: Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Turquoise Ledge.”

Rev. of The Turquoise Ledge. New West Books & Writers. New West, 13 Dec.

2010. Web. 23 Apr. 2011.

Sheldrake, Philip. Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory, and Identity. Baltimore:

John Hopkins UP, 2001. Print.

Sherzer, Joel, and Anthony C. Woodbury, eds. Native American Discourse: Poetic

and Rhetoric. New York: Cambridge UP, 1987. Print.

261

“Sidelights.” GALE Cengage Learning: Contemporary Authors Online. Gale Cengage

Learning, 26 Jun. 2008. Web. May 12, 2011.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination.” Barnhill

30-42. Print.

---. Storyteller. New York: Arcade, 1981. Print.

---. The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir. New York: Viking Adult, 2010. Print.

---. Sacred Water: Narratives and Pictures. Tucson: Flood Plain, 1993. Print.

---. “An Conversation with Leslie Marmon Silko on The Turquoise Ledge.” Seattlest

Daily. Seattlest, 19 Oct. 2010. Web. 17 May 2011.

Smelser, Neil J. “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma.” Alexander, et al.

31-59. Print.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous

Peoples. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999. Print.

Smith, William F., Jr. “American Indian Autobiographies.” American Indian

Quarterly 2.3 (1975): 237-45. Project Muse. Web. 25 May 2010.

Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Leslie Marmon Silko: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, North

Carolina: McFarland, 2011. Print.

Snyder, Gary. “From The Place, the Region, and the Commons.” Barnhill 93-102.

Print.

262

Stein, Gertrude. Paris France. London: Batsford, 1940. Print.

Stirrup, David. “‘Songs Belong to These Islands’: Mapping the Cultural Terrain in

Louise Erdrich’s Nonfiction.” European Review of Native American Studies

20.1 (2006): 29-34. Print.

Tal, Kalí. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. New York: Cambridge

UP, 1996. Print.

Teuton, Sean, and Robert J. Conley. “Writing Home: An Interview with Robert J.

Conley. Wicazo Sa Review 16.2 (2001): 115-28. JSTOR. Web. 5 May 2010.

Tharp, Julie. “‘Into the Birth House’ with Louise Erdrich.” This Giving Birth:

Pregnance and Childbirth in American Women’s Writing. Ed. Julie Tharp and

Susan MacCallum-Whitcomb. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular

P, 2000. 125-40. Print.

Thomas, Louisa. “Desert Song.” Rev. of The Turquoise Ledge. The New York Times.

New York Times, 26 Nov. 2010. Web. 13 Apr. 2011.

Thomas, Trudelle. “Motherhood as Spiritual Crisis: Memoirs of Childbirth and Early

Motherhood.” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 14.2 (1999): 273-91. Project Muse.

Web. 3 Sep. 2011.

263

Thompson, Tim. “In the World: Author Glancy Defines Distinctively Christian Voice

in Native American Lit.” Online Chimes. Chimes, 15 Jan. 1992. Web. 4 Mar.

2011.

Tonn, Mari Boor. “Militant Motherhood: Labor’s Mary Harris ‘Mother’ Jones.”

Quarterly Journal of Speech 82.1 (1996): 1-22. JSTOR. Web. 14 Apr. 2011.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. “Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective.” Progress in Geo-graphy 6

(1974): 211–52. Web. 3 Oct. 2010.

Tucker, Aviezer. “In Search of Home.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 11.2 (1994):

181-87. Wiley Online Library. Web. 2 Sep. 2010.

Turnbull, David. Maps Are Territories: Science Is an Atlas. Chicago: U of Chicago P,

1989. Print.

Turner, Sarah E. “‘Spider Woman’s Granddaughter’: Autobiographical Writings by

Native American Women.” MELUS 22.4 (1997): 109-32. JSTOR. Web. 3 Sep.

2010.

Udel, Lisa J. “Revision and Resistance: The Politics of Native Women’s Motherwork.”

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22.2 (2001): 43-62. Project Muse. Web.

3 Sep. 2010.

Vizenor, Gerald, ed. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American

Indian Literatures. 1989. Rep. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1993. Print.

264

Waldman, Carl. Atlas of the North American Indian. 1985. Rev. ed. New York:

Checkmark Books, 2000. Print.

Weaver, Jace. “In Other’s Words: Literature and Community.” Other Words:

American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture. Norman: Oklahoma UP, 2001.

3-52. Print.

---. “Indigenousness and Indigeneity.” A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Ed.

Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray. 2000. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 221-35.

Print.

Weaver, Jace, Craig S. Womack, and Robert Warrior. American Indian Literary

Nationalism. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2006. Print.

Welbrun, Ron. “Long Dog’s Winter Count by Diane Glancy; Claiming Breath by

Diane Glancy.” MELUS 19.4 (1994): 138-40. JSTOR. Web. 3 Mar. 2011.

Wiley, Catherine, and Fiona R. Barnes, ed. Homemaking: Women Writers and the

Politics and Poetics of Home. New York: Garland, 1996. Print.

Winning, Anne. “Homesickness.” Phenomenology + Pedagogy 8 (1990): 245-58.

Web. 17 Apr 2012.

Winter, Kari J. “The Politics and Erotics of Food in Louise Erdrich.” SAIL: Studies in

American Indian Literatures 12.4 (2000): 44-64. Web. 24 Sep. 2011.

265

Womack, Craig S. “Theorizing American Indian Experience.” Reasoning Together:

The Native Critics Collective. Ed. Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and

Christopher B. Teuton. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2008. 353-410. Print.

Womack, Craig S., Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton, eds. Reasoning

Together: The Native Critics Collective. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2008.

Print.

Wong, Hertha. Sending My Heart Back across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in

Native American Autobiography. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Print.

---. “Adoptive Mothers and Thrown-Away Children in the Novels of Louise Erdrich.”

Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities. Ed. Brenda O. Daly and

Maureen T. Reddy. Knoxville: U of Tennessee Press, 1991. 174-92. Print.

---. “Native American Life Writing.” The Cambridge Companion to Native American

Literatures. Ed. Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer. New York: Cambridge UP,

2005. 125-44. Print.

Young, Iris Marion. “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme.” One

Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays. New York:

Oxford UP, 2005. 123-54. Print.

Zandy, Janet, ed. Calling Home: Working Class Women’s Writings. New Brunswick,

NJ: Rutgers UP, 1990. Print.

266

Zerubavel, Eviatar. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past.

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print.

267