I have read a couple of other Erdrich novels, and so far, this one was the most accessible to me. Not that any of the others were less well written, but this one made access easiest for the non-initiated American Indian reader, of which yours truly is definitely one. This novel is set in 1953, when the United States Congress announcing the House Concurrent Resolution 108, essentially, a bill to “abrogate nation-to-nation treaties” which had been made with American Indian Nations, calling for the ”eventual termination of all tribes, and the immediate termination of five tribes” (foreword of novel). The story is of how the Turtle Mountain delegation fought the bill (they were given only a few months) but the result was that
113 tribal nations suffered the disaster of termination; 1.4 million acres of tribal land was lost. Wealth flowed to private corporations, while many people in terminated tribes died early, in poverty. Not one tribe profited (p447).
The key protagonists are Thomas Wazhashk (which means muskrat), the tribal chairman, who also worked as a night watchman in a jewel-bearings factory, a character based on Erdrich’s grandfather; and the fictional character of Pixie/Patrice Paranteau, another Chippewa member, who also works at the jewel-bearing factory. Her income supports her mother, Zhanaat, and younger brother, and more reluctantly, her alcoholic father who is a bully. They live in a reservation community, which with the bill, is threatened with dispossession and loss of home and livelihood. We follow Pixie’s story of going to Minnesota to search for her sister, Vera, who had gone there, and not come back. In dreams, Vera’s family know she is still alive, and even know she has had a baby. In fact, dreams and ghosts and of course signs in animal appearances/sightings and other natural events, form a big part of the Indian’s information system, as Erdrich tells us. These are sources of news and information which are regarded every bit as seriously as perhaps more mainstream sources, blending the ‘real’ with the subconscious, and finding veracity in both.
Pixie’s courage, good sense, and good judgement stand her in good stead as she makes the journey to search for Vera (only a 3 hour train journey, but nearly to a different world), and succeeds in tracking down her baby nephew. Her big city experiences are eye-opening, and she deals with discrimination and risk in her customary, no-nonsense way. It is clear that Indians try to stick to their own kind, for help and support, and get cursorily and arbitrarily discriminated against. A common sentiment:
To most of their neighbours, Indians were people who suffered and hid away in shabby dwellings or roamed the streets in flagrant drunkenness and shame. Except the good ones. There was always a ‘good Indian’ that someone knew. (p55)
There are also problems with positive discrimination, the identified ‘good Indians’ and desirable Indians, which fetishizes, commoditises, and objectivises. Pixie has some admirers, one of them the school Math teacher and boxing coach, a white man nicknamed Haystack for his hair. He once forlornly asks if he can be an Indian too, but is told gently, that he cannot. For all his admiration of Indians and Pixies in particular, it is clear Barnes is pretty clueless as well as stereotyping and so discriminating against Indians even inadvertently:
Barnes had seen her fade back into the leaves. She was barefoot. He found that charming. And so appropriate for a darling Indian girl. Ever since he was a child, here had been pictures. Advertisements. Lucious illustrations on fruit crates and dairy cartons. A lovely Indian maiden in flowing buckskin. She’d be holding squash, apples, peaches, cucumbers. She would be offering a little box of butter (p81).
Needless to say, Barnes’ infatuation with Pixie is as unreciprocated as it is ill-based.
The political background forms the thrust of the story, of how the Indian community rallied round to try to resist the bill which would strip away their Indian identity, and assets too.
The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa was targeted by the United States Congress for emancipation. “E-man-ci-pa-tion. E-man-ci-pa-tion This word could not stop banging around in his [Thomas’s] head. E-man-ci-pa-tion. But they were not enslaved. Freed from being Indians was the idea. Emancipated from their land. Freed from the treaties that Thomas’ father and grandfather had signed and that were promised to last forever. SO as usual, by getting rid of us, the Indian problem would be solved.
Overnight the tribal chairman job had turned into a struggle to remain a problem. To not be solved. (p80).
Erdrich’s writing is eloquent in how she communicates what is at risk, at stake, threatened, and ultimately, lost. She conveys the outrageousness of the whole proceedings throughout the novel, explaining the political through the personal, through the characters we have become attached to.
For days, he’d [Thomas] had tried to make sense of the papers, to absorb their meaning. To define their unbelievable intent. Unbelievable because the unthinkable was couched in such innocuous dry language. Unbelievable because the intent was, finally, to unmake, to unrecognize. To erase as Indians him, Biboon [Thomas’ father], Rose [Thomas’ wife], his children, his people, all of us invisible and as if we never were here, from the beginning, here.(p79)
As always, with Erdich’s books, I feel I am getting a glimpse into such a different world, different culture, different way of thinking, comprehending, interacting with the world. Zhanaat, Pixie’s mother, is one of the wise women of the community – she may not be illiterate, but she has such deep knowledge, and can address so many ills, mental and emotional as well as physical, with her cultural skills and knowledges. However, she also knows well the limitations of her skills, and when Pixie has an eye condition that her plants and medicines cannot address, she tells Pixie to see Western medical help. Zhanaat is such a wonderful character, with her calm and her passion combined, with her deep knowledge and steadiness, and her ability to see into different dimensions: “Because everything was alive, responsive in its own way, capable of being hurt in its own way, capable of punishment in its own way, Zhaanat’s thinking was built on treating everything around her with great care” (p190). Perhaps now it is I who is guilty of romanticising and exoticising, but Zhanaat seems such a perfect example of the old timer Indians, with her quiet confidence and extensive skills and knowledge, and her easy warmth and acceptance of all. She has one finger missing on one hand, and a perfect extra thumb on the other hand. She does bead work, taps birch for sap to drink (“The cold sap was a spring tonic. When you drank it, you shared the genius of the woods” (p438)), she makes cedar teas and other infusions. She is deeply pragmatic – she will not spare the hibernating bear which Pixie found and privately hopes her mother will not go after, but Pixie appreciates her mother can hardly do differently, “A bear was a walking medicine cabinet” (p324); a cultural point of view which would indeed be shared with a fair few other cultures too, which also prize various parts of a bear’s anatomy for their medicinal qualities. As she worked on skinning the bear, Zhanaat sang to it, and “as Zhanaat believed, the bear had intentionally given itself to her” (p326). Erdrich’s novels share intimate cultural glimpses with outsiders in a such a intriguing, warming way.
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