INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from anytype of computer printer. The quality or this reproduction is dependent upon the quality or the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affe\.."t reproduction. In the unlikely. event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyrightmaterial had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back ofthe book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell &Howell Information Company 300 NorthZeeb Road. Ann Arbor. MI48106-1346 USA 313!761-47oo 800:521-0600 THE FIREBEARER A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH AUGUST 1995 By Judith Gross Dissertation Committee: Ian Macmillan, Chairperson Nell Altizer Ruth Dawson Craig Howes John Rieder OMI Number: 9604153 UMI Microform 9604153 Copyright 1995, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, united States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 iii © Copyright 1994 by Judith Gross IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For their unfailing guidance and direction, I must acknowledge my dissertation committee: Professor Ian MacMillan, Director; Professor Nell Altizer; Dr. Ruth Dawson; Dr. Craig Howes; and Dr. John Rieder. They are a diverse group, but they share a commitment to solid writing and sound pedagogy. Their influence on my pro­ fessionallife will extend far beyond these pages. I am grateful to David Fadden, storyteller and cultural ambassador of the Mohawk people, for permission to use his version of the "gossiping dogs" story. Thanks also to Mr. Fadden for the lore surrounding Iroquois cornhusk dolls. Dr. Christina Johannson and her staff at the Iroquois Indian Museum in Howes Cave, New York, provided me with the opportunity to work surrounded by the visual images of Iroquois art. I thank Dr. Johannson and her staff, notably Stephanie Shultes, for their help in understanding Iroquois symbology, as well as their per­ mission to refer to Tammy Tarbell's sculpture, Grandmother Moon. v ABSTRACT Roberta McClusky, a ~ohawk Indian/Caucasian woman native to the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, faces isolation from family and place as she waits in a city hospital for her mother to die of cancer. At twenty-five, she recalls her fifteenth summer, the last summer she spent in the mountains of her birth. Her parents had already moved to the city by then, in order for her father to find work. When her maternal grandmother lay dying, Roberta and her mother, Summer, went back to help with nursing at the home of Summer's brother in Pottersville. With Summer and Roberta's Aunt Corrine focused on nursing, Roberta and her cousin MJ were left to cope on their own. MJ took refuge in Catholic fanaticism, try­ ing to bargain with God for her grandmother's life. Poised on the brink of sexual maturity, distraught over her grandmother, Roberta found no help in religion and no sympathy among the adults in her family. She became involved with Junior Bradley, the town bad boy. Grammy, the matriarch of the Mohawk side of the family, was the repository of culture and morality. With her decline came a loosening of ties: Roberta's father drank and used race-based cruelty to dominate her mother. When Corrine was not nursing, she worked full-time at preventing scandal over a sister-in-Iaw's lesbian relationship and the sexual recklessness that began as Roberta's way of handling pain and ended with an illness suspiciously resembling a pregnancy. vi On the night Grammy died, Roberta overheard her aunt and uncle reading Grammy's will aloud. When she reported this to her parents, she opened a breach between Summer and the rest of the family. Struggling with guilt, Roberta jumped off the roof of her grandmother's house, thinking to cause a miscarriage. Subsequent examinations revealed that she was sterile all along. She returned to the city to limp through school and an early marriage. Summer dies without regaining consciousness. Roberta concludes that she will return to her mountains to heal before launching herself in pursuit of a college degree and, almost incidentally, a self. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements .iv Abstract v Chapter 1 1 Chapter 2 12 Chapter 3 , 33 Chapter 4 38 Chapter 5 52 Chapter 6 74 Chapter 7 84 Chapter 8 106 Chapter 9 109 Chapter 10 123 Chapter 11 135 Chapter 12 139 Chapter 13 156 Chapter 14 166 Chapter 15 173 Chapter 16 182 Chapter 17 184 viii Chapter 18 194 Chapter 19 213 Chapter 20 222 Chapter 21 228 Chapter 22 240 Chapter 23 250 Chapter 24 262 Chapter 25 267 Chapter 26 287 CHAPTER 1 I saw two flies walking on the window, not one fly and its reflection. Knowing Aunt Corrine would have a fit about it, I raised the windowshade to let Grammy feel the sunlight, in case it might be the last time she could ever feel it, in case she died before we had another nice day. When my eyes stopped aching from the shock of sudden light, I could see the flies - one inside the room, the other out in the world. They fooled me. For one minute, they moved together so perfectly that I couldn't tell what I was looking at. Without taking my eyes off them, I counted ­ one, one thousand; two, one thousand - the way Uncle Mike counted in a whis­ per before he squeezed off the trigger and emptied his rifle into a running deer. The inside fly twitched and the outside fly flew off toward a big Adirondack white pine standing at the end of Uncle Mike's driveway. Nothing was left but the patch of sunlight the window made in the dark wall of Aunt Corrine and Uncle Mike's back bedroom. Corrine and Mike spent every night of Grammy's last summer on an old cast­ iron bedstead in the attic, wishing Grammy would finish dying because the mat­ tress gave them backaches. My mother and I came from our two-family house in Utica to help. Summer was glad to do it; she hated Utica, but we had to live where Daddy could work. I took all my final tests early - geometry and European Cultural Studies, all the usual tenth grade foolishness - but it was just as well. 2 We stayed in the Adirondacks from the middle of June 'till. the end of September, and I went back with a note from Summer saying we had a death in the family. We stayed with Corrine and Mike all week and at Grammy's farmhouse on week-ends when my father came to visit. Daddy lived alone all that summer, dri­ ving a beer truck for the Utica Club Brewery and keeping the yard up so we wouldn't lose our upstairs tenant. Mr. Kwapizewski always said he could live much better if he moved back to Poland. At least, he said that before April, when a poor fool threw the wrong switch at the Russian nuclear power plant in Chernobyl. After Chernobyl burned, Kwapizewski shut up about flying back to Lodz to spend his golden years. Summer said for two cents, she'd pack his bags, but we needed his rent to keep up the mortgage. Watching the inside fly run in circles looking for its other half made feel like crying. Daddy told me once that the old Mohawk Indians used to pour water up a baby's nose when it cried. Somebody crying would give away the tribe's loca­ tion to an enemy. I hate crying to this day; it feels as if your heart is going to explode. Even now, when I see my mother's pain in the miserable way she shrinks into her hospital bed, I would rather die than let my eyes fill up. All the Mohawk in us came from Grammy's side of the family, from her mother and from Grandpa, the man Grammy married. The rest is Irish. My father used to say that a Mohawk Irishman was a whiskey tenor with a mean streak. When I was little, I never paid much attention when he talked like that. 3 "Quit your pullin' on my arm," I said, and MJ made her pouty face and looked at the floor. MJ is the cousin who's supposed to look like me, but even ten years back, I could see a lot of differences. "I'll go when I'm ready," I said. "Towle's not about to have that baby today. I know things like that. Christ, Towie didn't even send for your mother to come get Skipper. Towie won't have a baby on her kitchen table with a two-year-old watching." MJ blessed herself.